OK, we’ve found a Massachusetts angle to the surprise selection of Cardinal Robert Provost as the new pope. NBC Boston, take a bow. Turns out Pope Leo XIV, as he’s now known, got an honorary degree from Merrimack College in North Andover in 2005. … Take that, Chicago and Villanova. … In other papal news, don’t you find it interesting that few are openly saying what many are privately thinking? That, coincidently or intentionally, the College of Cardinals may have partly selected Leo, an American, as a moral counterweight to another American, Donald Trump? The NYT comes close to stating the obvious with this story about Leo’s views on immigration and his past X criticism of JD Vance’s zeal-of-a-convert theory on hierarchical love. And there is a modern precedent of cardinals selecting a pope they knew full well would act as a political and spiritual counterweight to leaders of another historic superpower. …

… The Hub Blog mind wanders back to secular events in the 2000s, when the Nobel Prize committee took an obvious jab at George W. Bush by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter and repeated the jab by awarding the same prize to Barack Obama in 2009. The Nobel award is not the same as selecting a pope, of course. But it does show how elite world institutions often base decisions, partly or largely, on global political considerations. And I find it extremely hard to believe yesterday’s selection of Leo was devoid of global political considerations as they apply to contemporary America.

Update — WHDH also had the momentous Merrimack College angle.