I gotta go. Swimming lessons wait for no Pope. Use this thread to...talk.
Cover the coverage, too.
I will say that after he picked himself up off the floor, Fr. McBrien gave some mad props to Ratzinger's humble and self-effacing demeanor.
The weird thing about a Pope not coming out of nowhere is that you're so familiar with him as something else...Cardinal, head of the CDF..that it's hard to think of him as...Pope. Which is another good fruit of taking a new name, I suppose...Pope Benedict XVI!