By Herald Wire Services

PARIS - The Vatican’s daily newspaper marked the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ “White Album” yesterday by dismissing as a “quip” a notorious claim by John Lennon that the Fab Four were bigger than Christ.

The double album, which came out Nov. 22, 1968, was “a magical musical anthology” from a band “full of talent,” L’Osservatore Romano said. Its lengthy article kicked off with Lennon’s remark to a London newspaper in March 1966 that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. . . . We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

“It is a phrase that provoked deep indignation at the time, but which sounds today like a quip from a young man from the English working class overtaken by unexpected success,” the article said. The Beatles’ genius, it said, “rested in their unequalled capacity to write popular songs with a sort of euphoric lightness that constituted a genuine trademark.”

“Today,” the paper lamented, “recordings seem above all to be standardized and stereotyped, falling far short of the creativity of the Beatles.”