Let’s just get a few details out of the way, first and foremost.
As many of you know, I was born and raised Catholic, baptized into the Church, some ten days after my birth. My godparents’ names were Hilda and Bob. I never once in my life called them and said, “God-Mom, God-Dad? I need some Catholic help.”
Anyway, there is my Catholic proof, but don’t hold it against me. There’s a lot to know about Catholicism, with all its creeds, and doctrines, and traditions. Sit, kneel, stand, sit, stand, sit, kneel, sit, kneel, and on.
But a thing of interest caught my eye today. It was on this date, September 27, 1590, that Pope Urban VII died. He was born 69 years earlier in Rome. His little tiny baby name was Giovanni Battista Castagna. He sucked his thumb and ate god only knows what back then. He wore diapers.
But when he grew up, he became the head honcho of the Catholic Church. For a very short time, that is. He died only 13 days after being chosen Pope. That makes his reign the shortest papacy in history.
I don’t want to make him feel bad in any way, but I guess he was the wrong man for the job.
St. Peter, traditionally, is considered the first Pope. Since him, there have been 260 additional Popes.
It’s a holy job. As such, among these beanie-heads, 82 have been proclaimed saints.
There have also been some antipopes. That doesn’t mean they had 666 tattooed on their underbellies or anything. They were just rival claimants to the papal throne. They were appointed, or elected, in opposition to the legitimate Pope.
Speaking of Popey trends. All have been male.
I didn’t mean to get off on this sidetrack about Popes. I wanted to talk about Pope Urban dying 13 days after being appointed. Perhaps he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe, he didn’t belong in the office, to begin with. It could be that God decided to undo what man had done. Which turned out to be a fatal case of malaria.
There have been times in all our lives when we knew we were not in the right place. It might have been stuck in a meaningless job. Or perhaps we did some sort of community service, which turned out differently than we expected. So many people have found themselves in relationships that did not have the right stuff.
Thankfully, since you are still reading this, you were not terminated with a capital T, from whatever it was you were doing, like Pope Urban. Yet, we see this happening too, with shootings in the workplace and with media-drenched coverage of young girls murdered on camping trips by their boyfriends.
The wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong choice. The wrong situation.
If we are lucky enough, fortunate enough, smart enough, or whatever the “enough” might be, we can transcend these experiences. We saw what didn’t work, and we went on, growing from that encounter. Hopefully, we made notes and learned from the circumstances. Perhaps the wrong thing made us better people, in the end.
That is one of the keys to life, I think. Being better people along the way, and in the end. We encounter life, we learn from it, and we grow.
And we grow.
And we grow.
==========
“Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.”
— William Crawford
==========
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
— Mark Twain
===========
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle
===========
When the Pope died. Super fast.
