Query put to a Pope

"Sancte Pater! scire vellem Si Papatus mutat pellem?" I have been told that these lines were addressed to one of the popes, whose life, before his elevation to the see of St. Peter, had been passed in excesses but little suited to the clerical profession. They were addressed to him *orally*, by one of his former associates, who met and stopped him while on his way to or from some high festival of the Church, and who plucked aside, as he spoke, the gorgeous robes in which his quondam fellow-reveller was dressed. The reply of the pope was prompt, and, like the question, in a rhyming Latin couple…