Me and the Next Pope:

A reader asks:

Do you really not have an opinion on who the next Pope will be? Even given there are a whole bunch of Latin Americans seriously in the running?

No, at this point I'm clueless. It's been my entire adult life since the last Papal election, so I don't have any database to draw from. The entire electorate is new since the last election too. John Tierney, in his first NYT op-ed column, however, suggests a source for objective forecasts: the Irish gambling futures market on the Papal election.

Keep in mind, however, that a Papal Bull of 1591 outlawed betting on papal elections, which had been getting out of hand during the 16th Century. (Those darn Protestants took most of the fun out of Catholicism with their killjoy Reformation. But, not all of it -- gambling at parish functions is still a big deal. When one of my sons was nine, he won $1,000 at a parish raffle. It was the fourth straight time he won something at a church event, so I would rely on his instincts more than mine if you are in a gambling mood.)

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn writes:

We live in a present-tense culture where novelty is its own virtue: the Guardian, for example, has already been touting the Nigerian Francis Arinze as "candidate for first black pope". This would be news to Pope St Victor, an African and pontiff from 189 to 199. Among his legacies: the celebration of Easter on a Sunday.

But does being from Africa mean Pope St. Victor was black? How does Steyn know a Pope who died 1800 years ago was black? That's the same logic Afrocentrists use to proclaim Cleopatra black and argue that Denzel Washington should play Hannibal of Carthage instead of Vin Diesel (granted, the Afrocentrists have acting talent on their side on that one).

I briefly reviewed what's on the web about Pope St. Victor and the other two early popes from North Africa, but nothing seemed close to conclusive about what races they were. It's generally believed that St. Augustine, the famous North African theologian, was not black. To the best of my knowledge, the one major classical figure for whom we have positive evidence that he was notably black was Terence, the comic playwright of the Roman Republic. (And that evidence is actually sketchy.)

Terence is best known today for just one line, but it's a good one: "I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer