White Smoke, part deux

How irritating!

I just wrote a whole post, but it didn't take, so now I'm rewriting an impatient abridged version.

Two funny things about the first Papal mass--one, funny 'hmm...;' the other, funny 'ha ha.'

The first was when the Pope chose to skip the homily; the crack interpreter they bring in just for the homily was surprised, and the (non-Catholic) newsroom was lost--what's going on? is that bad? what does that mean? --and the Catholic experts they have standing by went into commentary mode. It was funny because they had been hyping that homily since before the procession.

What happened was that the Pope decided to give an address after the communion, which is out of the ordinary, but not odd. I'm not sure why he'd skip the opportunity to break open the Gospel.

Ok, the other funny thing was that before the doxology, there's a spot in the Mass where the concelebrant mentions the Pope's name. You know they've been saying "Lord, remember your church throughout the world. Make us grow in love together with John Paul our pope . . ." for the last 26 years. So on Benedict's first Mass as Pope, in the capella sistina, the concelebrant says (in latin) "make us grow in love together with our pope Giovanni . . Gio . . . Be . . . Benedetto . . . Benedictus . . . Benedicto diciasette . . . Benedicto diciasei . . . diciasesimo . . . .

So first, he started to say John Paul, then he said Benedict in Italian, and then in Latin, and the in the correct ablative declension, and then he said 17, and then he said 16, and finally he says Benedict the sixteenth. You could see him working it all out.

It was late at night, so I'm not remembering it completely correctly, and I know they were speaking Latin, so I don't know why I remember the Italian numbers instead of the Latin ones; maybe I was hearing the italian interpreter. But that's the jist.

Anyway, the funny thing wasn't that he was tripping on his grammar; the funny thing is that he was doing it while standing next to Benedict the Sixteeth, in fact, reading over his shoulder. You could see him start to laugh as he was struggling through it; unfortunately the camera didn't show anyone else's reaction.

I think it's time for Nap part cinq.