It's been a week now, so I assume that everyone knows that the Pope is stepping down. He is, in the words of the wise old Facebook icon, an ex-Benedict. Actually, that's an interesting question-- will he keep the Pope name or does he have to go back to being Ol' Joey Ratzinger? I don't know the answer to that one-- yet.Anyway, all issues of religion and etc aside, my first reaction (and presumably a lot of other people's as well) was, "So soon? He's only been in office, what? A few years?" And then I looked it up and found out that it was/will be a bit shy of eight. But that still doesn't seem like very long.
So-- to the researchmobile! Atomic Googles to power... Factoids to speed!
As it happens, our perceptions of the length of papal occupancy have been somewhat colored by Benny's predecessor, Pope John Paul George Ringo, who was in office for about 27 years; the second longest reign in recorded history (which doesn't count Peter, the First Pope). According to a lovely pair of charts at the Popes and Papacy blog, we can see that the average (mean) length of a papal reign is just over 7 years, making Benedict's reign actually slightly longer than average. However, this is an excellent case study in why averages can be tricky-- after all, there were nine Popes who lasted less than a month! This can skew results. So let's forgo the mean and look instead at the mode, more or less. This technically would be the length of office that corresponds to the most Popes. However, since very few popes had exactly the same terms, the "true" mode would be something like 33 days (Popes Benedict V and John Paul I). So we'll break up the range into sections, which can be misleading depending on how the groups are created, but can still be interesting. According to the Popes and Papacy blog referenced above, we can see that out of the 260ish Popes (depending on how you count), the largest grouping held office for between 1 and 5 years--again letting Pope Benedict XVI beat the average. So this idea that he wasn't Pope for very long is actually almost entirely a misperception.
[Edited because I screwed up the terminology-- see the comments]
You sure 7.2 is a median and not a mean? It's kind of a strange way to report a median, which in this case should be the exact length of the 133rd longest reign. And there is clearly some skew to the data, so one would expect the mean to be different from the median, um, larger, I think, I really should know this but for some reason it's the single most difficult fact for me to remember when I teach stats....
ReplyDeleteNo, you're right. I knew that, too. I just had a cerebral gaseous expulsion. I'm not sure what the median value is here, but looking at the chart, I'd guess it's somewhere between 5 and 6 years-- after all, 121 popes (nearly half) had reigns of less than 5 years, and the median would only be about 10 data points higher.
Delete