Papal Mor(t)ality

Mark Honeychurch - 28 April 2025

As I’m sure you’re all aware, although I’d question whether it really should be international news, the Catholic Pope has died. So we’re all now going to be eagerly awaiting the white smoke that tells us the Catholic cardinals have chosen their new leader. I wish this wasn’t news - a small group of senior (both old and high-ranking) people choosing which of them gets to be in charge of a pre-scientific organisation with supernatural beliefs doesn’t seem to be something we should have to care about. But…

This new Pope will be in charge of over a billion people who share his delusion, and he (it’s always a “he”) will also be able to dictate, to a creepy extent, how this billion+ people live their lives - who they are allowed to love, what kind of contraception they can use when having sex (spoiler: none), how they should treat those who are different to them. The pope will also continue to have a large sway over how governments around the world treat their entire populations - especially countries in Africa and South America.

And so, despite me wishing that we could simply ignore this news, the result of the conclave will have far-reaching consequences for a large number of people. So we all collectively end up hoping that the cardinals pick someone who’s modern and forward thinking, rather than a backward-looking conservative.

At least some people aren’t taking it too seriously - including bookies, who are apparently doing a brisk trade in bets over who will be the next pope. I’ve even read that this succession has received more bets so far this year than the FA Cup. You can even use a crude online trading system, PolyMarket, to gamble on the outcome of the conclave.

In this vein, we have a Catholic-flavoured issue of the newsletter this week. I start the ball rolling with a brief look into some of the more daft Catholic conspiracy theories I’ve found - conspiracies about the Church, not from the church! Bronwyn has looked into our Skeptical Calendar and found a couple of Catholic-related New Zealand events of interest. We then round out the Catholic trinity of articles with a second one from me, looking into Catholicism’s answer to yoga - SoulCore.

We then have a short piece from Barry Lennox, who felt annoyed enough at the idea of EMF Rocks that he wrote to us, the last part of Katrina’s magnum opus on Sovereign Citizens, this time looking at how the courts are dealing with the nonsense, and finally Patrick’s summarised some more recent articles on climate change for us.