Too bad about Geoff. It's a pity that a whole lifetime of honorable behavior should be blighted by one mistake. Sort of like Peewee Herman.

I propose a moment of (unaspirated) silence to mark the solemn occasion.

. . .

I guess out of respect for one who's about to be formally shunned, I'll only mention here the _other_ major mistake he made.

He wrote that the cardinal in question had a thick Chilean accent enought though the cardinal did clearly say papam /papam/. But Spanish has no final /m/ and Spanish speakers routinely turn it into /n/ so a thick Chilean accent would be /a'Bemo(h)'papan/.

To the above poster, correct. I too did not hear a thick Chilean accent on the Cardinal, but a mild one. And it was a mild Spanish (though Latin American) accent, not specifically Chilean. I assumed that comment was made to identify the Cardinal's nationality.

Geoff, I am a Roman Catholic and I am familiar with Latin and Greek. Your mistakes are just common in the time when the old classical culture has died. In a Pontificale Romanum of the late nineteenth century you can stil find a laus dedicatoria in classical hexameters, but this has gone. Around the turn of the century - I mean 1900 of course - ignorance was already so rampant, that the French made a special abridged dictionary for those schoolboys who would not go on with the study of Greek. I find your ignorance not inexcusable, for it is general and far older than you and I have learned to accept the comments at college, when I did not translate pontifex maximus. For I was wrong they said. They said people really will not understand that. You have to say 'pope' or something like it. You're living among ignoramuses and you have to adapt. A matter of survival.

I am not at all theologically conservative, or Catholic either, or even Christian or theist.

But it still pissed me off when I went into a Catholic bookstore and they didn't have a little handbook of Gregorian chant.

They just looked at me. I'm not sure they knew what I was talking about.

John, it should not be too difficult to find a Kyriale at used bookstores. You can find a giant PDF of one here, but it is just the music and words, no guidance.

On behalf of all science reporters, I wish to protest.