Naming a New Pontiff

Hello. Bouncing right off the news:

Having devoted the requisite day of mourning the death of Pope Francis, the media now is moving briskly from grief to parimutuel handicapping. There are spreadsheets on who the new pope might be. I’ve read through lists of the front-runners, and am bored. Not a good name among them.

The GOAT of papal names, the funniest of all time, was Pope Hilarius

(I once spent the better part of an afternoon fruitlessly trying to verify whether Pope Hilarius had a good sense of humor. The closest I could come was learning that the word “sardonic,” often associated with a certain kind of bitter, scornful smile, came from the Ancient Greek word sardónios, which means "of Sardinia” … and Pope Hilarius came from Sardinia. The word's association with the Italian Island stemmed from a certain plant, native to Sardinia, which, when eaten, caused facial contortions resembling that bitter, scornful smile, sometimes followed by death.)

So, anyway, that was the best I could do.

Among mere cardinals, inarguably the all-time champ, never to be equalled, was Cardinal Sin.

So after despondently reading the list of front-runners for the papacy, I decided to read the names of ALL the cardinals, so I could nominate a few right here. Call them dark horses. Here they are, in Ascending Order, as it were.

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Third Runner-Up: Cardinal Polycarp Pengo, from Dar -Es-Salaam. It is just such a cool name. I wish I had named my son or daughter that. Dar-Es-Salaam is also a cool name.

Second Runner-Up: Cardinal Raffaele Farina, from The Vatican. I love the idea of an Italian pope whose given name sounds like pasta.

First Runner-Up: Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, from Paris. I chose this because his surname in French means Andre Twenty-Three. And one of the great popes was John XXIII. And one of my childhood heroes was Malcolm X. I didn’t put a lot of thought into these choices.

And the winner, hands down:

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa

… From Jerusalem.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll

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See you tomorrow in The Invitational Gene Pool, where we birth a new song parody contest, and show you what you came up with to explain a big blank space.

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