At last the Vatican has found a rock oddball who embodies the softer side of Christianity.

Even if Tom Waits’s songs, which include Dragging a Dead Priest, are sung in a rasping voice that seems to have been soaked in a whisky barrel, he has won over friends in the Jesuit order. Barely a week after Pope Benedict XVI disclosed his dislike for the “prophets of pop” and Bob Dylan in particular, the Jesuits in Rome have embraced Waits as a Christian role model.

The latest issue of Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal, the contents of which are subject to Vatican approval, says that Waits represents “the marginalised and misunderstood”.

Father Antonio Spadaro, 40, who normally writes about literature but is emerging as a Roman Catholic authority on pop music, said that Waits had lived a youthful life of “drugs, alcohol and sex” as an outcast on the streets of California.

He therefore understood “the lower depths” of society, and was able to convey the desperation of those on the margins. His past also enabled him to express their “capacity for hope and instinct for happiness” in “authentic songs devoid of vanity and false illusions”, Father Spadaro said.

The singer has not always drawn such comparisons. One critic described his voice as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car”.

His religious beliefs are equally difficult to pin down. “I don’t know what’s out there any more than anyone else, cause no one’s really come back to tell me,” Waits said in an interview in 2004. “I think everyone believes in something. Even people who don’t believe in anything believe that.”

Last week Pope Benedict — the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — revealed in a book, John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor, that he had warned the pontiff not to appear with Dylan at a pop concert in Bologna ten years ago.

As a cardinal, Pope Benedict condemned rock music as the work of the Devil. Last month, however, Father Spadaro insisted that rock was “not the music of Satan but has great expressive power which reaches peoples’ souls”. Speaking at a conference on rock music held by Civilta Cattolica, he said that rock was often “violent, angry, blasphemous and nihilistic”, and was sometimes “imbued with Satanism”.

But he said that it could be channelled towards “spiritual renewal” instead, citing Nick Cave, who survived alcohol and drug abuse to write songs “inspired by the Bible”. Father Spadaro said that Waits also offered “hope of a new dawn”.

The words

Jesus Gonna Be Here

Well I've been faithful And I've been so good Except for drinking But he knew that I would I'm gonna leave this place better Than the way I found it was And Jesus gonna be here Be here soon

Gospel Train Come on people: get on board Train is leavin' And there's room for one more Just trust in the Lord Wooo Woooo Woooo

Copyright Island Records, 1992/1993

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