Reading about the ceremonies associated with the departure of the present pope and the election of his successor seem so weird that it’s fascinating, and bring out my inner 13 year old to comment, MST3K-like, at the goings-on.
As I’ve said before, they must’ve gone into the archives and blowbn the dust off the ceremonials manuals. It’s been six centuries since they had to go through this. I’m pretty certain that this is the first Pope to be whisked away after his term in office by a helicopter. Fortunately, they have precedence in the US Presidents to guide them for that part.
They destroy his signet ring with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. I suppose that they keep a special silver hammer around that they every time a pope dies, so they didn’t have to go out and buy a new one for this occasion. But it seems needlessly fussy and effete. If preventing forgery were your goal, I’d think a plain old sledgehammer and an anvil would do the job more effectiovely and rapidly. Or even just crushing it in a vise. I’d be too worried about damaging the silver hammer, which I can’t see dong the job very effectively, anyway. Unless it’s a silver sledgehammer. Maybe, since they went to the trouble of making a special ceremonial Papal-Ring-Destroying-Hammer, they could make a special Ring Destroting Pres. If they want it to be special, they can plate it gold and silver.
The Pope’s Prada Shoes. Well, if the DEvil gets Prada, I suppose the Pope need it, too, if only to stay even. The red color seems kinda showy, but I guess that’s the point. The Roman emperor used to wear red slippers, and I suspect the Papal office just copied the idea. Benedict doesn’t get to wear red anymore, not being Pope.
They remind me of the Ruby Slippers from the 1939 Wizard of Oz. Maybe they’re afraid Benedict, in retirement, will click his heels together and repeat “here’s No Place Like Rome” over and over, and get transported back to the Vatican. This suggests a nightmarish transition ceremony to deprive him of those shoes, whereby a farmhouse gets dropped on him, and his successor has to pull the red shoes offBenedict’s striped-stocking feet before they curl up and disappear beneath the house.
After the transition, I suppose Bedeict wil remain quietly sequestered. You’d like to think he’d be at least as discreet as former presidents, not commenting on his sucessor’s statements and decisions for more than the first year or so. I assume that the Twitter account goes with the job, so he won’t be tweeti ng his acquaintances about goings-on.