Habemus Papam

Workplace productivity was seriously hindered on Wednesday, not by watching the conclave and its aftermath, but by watching the media watch the conclave, which is way more entertaining. One should be charitable, because most of these people are only on the Popery beat when the last one shuffles off his mortal coil to retire, but it was getting egregious.

Allow me to gripe:

1. The media is shocked the Pope is, in fact, a religious Catholic. Many reporters seem surprised to discover the conclave did not accidentally pick a Unitarian. Rumor has it the Pope also thinks some pretty wild stuff about Jesus. (No offense to the Unitarians. But it's more likely that the Unitarians will start venerating icons and praying in Old Church Slavonic than that the conclave will pick one as pope.)

2. The media thinks Pope is the first non-European to hold the post! No, he's not. Church history actually goes back quite a ways, and in the early church, there were a few from North Africa. Prior to the rise of Islam, the center of the Christian world was not Europe. St. Augustine, one of the Church Fathers was North African. St. John Chrystosym was from modern Turkey. The apostles founded their churches in Turkey, Greece, North Africa and the Middle East. The center of global Christianity didn't really solidify in the West until the fall of Constantinople in the 1400s.

3. Apparently, CNN can not hire a competent Italian translator. The fellow they had translating on the live webstream was awful.