The Pope has finally forgiven John Lennon for claiming that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. The Vatican’s official newspaper yesterday absolved Lennon 42 years after he made the remark, which led to public burnings of Beatles records in the US Bible Belt and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Yesterday’s edition of L’Osservatore Romano said that “after so many years it sounds merely like the boasting of an English working-class lad struggling to cope with unexpected success”.

In a lengthy editorial marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ famous so-called White Album, the newspaper heaps praise on the band. “The talent of Lennon and the other Beatles gave us some of the best pages in modern pop music,” said the newspaper, which has recently tried to shake off its stuffy image by covering popular cultural events such as the Oscars.

Only “snobs” would dismiss the band’s songs, which had shown “an extraordinary resistance to the effects of time, providing inspiration for several generations of pop musicians”, the paper said.

Lennon made his infamous claim in March 1966. “Christianity will go,” he told a journalist from the London Evening Standard. “We’re more popular than Jesus now — I don’t know which will go first, rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

A few months later an American teen magazine called Datebook reprinted part of the quote on its front cover and the Bible Belt exploded with anger. Radio stations stopped playing Beatles records and some concert venues cancelled performances. Lennon apologised at a press conference in Chicago, saying it was never meant to be a “lousy, anti-religious thing”.

Lennon may no longer be accused of mocking Christianity but he faces a new charge today from Sir Paul McCartney, who says his songwriting partner inadvertently helped to turn a generation on to hard drugs.

In an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine, McCartney says: “A lot of people started on heroin because John did. We didn’t know the dangers of overindulgence. The problems of cannabis have escalated and it really is more dangerous.”

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