It would seem - where are we and where is the huge Catholic world, for which the Pope is the first after God.
But the Vatican has long been no longer about faith as such, but about the so-called secret springs of world politics.
And so everything that happens there is interesting to us.
Therefore, both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev met with Pope Benedict XVI, who has now left the earthly limits.
And in general, to consider yourself a politician and not to communicate with the Pope has somehow not been accepted in recent centuries.
At the same time, Benedict XVI himself was a man of unusual fate - literally a child of turbulent European history.
The son of a cook, ascended to the highest throne of the religious world, he is also a young fighter of the Hitler Youth, he is also a Wehrmacht soldier, he is also a professor at the University of Regensburg.
Cities where the Crusades started.
Benedict XVI is considered to have radically renewed the papacy.
And even in his voluntary renunciation of the papal throne, for which he does not need anyone's permission, he became the first in 700 years.
He was a rather stern dad: while many figures flirted with the fashion trends of universal love and brotherhood under the rainbow, he published documents where he reminded that Catholics should not associate with Protestants, that Protestantism is not a church at all.
During his career, he advocated either the abolition of celibacy or, on the contrary, the strict adherence to it.
But here the key concept is that he demanded both of them for all priests without exception.
He forgave excommunicated priests who denied the Holocaust, but went to Israel and spoke there at Yad Vashem.
True, he kept silent about the role of the church in the extermination of the Jews.
In 2005, the pope blesses a document obliging seminaries to no longer allow men with "deeply rooted homosexual inclinations" to priestly ordination.
And this at a time when the whole world was already practically defeated by the ideas of the all-pervasive LGBT.
That is, he was a conservative, a keeper, and not some fashionable renovationist.
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Now, when, on the occasion of his death, all the milestones of his life and work are remembered, for some reason they blame him for emptying the Catholic churches, that people are leaving faith in moral chaos, but the fact remains: it is the renovationists and modernizers of the church who usually become the cause desolation and closing of churches.
Unlike his “colleagues” (if you can call other popes that way), he did not try to win the love of the press and canceled all kinds of dinners and lunches with journalists.
He generally preferred to spend time in solitude, reading and thinking a lot.
Benedict was one of the most important theologians of his time, intellectually far, far superior to his current critics - even if many don't want to admit it.
He warned everyone about the onset of the "era of arbitrariness", but few understood him.
But it would be interesting to look behind the scenes of the activities of the Vatican during the times of Benedict XVI and in Ukraine, where, traditionally, on part of the territory there is an open confrontation between confessions and a struggle for influence.
By the end of Benedict's tenure on the throne (by 2013), it was already clear what kind of processes were taking place there and how exactly all this was threatening to end.
Then we would understand, perhaps, the current gestures of the Vatican in the Ukrainian direction, where the current pope is trying to play his game.
Pretty contradictory.
And now he went to where many would like to go, but not everyone is allowed.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.