Habemus Papem!

After bicycling royalty, we now have a tram travelling pope, Well, he was a tram travelling, appartment dwelling, self cooking cardinal, but I presume he will not be allowed as pope to get on the trams very often. What next? Bankers on... what? Rickshaws probably - a Japanese invention of the mid-nineteenth century that replaced palanquins. Such is progress: the rich adopt the wheel after millenia. the catholic church had problems here as well. The third Council of Braga in the late seventh century AD ruled that bishops carrying the relics of martyrs in procession should get out of their litters and walk, relieving the white clad deacon bearers from their burdens.

A litter, I think, originally meant a bed, which formerly was likely to be made of cast down straw, and so the word came to be applied both to the human-borne conveyance and to the light trash we drop around us.

It was of course the democratic Americans who put the wheels on the sedan, and the engine, thus turning it into an auto mobile. The sedan now was democratic not just in that it was no longer carried by human bearers, but in that it consisted of a single compartment, including the driver, who was no longer a servant stuck out in front, outside the cab containing the passengers, but had come in from the cold.

There probably aren't any trams in Vatican City anyway, just as there are no cash machines. However white the pope's garments, his temporal state does not gain admittance to the European Union's 'white list' of those that comply fully with international standards aginst money laundering and tax abuse.

There is much discussion in the public news media as to what is the true character of the new pope, the man who regularly visited the poor in the Argentinian slums, and the man who resisted the conflation of religious and economic activism in liberation theology and, apparently, was not entirely comfortable with his Jesuit order. There is the uncomfortable question of whether or not he abandonned to their fate two Jesuit priests who were tortured by the Argentinian authorities forty years ago. I imagine it is entirely possible that he both vigorously tried to save them and that his previous stern attitude contributed to their peril.

Clearly he is both a man of authority and a man of the people, and perhaps no more able to solve that conundrum than any other.

Estela de la Cuadra, whose mother co-founded the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo activist group during the Argentinian dictatorship to search for missing family members, when asked if she felt Francis had lived up to his reputation as a common, humble man, replied: "Yes, he has an arrogant humility." No doubt that is a spiritual condition with which the Catholic church has often struggled.