Never Believe Experts About the Conclave

3/10/2013

Albino Luciani: Uomo di Popolo. Sardinian woman.

Take it from me, since I was around a Conclave, the Vaticanologists do not know what they’re talking about when they predict the new pope.

Better you should consult a Roman housekeeper from Sardinia, named Grazia. She will know.

I discovered this in August of 1978, when I was dispatched to Rome upon the death of Pope Paul VI. (The first thing I learned is that journalists in Rome do not refer to the popes by number but by their original family name; Montini had just passed, for example.)

Every expert was talking up the most famous candidates – Baggio, Maldini, Baresi, Del Piero. (Those are actually soccer names; I just wanted to see if you were paying attention. The point was, the favorites were all Italian.)

As soon as I got to Rome, the Times promptly went on strike. Our bureau chief departed for, I think, the beaches of Sardinia, lending his flat in the Piazza Navona to me and a colleague and our ladies. This gift included his Sardinian housekeeper, well under five feet tall, named Grazia. Her sister, also under five feet tall, was visiting. They wore black all the time.

Since I was the only one of our group who spoke any Italian, Grazia ran the household through me, but mostly she divulged her predictions for the upcoming conclave:

Signore Giorgio! Cardinale Luciani! Venezia! Famiglia Socialista! Uomo di Popolo!

I recited to her the names of all the Italian favorites. She wagged her index finger at me like a defender telling the referee not to give a yellow card.

Since I was on strike, my wife and I took a side trip to Vienna and Budapest. We came back when the conclave began. Grazia repeated her assertion that the Venetian cardinal would win.

Then one afternoon, while I was taking a blessed nap with the shades drawn, I could hear bells ringing all over Rome. I heard bustling in the hallway. Grazia and her sister, in their finest black, were heading off to church to pray for the new pope.

Grazia paused in the doorway and delivered her punch line:

Signore Giorgio! Cardinale Luciani! Venezia! Famiglia Socialista! Uomo di Popolo!

Albino Luciani lasted only a month. He was succeeded by a Polish prelate named Karol Jósef Wojtyla (whose name emerged from the first conclave; maybe I’ll tell that story in a day or two.)

If you want to know the identity of the next pope, ask a Sardinian under five feet tall. Or her sister.

Charlie Accetta link

3/10/2013 04:26:50 am

Part of the charm of the expert class is in its willingness to persist in spite of the ongoing proof of their hubris. That's all of us, in some manner, isn't it? From the meteorologist with his charts to the sailor sniffing the salt spray, we all correctly predict the impending weather once in a while and then make those guesses our eternal triumphs. As for the cleaning ladies, God bless them, for they're no less insightful than the rest of humanity, but I'll leave it to you to bet the ranch on their opinions.

John McDermott

3/10/2013 09:08:24 am

Roncalli di Bergamo(Giovanni XXIII) rimane l'MVP, il più grande Papa di tutti tempi.

George Vecsey

3/10/2013 10:37:54 am

Vero. Il mio amico Leonard Koppett chiamava Giovanni XXIII "the yontif pontiff" -- Yiddish/English -- "the holiday Pope." Non fa senso, ma fa rima. GV

Alan Rubin link

3/10/2013 10:58:02 am

George

Grazia and her sister are probably as reliable as one can get.

I found when I worked as an engineer in industry, as well as dealing with my suppliers when in retail, the further from the top the more reliable the information. The secretaries always seemed to know what was happening before the bosses did.

Valentine, our bush tracker in Zimbabwe, claimed that he could tell the sex of an elephant by tasting fresh dung. I had no way of determining his reliability, but he was extremely adept at tracking animals from marks in the sand that were barely visible.

In the unlikely chance that a Cardinal from Africa would even make the long list, it might be advisable to check with Valentine.

George Vecsey

3/10/2013 11:10:41 am

Alan, does that work at the race track? GV

Alan Rubin link

3/10/2013 03:09:08 pm

George

I do not know, but I would not want to try it. You dip your finger and lick it. Valentine suggested that we try it, but how would we know if were were correct or not.

It is more sanitary to flip a coin.

Brian Savin

3/10/2013 01:49:01 pm

Cool -- GREAT story!

Gene Palumbo

3/10/2013 04:11:03 pm

"I recited to her the names of all the Italian favorites. She wagged her index finger at me like a defender telling the referee not to give a yellow card."

i loved it.

Gene Palumbo

3/12/2013 01:04:30 pm

Hey, folks, George has a column in today's Times: "Where Are the Yankees I Loved to Hate." www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/sports/baseball/where-are-the-yankees-i-loved-to-hate.html

Michael Green

3/16/2013 03:48:10 pm

Mr. Vecsey, when you were in Rome, you may have encountered Winston Burdett, one of the legendary Murrow Boys, who reported from there for more than 20 years for CBS News when it was CBS News. I will never forget watching the coverage in 1978 when Burdett said he thought there might be a non-Italian pope, possibly from behind the Iron Curtain. Uh ... he got it. Which is why the NBC producer at the time told his staff there were 112 cardinals going into the Curia and they should count; if 113 people went in, it meant Burdett had found a way in.

George Vecsey

3/17/2013 05:35:00 am

Dear Michael Green: I did not know Burdette. I was sent over for the first conclave but was home by the second one. When Luciani was elected, I went to the press conference at the NA Cardinals' residence, and heard Krol of Phila. allude to the Holy Spirit choosing a pope but then, and then -- I and I paraphrase -- Krol added that he had also been highly impressed with the cardinal from Krakow, that is to say, Karol Wojtyla. Burdett may have been there that day. I go into detail in my Musial biography (Musial was active in Polish circles, and had met Wojtyla.) Thanks for your enlightened note. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Never Believe Experts About the Conclave

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