In 1948 the British masters Powell and Pressburger made a film called The Red Shoes. Moira Shearer played a ballerina whose dream is to perform on stage. She gets her wish, playing in a new production wearing special shoes. They take her places she has never been and always wanted to go.
But she cannot take them off, and is trapped in an unending cycle of dance. Her one hope of escape from this growing nightmare is to take off the red shoes, but can she?
It is a modern fable, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen. In the original a vain, spoilt girl tricks her adoptive mother into buying a pair of red shoes. She shows them off in church and other places, only to find that the shoes take over. They dance her everywhere. She is cursed by an angel and forced to wear them forever.
Even when her feet are amputated the shoes keep showing up and dancing before her eyes. Only after repeated efforts to seek forgiveness, to be humbled, is the girl finally forgiven.
The Red Shoes would, for obvious reasons, come to my mind during the last pontificate. It's hard to trace the rumour that Benedict XVI's shoes were designed by Prada. Perhaps it was just a mischievous allusion to The Devil Wears Prada, but nothing so vulgar! The Pope's shoes were actually made by a local Vatican shoemaker out the back of Borgo Pio and one thing you had to say about them, they were not the shoes of a fisherman.
Whatever Benedict had in mind when he donned his gay apparel will go with him to the grave, but one reason seems to be a message that popes are unique. Because John Paul II wore brown Polish loafers, and no one paid much mind to his predecessors' footwear, Benedict's stepping out caused a sensation. Sydney went seismic.
Popes in previous centuries wore red shoes, hence Benedict's harking back to an age of papal prestige. He would know that in Byzantium only three people were allowed to wear red shoes: the Emperor, the Empress, and the Pope. They are symbols of imperial power, in keeping with the opulent dress sense exhibited by monarchs. Even on a normal day,