Building a Custom Papal Tiara for Pope Leo XIV

Yes.

Um, because you're right.

I, I've honest- I've, you know, looked at the Vatican flag a million times.

Heck, the logo for my podcast has the papal tiara as the O in POPECAST, and yet it just kind of unceremoniously disappeared, or maybe s- unceremoniously is the wrong word, but that was what-

Well, it, it, it was discontinued extremely ceremoniously, right?

That's right.

Yes.

That's ri- the, the opposite, yeah.

There were, there were grand ceremony for that.

Right, right.

So yeah, and we had, we had discussed before, before we started recording that Pope Paul VI is, Pope St. Paul VI is over my left shoulder, and you said it maybe prac- maybe for practical reasons, but the, the big, ugly silver papal tiara that he had been gifted by the faithful of Milan weighed, you said 15 pounds.

And so, yeah, just not practical.

It's something like that.

So yeah, the tiara of Pope Paul VI is currently on display in the National Basilica in Washington, D.C. I've seen it many times.

Now, I do understand that in the era of the Papal States is long gone, the era of the monarchies is long gone.

Um, and so I do understand why, why they, the Church, which saw this as a, a symbol of temporal sovereignty, right? The reason for it was to show the superiority of the spiritual realm over the temporal realm.

Mm-hmm.

Right? That, uh, the Church is superior to the, is superior to the king, and that that is not the world that we're, we're living in.

But I, I-

Right

...

I have speculated that part of, part of [laughs] Paul VI's reasoning was simply that the one that was made for him was so heavy-

Mm-hmm

... that you would need physical therapy after a regular mass.

[laughs]