This blog entry by another author reminded me irresistibly of the period in late 1978 when there was a considerable turnover in the Vatican – in that a long-serving Pope passed away of more or less natural causes, followed by the usual ceremonies, followed again by the lengthy ceremonial ritual of the college of cardinals selecting and installing another pontiff. All these occurrences made for considerable news coverage through our network lead station, FEN-Tokyo, and some inadvertent hilarity on my part, listening to one of their staff announcers (owner of a magnificent resonant speaking voice and the most vacant skull ever recorded in the possession of an AFRTS broadcast specialist) repeatedly mangle the phrase “papal encyclical” in news releases. There was a good reason – several volumes of them, actually – that this broadcaster was famed as “The Ted Baxter of the Far East Network. He was a legend in his time…

Lo and behold, after  weeks of noting all these stories out of the Vatican (it was a very dull period with regard to major news developments in international news, I think) … Pope John Paul I passed away after barely three weeks and change in office. (The shortest Papacy on record, it seems – even counting some of the very earliest in the times of Roman persecution or later corrupt Renaissance shenanigans.) One of my NCO supervisors mused, “I guess the excitement was too much for him,” while my friend Marsh wailed despairingly, “You know what this means?! Another month of Dead Pope!!”