Habemus Papam

I see a new Pope has been elected. No word yet on who he is, but they ought to be announcing it soon.

11:53 AM: Well, that was quick. It's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger— more or less who I expected. I know some of my more liberal Catholic friends will be disappointed; though, sometimes mellow and sometimes cantankerous Presbyterian that I am, I feel a resonance with anyone who says the following:

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires," said Ratzinger, 78, who has been the Vatican's chief overseer of doctrine since 1981.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism," he said, making clear that he disagrees with that view.

Sounds to me like my long-standing "Burgess's Law": "Relativism is the intellectual equivalent of disarming you through gun control: for when absolutes are outlawed, only relativists will have absolutes."

12:04 PM: And he will go by the name of Pope Benedict XVI.