Pope Francis’ debut as the new pope.

With Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, coming to school this past week, knowing who world leaders are couldn’t be more prevalent to us students here than before.

However, while Kagame was a fundamental leader of the Tootsie tribe in the Rwandan civil war against the Hutu tribe, and was crucial to the prevention of genocide in his country, it’s important to know which leaders are actually worth following.

For instance, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, which, as of yesterday evening, a new one, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, pronounced Ber-GOAL-io according to the New York Times, was chosen.

He will be Pope number 266.

For that reason alone, the fact that he is the 266 pope in all of the papacy’s existence is enough for people to not have a care about him anymore.

Try to think of things in this world, that involve that number, 266.

The number of years we the United States have been a country? That’s 236 years, going on 237.

The number of YouTube videos with over 100 million views? That’s only 138.

The number of countries that participated in the 2012 Olympics in London? That’s only 204.

By bringing up and comparing all these numbers, its clear that there have been a lot of popes, and with the pope being a person, who lives to be at least 80 or so, that’s a lot of years that the pope has been around.

In fact, since year 33, when the first pope, St. Peter, was introduced, and not only is that around when the Bible was written, it is yea, a year that is so old it is counted in double digits.

But not only does the fact that Pope has been around, since you could pretty much be literal in saying, “forever,” the fact that the church still uses smoke to signify the decision of a new pope being made is another reason to move on from following him.

Tradition and keeping everything a secret, enclosed, until a decision is made may be all very nice, and as a brother of a Fraternity, I respect that such decisions are taken seriously and made through such methods.

However, I guarantee you that if the University can get the President of Rwanda to speak at our school, than tradition and secrecy were not at mind when the church conceived the idea to use smoke.

In a world that had no newspaper, no phones, no internet, no nothing, they were thinking how could they best get the message out to the people that a decision had been made.

“Smoke. Let’s just send a bunch of smoke into the sky signifying the change. That’s noticeable. People will see that,” were probably the words that came out of their mouth.

So if the idea of having something around still, that has been around for more years than the age of our country, or still uses primitive communication technology involving sending dust particles into the sky.

Yes, the fact that he is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church does warrant respect for him. He is chosen after over 100 cardinals, under the age of 80, deliberate with each other about who the next one will be.

And with 1.2 billion of the over 7 billion people in the world being Roman Catholic, that’s 14 percent of people that do have a connection with him.

But, that connection is minimal if people do appreciate that connection I’m willing to bet, because this isn’t the Holy Roman Empire anymore.

With such a large empire, which was based so largely on religion, having the pope, a figurehead, a leader, is certainly appropriate then. And we may still have Catholicism around today, but we don’t have it dominating a majority of society today.

We have other governments; we have international communications and economies linked between multiple countries.

The pope may be a very nice gentian and been quite beneficial to peoples life’s, but at this day and time, it’s time for him to move on.