Robert Prevost

Friday

Grayson Quay

Betting on a papal conclave felt mildly degenerate

Josh is a five-foot-tall aspiring priest with a prosthetic leg who wears half a dozen assorted crucifixes and medals, causing him to jangle as he lopes around on crutches. He also carries so many holy cards in his pocket that you’d think he was worried about being spontaneously challenged to the Catholic equivalent of a Yu-Gi-Oh duel.But most importantly for my purposes, Josh will talk to you about Church politics until you’re ready to jam an aspergillum through your eardrum.When I first approached him, purely out of curiosity, he sent me an article from the National Catholic Reporter suggesting that the odds-on favorite, Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, was a paper tiger.

Pope
Cockburn

Where in the world is Melania Trump?

Melaniabsent Where in the world is Melania Trump? That’s the topic of a dishy piece from the New York Times’s Shawn McCreesh. The First Lady “vanishes from view for weeks at a time, holing up in Trump Tower in Manhattan or in Florida, where she can lie low at Mar-a-Lago,” writes McCreesh. “It’s like having Greta Garbo as first lady.” Despite staffing up the East Wing, “she rarely goes into the office.” It has been suggested that the First Lady would not be spending much time in Washington during her husband’s second term, preferring to be in New York with her son Barron or down in Florida. However, McCreesh writes, “Even regulars at Mar-a-Lago say they don’t often see Mrs. Trump around the premises.