Well, though the answer should seem obvious, I'm not sure exactly whom to congratulate about this whole new American pope idea. I guess I could wish the guy himself well, but honestly I'm having such a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the pope--the pope, of which there is only ever one at a time*--with almost 100% certainty has a strong opinion one way or the other about Italian beef sandwiches, I think I need to sit with that part for a while. Bluesky is absolutely ablaze with takes and jokes about the events of the day, like it's twitter 2012, which is a fun distraction but just creates even more white noise around any attempt to make sense of it all.
Someone at work announced the white smoke for all of us, so we knew it was coming. I propped my little phone up and found the AP News YouTube feed (ambient sound only, blessedly devoid of breathless commentary) so I could watch the build-up on the Piazza San Pietro as gawkers and well-wishers packed it in, waving flags, singing songs and chanting "long live the pope!" even before they knew if it would be some asshole in the Ratzingerian mold where maybe it would be best practice to keep your powder dry on that particular sentiment.
I went about my business as the Swiss Guard in their traditional harlequin getups marched in with some bands. I'm always fascinated by what point in history something becomes time-fixed as traditional. It's certainly not true that the Swiss Guard have always been in that role and always had to be dressed like the joker in a 1960s deck of playing cards. You don't have to be a trained historian to reach the conclusion that there was a circumstance before any of that were true, you just have to understand how time functions, and not even mechanically, just as a concept. But somehow it's 2025 and they are still being told that the best way to do their jobs is to go out in public wearing a hat a conquistador would have thought was un poco demasiado and armed with a stick. Fancy sticks, yes, and extraordinarily pokey ones to be sure, but with the same exact caliber of ballistic firepower as any other stick. Unless they're being trained to block bullets fired at them with halberd blades, that would change the context of, well, literally everything. Fuck this drag pageant of a coronation, I want to see some jedi shit.
No, the people I'm most proud of are the Wikipedia editors. As I said, at work I had the pre-events streaming on my phone. Then one of these zillion completely interchangeable old virgins comes out on the balcony and says the incantation to invoke the Ritual of Summoning in an unlamented long-dead language. I don't speak any Latin, but I do like trying to figure out who is being named and what their pope-name is going to be, both of which happen in that little spell (if you don't say all the parts, you could fuck up and accidentally get a Pershing missile or something). I wasn't sure I heard the given name right (it couldn't be the American one, that didn't make sense), but I got "Leo XIV" more or less. I swooped over to Wikipedia to look up if there had been an Leo XIII, just to track it (there had!) but noticed as I typed it in--remember this is after the Latin, but before the appearance of the new pope and confirmation by news outlets), Wikipedia was already as I was typing trying to redirect me to the new page for Pope Leo XIV.
I really do have to hand it to the nerds. I don't know if they have their own standby in the vein of Operation London Bridge for, like, every papabili possibility ready to CTRL-V into place the second Cardinal Emcee gets done wheezing the new reality into being, but they were fucking on it. I couldn't help but check back over and over again to watch the page evolve in real time, as a swarm of worker bees engaged in what I imagined was an absolutely furious war of publishing and republishing to get credit for the sections that were going to stick. History goes to the victors, who in this case were probably whoever knew what the pope's mom and dad's names were or where he went to elementary school. You know that shit is staying in.
There's more to say, but a lot of the rest of the discourse was political, and I'm not interested in seeing this (or anything else really) exclusively through a Trump lens. It all comes out distorted anyhow. Besides, this pope is a Catholic arch-prelate. Project what you want on him, but he's going to disappoint you in the end. I understand that liberalism in this sense is a hard-bent relativism on a very narrow scale (are popes automatically explicitly anti-fascist? Not always!), but Jesus people are going to Jesus it up in the end.
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