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Pope Hopefuls vs. Spread

We’re all stocking up on beer and chips and cases of altar wine for next week’s conclave and celebratory smoke signals. How to while away the hours till the college of cardinals gets together Monday to pick a new pope? Well, you can dip into the beer and chips early, or you can place online bets on the outcome of the papal election. Or both.

Paddypower, an Ireland-based wagering site, is taking bets on which cardinal will become the next pope. The current favorite (now at 7-2, down from earlier quotes of 11-4 and 3-1) is Francis Cardinal Arinze (to use the traditional R.C. title) of Nigeria (he’d be the first pope from Africa in 15 centuries). Interesting that of the top 10 on the Paddypower list, just three are from Italy (and five of the top 13 listed candidates are Italian). The non-Italian betting favorites are from Honduras (No. 2 on the list), Germany (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, a conservative Vatican insider), Brazil, Argentina, France, and Portugal. Personally, I think the next pope will be Italian; the Vatican has had its fling with flamboyant outsiders for awhile. If you’re looking for a long-shot to fund the kids’ education, try Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Man of Vietnam, one of several cardinals listed with the longest odds of 125-1. Hey, that’s better odds than the lottery, at least in California.

Paddypower also has some side propositions if you’re really determined to lose some money: what name the next pope will take, how many days the election will take, and — best of all — will the next pope fulfill a medieval Irish prophecy foretelling the end of the papacy?

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Opening Night

The Infospigot household, plus special guest (and friend of Thom) Jane, took in the Oakland Athletics home opener tonight. The final score found the hometown nine at a steep deficit to the visiting Toronto Blue Jays, a result that left the 44,000 witnesses chilled and uncharmed. (Just a second and I’ll be done with what I believe is a bad Roger Angell impression.) But the team has 80 more home games to play, so hope abounds.

I’ll say this, though: Everything was close to OK before the umpire went and wrecked things by saying “play ball.”

The A’s stadium, which now goes by the name of McAfee Coliseum or something like that, is impersonally massive since its reconstruction a few years ago to accommodate the East Bay’s professional football team. The main charm the big concrete bowl had before the remodeling was a view over the top of the outfield bleachers to the Oakland Hills. There’s still just a sliver of that vista visible from the cheap third-deck seats (ours came with an unadvertised obstructed view), and the evening sunlight on the ridge — even with a hillside stripped by a gravel quarry — is always striking. Just before the anthems were played — Canadian first, then ours — I noticed a couple of big birds soaring just over the rim of the stadium to our left. I thought they were turkey vultures at first silhouetted glance — an addition to the pigeons, California gulls, and barn swallows that claim the Coliseum as home roost — but as we kept looking, we realized they were red-tailed hawks. Both swayed and wheeled around a light tower on the third-base side of the stadium, and both eventually settled onto the white-painted grating of a workers’ platform at the base of the lights.

Then the anthems. Even though a Canadian guy I met in Ireland in 1973 pointed out that “O Canada” is a militarist hymn (“Listen to what they’re saying — ‘O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.’ On guard!”), I’ve always liked it, and Kate and I sang the few words we knew. Then a singer started into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a performance punctuated by loud fireworks. We sang along to that, too, despite my dislike of the current manifestation of our flag and patriotism cult.

But while we sang, both Kate and I kept scanning the sky around the stadium. Roy Steele, the public address announcer, alerted the crowd to expect a flyover from a pair of FA-18 jets from Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley (here’s a question: How much do those flyovers cost, and who pays?) when the anthem was done. Somewhere in the song’s last few bars, Kate said, “There they are.” And off to the southeast, a couple of tiny shapes trailing smoke headed for the rim of the stadium opposite us — heading straight for us, in other words. I said, “Stay way up there, you two.” There was just a dull roar till they climbed into the west behind us, then we were engulfed in a prolonged peal of thunder. I love seeing the big, fast planes. Too bad we can’t put them on permanent amusement duty.

Then the game started, and things went downhill from there. At least until the postgame scrambled eggs back here in Berkeley.

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‘Please — Please! — Don’t Look’

An immortal moment of broadcasting conscience on ESPN’s “SportsCenter”: The show was reporting on the death of Al Lucas, an arena football player who died in a game tonight after trying to make a tackle. One of the show’s anchors, Fred Hickman, read the item. As they got ready to show the clip of the play in which Lucas was fatally injured, Hickman said, “in the interest of decency, we invite you to look away.”

Then they played the tape.

The content of the video aside — uninterested as I am in ESPN’s notion of decency, I did not look away; the angle of the play they showed was just generic football rough stuff, a tangle of players hitting each other during a kickoff return — what a nauseating display of false piety and pandering: “Oh, we hate to do what we’re about to do; and you’ll hate us for it too — especially if you stoop to our level and watch what we’re about to put on the screen. For heaven’s sake, don’t watch this. It’s just horrible. Isn’t it? We’ll have a replay in 15 minutes. In the name of all that’s holy, please avoid it.”

I’m not saying ESPN or anyone else should refrain from showing the tape. Quite the contrary. The poor guy died in a public venue in the conduct of a sport that puts a premium on violence, even crippling violence, and ESPN promotes the voyeurism along with the rest of the media. So go ahead and roll the tape. Just spare us the solemnity. If ESPN had really wanted to make the kind of “in the interest of decency” statement it was pretending to make, the producers could have shelved the footage. What are the chances of that happening?

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On the Bike

Yesterday was, well, yesterday. And today was today, and I was out pedaling my bike through the Santa Cruz Mountains all day instead of sitting here posting. Which merits more details — a gorgeous and challenging day — but frankly I have to gather my wits about me first and get some shuteye, too. More later.

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John Paul Embalming Caper, Part IV

With Pope John Paul II’s funeral about to begin, here’s one last — I promise — return to the subject of how his body has been handled since he died last Saturday. The Los Angeles Times on Thursday sorted through the conflicting reports about how the papal remains were prepared for viewing and came up with a pretty convincing, if not intricate or exact, account of what’s happened.

Reporter Laura King recounts how a professor of forensic medicine was assigned to handle John Paul’s body. And from the few facts and informed speculation available — the professor says he is sworn to secrecy about the details — it sounds like the pope was semi-embalmed. Further, his body has been getting nightly cosmetic touch-ups.

“During the three days that the body has been on view, St. Peter’s has closed from 2 to 5 a.m. The Vatican has said the hiatus is for maintenance inside the basilica, but a prominent specialist said it was likely that a formaldehyde solution was re-injected during that time, and cosmetics applied to conceal what by now would be apparent signs of decay.

” ‘Even with treatment, after this length of time, there would be the beginning of blackening of the skin, and “weeping” of the eyes,’ said Vincenzo Pascali, director of forensic medicine at Rome’s Catholic University.”

Also worthy of note in the Papal Embalmment Watch is Slate’s “Explainer” column, which doesn’t purport to say how the pope’s process was handled but instead focuses on how nature has its way with us after we die.

Slate: Why Didn’t They Embalm the Pope?

Los Angeles Times: An Alternative to Embalming for the Pontiff

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Iraq by the Numbers

The Iraq Coalition Casualties Web site offers a glimpse at a dimension of the human toll often missing from U.S. reporting on the war. For last month, the site’s operators compiled all the stray day-in, day-out reports of violence around Iraq and tallied casualties among Iraqi civilians and members of the Iraqi security forces. As the site cautions, it’s not a complete list, just what folks could scrape together from a careful reading of daily news wires.

The toll reported for March was 440, including 240 civilians and 200 military. The compilation continues this month.

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Papal Embalmment, the Sequel

Do we want to know whether Pope John Paul II was embalmed? We do. The Infospigot Papal Interregnum Information Clearinghouse is under siege this morning today with dozens hundreds of visitors seeking the facts. So here, as precisely as they can be ascertained from a distance of 6,260 miles, they are:

The authoritative word from the Vatican is that Pope John Paul II has not been embalmed. Instead, according to a pretty good rundown from the BBC, the church is saying the body has been “prepared.” But there’s a mystery about the nature and extent of the preparation. The BBC story cites speculation that the bier upon which the pope lies is being cooled (get your ice-cold bier here) to slow the body’s decomposition. The Associated Press reports Massimi Signoracci, a Roman mortician whose family has handled past popes, as saying some type of embalmment would be necessary for a body on display as long as John Paul’s has been. Reuters’ story, which sheds no more light on what was or wasn’t done, picks up a good quote from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago:

“You see him, you see the body, and in Italy they don’t embalm in the same way we do, so you see the face of death more clearly,” Cardinal Francis George was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun Times. “The person who is there looks like a dead person, and that’s good, that’s the reality of our future, but it’s not the last word.”

BBC: Preparing a Pontiff for the Grave

Reuters: Vatican Not Afraid to Show Pope’s Face of Death

San Francisco Chronicle (AP): Vatican: John Paul II Was Not Embalmed

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Embalming the Pope

In further search of the truth about papal embalming practices, I found what appears to be a nice feature story Reuters did in 2001, when Pope John XXIII was disinterred to be put on public display. The story says that the pope himself directed that he be embalmed, and the job fell to a young doctor named Gennaro Goglia:

“… Goglia, now 78, still vividly recalls how a Vatican car picked him up at home on the night of June 3, 1963, hours after Pope John died of stomach cancer. Goglia, then a specialist in anatomy at Rome’s Catholic University, did not even tell his family where he was going.

“Before John died he entrusted a custodian to see to his funeral. John recalled that the body of his predecessor Pius XII was preserved so badly in 1958 that the four men standing guard in the Vatican had to be changed every 15 minutes because they could not stand the stench. The custodian, also a doctor, got in touch with Goglia. After they arrived, Goglia and others were taken by private elevator to the papal apartments in the apostolic palace. They had to wait about an hour while Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzu made a bronze death mask.

” ‘Manzu walked out and we walked in,’ Goglia said.”

The best line in the story: “Yes, it was just a body,” (Goglia said). “It didn’t have to go to a beauty contest but it was the body of the pope.”

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Search of the Day

What with all of the pictures of the deceased pope being carried through St. Peter’s Square, a lot of people seem to want to know whether he was embalmed or not before being displayed publicly. I count nine people coming to the renowned Infospigot Papal Information Clearinghouse through Google searches looking for information on whether the pope was embalmed; before you scoff, that’s a hefty 16 percent of the site’s visits on a non-banner Monday.

The answer is: I don’t know for sure. I mean, I have not found a story anywhere that says definitively that John Paul II was embalmed. However, lots of stories refer to his embalmed body being borne through the square on Monday. So I’m guessing he was embalmed.

Interesting to note that the Universi Dominici Gregis — the rules of succession that John Paul promulgated in 1996 — don’t mention embalmment, but do set out some specific rules limiting the kinds of pictures that can be taken of the pope’s body after he’s died:

“No one is permitted to use any means whatsoever in order to photograph or film the Supreme Pontiff either on his sickbed or after death, or to record his words for subsequent reproduction. If after the Pope’s death anyone should wish to take photographs of him for documentary purposes, he must ask permission from the Cardinal Camerlengo of Holy Roman Church, who will not however permit the taking of photographs of the Supreme Pontiff except attired in pontifical vestments.”

The Vatican’s site is worth checking out, for its orthodox weirdness if not for the oddness of Medieval Europe brushing elbows with the postmodern world. (Most of the news on the site has yet to be translated from Italian. So the official announcement of the pope’s cause of death refers to the primary causes — “shock settico” and “collasso cardiocircolatorio irreversibile” (which I take to be septic shock and irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse) — and several secondary causes:

“–Morbo di Parkinson

–Pregressi episodi di insufficienza respiratoria acuta e conseguente tracheotomia

–Ipertrofia prostatica benigna complicata da urosepsi

–Cardiopatia ipertensiva ed ischemica.”

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‘Viva il Papa’

The New York Times’s coverage of the pope’s death features an obituary by Robert D. McFadden. To call it an obituary is somewhat misleading. It’s a mini-biography that takes up most of an eight-page special section in the paper and 21 pages online. McFadden is what I would call a rewrite man extraordinaire. He works nearly exclusively in the newsroom and writes stories based on his own reporting and research, almost always on deadline, sometimes wrapping in contributions from others. His command of the rewrite craft — his ability to assemble and marshal the important facts in a story, his ability to convey a sense of scenes and personalities he’s never witnessed or encountered directly, the lucidity of his prose, his speed and encyclopedic general knowledge — means he gets to write some of the biggest stories. He’s so good with them that he won the Pulitzer Prize one year — not for any particular story, but for what he did day in and day out to create sound, well-reported, and readable stories. Although I’ve never met McFadden and don’t know exactly how the Times newsroom works, I’m confident of all of the above because we had our own extraordinary rewrite guy at The Examiner when I was there, Larry D. Hatfield, who would bail the desk out on deadline nearly every day. But that’s another story.

Back to the John Paul II piece in today’s paper. Here’s how it starts:

“On the night of Oct. 16, 1978, a vast, impatient throng in floodlit St. Peter’s Square cheered wildly as white smoke curled from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signaling the election of a new pope. A long wait had ended, but the enthusiasm was somewhat premature.

“Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged minutes later to introduce Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the first non-Italian pope since 1523. But even he had trouble pronouncing the name – voy-TEE-wah. Hardly anyone, it seemed, knew who he was. Murmurs and questions rippled through the predominantly Roman crowd.

“Then a powerfully built man with slightly stooped shoulders and a small smile on his angular face stepped onto the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. Cheers faded into silence. The crowd waited.

“He stood at the balcony rail, looking out, a Polish stranger in the fresh white robes of the pope. And there were tears in his eyes as he began to speak.

” ‘I have come,’ he said in lightly accented Italian, ‘from a faraway country – far away, but always so close in the communion of faith.’

“There were scattered cheers, and they grew louder as he went on.

” ‘I do not know whether I can express myself in your – in our – Italian language,’ he said, pausing.

“The crowd roared appreciatively, and the laughter swelled into resounding cheers.

” ‘If I make mistakes,’ he added, beaming suddenly, ‘you will correct me.’

“Tumult erupted.

“The cheers went on and on, and then grew into rhythmic waves that broke on the basilica facade and echoed across the square in a thundering crescendo:

” ‘Viva il Papa!’ Viva il Papa! Viva il Papa!’ ”

That’s enough to make me want to read the whole thing.