I was monitoring the announcement of the new Pope on the Daily Telegraph's web site yesterday afternoon; the ladies' Bible study was meeting across the hall and they wanted to be told who the new Pope was as soon as it was known.
As the world waited, a band had marched out and played a couple very brief snippets of tunes that many in the waiting crowd knew and tried to sing along with. When the band abruptly stopped, the crowd kept singing, but the band didn't rejoin them. This was several minutes before the lights came on in the chamber behind the balcony window, so it wasn't because the announcement was imminent.
The initial announcement was made in Latin -- including Latinizing the man's name -- so for a while, all I knew was that the cardinals had elected Georgium Marium Somebody and he had taken the name Franciscum. If there was any mention of Argentinibus or Bonibus Airibus, I completely missed it. I only took one semester of Latin in college, which was enough to figure out qui vicit quem, but the class never got around to learning New World geography.
Once news sites started reporting the name of The New Guy, I went in and broke the news to the Bible study group. They all were surprised that it wasn't Timothy Dolan (who used to be the archbishop in our area, so the local media had been echoing New York media speculation of Dolan's chances).
For my own part, however, that I had suspected that this Pope would turn out to be either Latin American or Italian.
I had no idea he would turn out to be both.
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