That Mysterious Non-Catholic Interest
Mystery has been in a long, slow decline. If it were a stock, you might short it except for the fact that it might've already gone as low as it can go.
Some of it is the lack of uncharted realms on the map. In the 1500s you had huge swaths of lands marked "unknown". There's something neat about a map with uncharted territory.
Back when I was a kid the Soviet Union was an unknown. They were a closed society capable of inflicting a nuclear holocaust on our ass. This concentrated the mind and made you curious about them. The odd architecture of the Kremlin added to their mystique. Red Square was different.
But then the U.S.S.R. fell and became more like us. Fewer secrets. More materialist. More sexual license. A maybe a bit more democratic.
In the '90s Islam seemed interesting. Another mysterious, closed society. I wanted to trespass in their mosques. I wanted to see how they kept faith despite the lack of truth in their religion. But it eventually became impossible to ignore their reactionary and hate-filled Wahhabism. A culture capable of producing a 9/11 becomes much less interesting. They lost some of their mystery because there is a banality in evil. Hatred is the broad highway, not the narrow, interesting byway.
All of this is prelude to suggesting why there might have been non-Catholic interest in the papal election. I think it's because there's still mystery in the Catholic Church. In a time where everything is televised and secrets are rare, the conclave was a black hole. Something going on in the Sistine Chapel that was off-limits to reporters. In a global world where diversity astronomically decreases, the papacy still has the whiff of something different and something counter-cultural.
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