Ardal O'hanlon Met Pope Francis With Comedians at the Vatican in 2024

Ardal O'Hanlon met Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2024, and he still sounds mildly baffled by it. The stand-up comedian, actor and writer said the encounter happened during a gathering that included major US comedians, Italian comics, Tommy Tiernan, Patrick Kielty and Stephen Merchant.

“It was totally bizarre,” he said, and the line fits a meeting that paired a comedy lineup with the Pope. O’Hanlon said he shook Francis’s hand, gave him his parents’ rosary beads to bless and then walked away telling himself he was “the golden boy at home.”

Vatican room, comic crowd

O’Hanlon said he did not get to speak to Stephen Merchant, adding, “I didn’t get to speak to him, but [as he’s 6ft 7in] I obviously did see him across the room.” That detail gives the scene its odd scale: a papal audience room filled with comedians who normally trade on timing, not ceremony.

He also said Pope Francis delivered “this lovely speech about the value of comedy,” and that the Pope “was kind of funny, he got some laughs, but it was in Italian, so I’m not sure what they were all laughing at.” For a performer used to working a room, that is the sharpest part of the account: the audience was international, the language barrier was real, and the jokes still landed somewhere.

Father Ted and Cardinal Hume

O’Hanlon said he had heard that Cardinal Basil Hume, then Archbishop of Westminster, was a big fan of Father Ted, which is why he thought Francis might have known the show. That is the bridge between the Vatican visit and the recognition that made O’Hanlon familiar to millions: the comedy kept traveling long after the original broadcast ended.

He did not lean on nostalgia for its own sake. Instead, he framed the encounter as a real meeting between a religious leader and comedians from several countries, with the value of comedy treated as something worth addressing from the Vatican dais rather than as a throwaway line.

A Plot to Die For

O’Hanlon is promoting A Plot to Die For, a cosy-crime murder mystery, and he was blunt about the label: “I don’t love the term ‘cosy’.” The novel centers on Finn, a celebrity gardener in the UK who returns to his small Irish home town to care for his elderly mother.

He said the starting point of the book was that “my mother had a pretty bad accident, and she was in recovery for a long time.” During that period, he said, “I was spending quite a lot of time with her and getting to know her as a person, which was wonderful.” That experience became the engine for a book built around family rather than the darker tone of his previous two novels.

“I wanted to write the kind of book she would enjoy, but also wanted to celebrate mother-son relationships – so Finn and his mum form this investigative team,” he said. That gives the Vatican story a useful second life: O’Hanlon’s newest book is not just another release, but a project rooted in the same domestic intimacy that shaped his memory of the Pope, the rosary beads and the oddity of being in the room when comedy was being blessed by the Vatican.