the new pope
While the new Pope, Francis, has made a point of emphasizing simplicity—rather than wearing the usual gold ring, he has insisted on one made of silver—today he gave way to Vatican tradition and formally assumed his office following most (but not all) of the elaborate ceremonial script worked out in minute detail over more than a thousand years. Even within this deeply traditional institution, the script has changed, sometimes quite substantially. Popes are now “inaugurated” and not crowned; Pope Paul VI, in 1963, was the first who declined to wear a crown, although he was still carried about in a special papal litter ( la sedia gestatoria ), a kind of portable throne—a practice that his successor, the short-lived John Paul I, abandoned in 1978. And Francis obediently read from the heavy Latin tomes held up in front of him by the papal retinue, after being led outside St. Peter’s Basilica by hundreds of men in golden robes and tall white hats who chanted solemnly in Latin a...