The news of this week was summed up in a phrase: Habemus papam. The election of a new Pope was major news for the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, of course, but the internal workings of the Vatican hold a strange, almost universal appeal, and even after two millennia the papacy is appreciated as a political institution as much as a religious one. Everybody, Catholic or not, suddenly had an opinion about the candidates and the factions fighting over each ballot behind the locked door of the Sistine Chapel, and the most confident analyses were, as ever, offered by non-Catholics –...