The livelier feel of L’Osservatore Romano over the last three years owes much to the Vatican newspaper’s expanded and increasingly friendly coverage of contemporary secular culture — or at least Baby Boom culture — including pop music.

In the latest example, an entire page of tomorrow’s edition is devoted to the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. According to the pope’s newspaper, that album and the group’s subsequent break-up marked the “end of an era,” as rock music ended its existence as a form of cultural rebellion and took up its current role as a frankly commercial enterprise.