The singer out of Slipknot went to Rome to see the Pope

[venta]

Most people in my office have their news site of preference open in the background during the day; most people sporadically comment on the headlines.

This morning has mostly been punctuated by people saying "Oh. I didn't know popes could resign."

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Couple of times, but not since 1415.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's... not recent!

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

No, and then it was only because there were two other potential Popes battling for supremacy (the Avignon and Pisa antipopes), so he resigned after calling a conclave of all the relevant parties to end the dispute once and for all and prevent the church fragmenting into two or more rival factions.

As far as I know this is the first time a Pope has resigned on grounds of ill health, despite many having obviously had severely impaired health and faculties before their death in office.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

The whole concept of antipopes is pretty awesome (he said, knowing relatively little about it). We should do more mad stuff like that in the modern world! ;-)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Oh, some people still do - there's a whole bunch of peculiar conservative fringe Catholic groups who believe that the Catholic Church reneged on its dogma in the 1950s and therefore hasn't had a 'true Pope' ever since:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Ooh, excellent! They've even got some ridiculously byzantine infighting going on. 8-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

... but apparently the sedevantist antipopes aren't even true antipopes, because there aren't enough people who believe them. So they're just nutters.

(Which on the whole is probably for the best. Antipopes are all very well, but I don't think we really want rival claimants to the Holy See tearing up Europe between them ;)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

So they're just nutters.

Being a nutter isn't nearly as cool as being an antipope!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Yeah. These days we'd resolve things like the Western Schism (the whole Rome/Avignon issue) by colliding popes and antipopes together, resulting in annihilation and a shower of high-energy exotic particles.

All that Dan Brown stuff about CERN and the Vatican was smokescreen to cover up this truth. And you thought all that stuff about the God Particle was just fanciful.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in Dan Brown - he's just a fairy story dreamed up to scare little kids into reading real literature!

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

a shower of high-energy exotic particles.

Called papions. It's probably something to do with the butterfly effect.

[venta.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

*goes back to early Pratchett (Mort?) to find the bit in a footnote about instant messaging by torturing minor royalty*

I really like your journal venta. It provides much needed silliness on a truly cold, grey, miserable day. Thank you to you and the assembled commenters.