A world-historical moment, a fleeting glimpse of the eternal

The faithful gather in St. Peter's Square.

Jon Stewart, on Ratzinger's first public appearance as pope, standing before the adoring crowd gathered beneath him: "This is how Bono must feel." Hilarious. So, too, his comments on the sheer stupidity of the media coverage, not to mention of all the hosts and guests who really had no idea what was going on. An easy target, but a truly worthy one. Many in the media were in it for the story, as was the case with Terri Schiavo, and I have no doubt that many onlookers, including detached television viewers around the world, were simply caught up in the wall-to-wall media coverage, or otherwise "mediated". However, I similarly have no doubt that many others, and not just the faithful or otherwise spiritual, truly understood the magnitude of what was happening and experienced some sort of connection, however individuated and refracted through personal belief and experience, to the divine, or at least to what resembles the divine. It was not just about a world-historical moment, the election of Cardinal Ratzinger, however political that may have been; it was about a fuller, richer, and more expansive understanding of a human condition that is not permanently grounded in the temporal abyss of the here and now. In short, it was a glimpse, however fleeting, of the eternal.