POPE-NEY SWOPE.

           I’ll be surprised if the next Pope isn’t Italian and shocked if he isn’t European. So, things look pretty buono for the Archbishop of Milan, Angelo Scola. Don’t count out Peter Cardinal Turkson, though. The Ghanian prelate could be the first black pope. (Not counting the leader of the Jesuits, called by some, “The Black Pope,” after his priest-like vestments.) The odds against His Eminence are, I’ll admit, pretty high, but you have to consider the Putney Swope factor.                                    

Putney Swope is a 1969 comedy, written and directed by Robert Downey Sr., in which the executive board of an ad agency must elect a successor to their recently deceased chairman. Since the rules forbid voting for yourself, they each vote – by secret ballot – for the one person they’re sure will never be elected: the only black man on the board, Putney Swope.

I don’t know for a fact that Cardinals can’t vote for themselves, but it seems to me that some Vatican official back in, say, the third century may have seen the risk and proposed a rule against it. Nor is it a guarantee that, once elevated to Pope, the former Cardinal of Ghana would commence a series of sweeping changes as Putney Swope did in the movie. Changing, for instance, the name of the ad agency to “Truth And Soul, Inc.” The chances of something like that happening are very, very small. Yet, as Lord Acton said to George Gershwin, “Power corrupts and absolute power is nice work if you can get it.”