Joan, Jeanne, Joseph, and Chico

I was in Rome last October when the book "Joseph and Chico" hit the bookstores. It's a hardcover children's book, in Italian (which is why I could read it without too much use of a dictionary), which looks at the life of Pope Benedict through the eyes of one of his feline neighbors from Germany. Its publication gained gravitas when Msgr. Georg Gänswein, the Pope's personal secretary, wrote the book's introduction.

I tell you this because Joan Lewis' blog today tells the story of her meeting with Jeanne Perego, the book's author, who was in Rome to meet Pope Benedict for the first time. The whole story is here, but the tagline is the best part:

She happily recounted her Wednesday meeting with Benedict XVI – Chico’s friend Joseph. Then she came to the punch line. At the end of their conversation Pope Benedict looked at her, smiled broadly, and said, “You know, I always wanted to write a book about cats, and now a cat is writing a book about me!”