St. Peter's throne

Yesterday's announcement inevitably prompts the question of how his eight years on St Peter's throne are to be viewed.

When he was elected, experts said that liberal cardinals knew they wouldn't get one of their own into St Peter's throne because John-Paul II had packed the College with ultra-conservatives.

In it Galileo pins his hopes on a new occupant of St Peter's throne, a mathematician he believes will be more sympathetic to a new cosmology and put the theological conservatives in their place.