THE POPE, AGAIN: As one of the great election upsets of modern history, the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the Papacy seems to have caught a good many political pundits completely by surprise. No one is quite sure at the moment how this happened; the media's tracking polls, as we know, showed that Ratzinger did not stand a chance, given his very conservative stances on the issues and his last speech before the election, which many pundits regarded as a major gaffe. No firm numbers exist as yet, but right now the conventional wisdom is that Cardinal Ratzinger somehow or other managed to pick up a majority of the Catholic vote and this was enough to put him over the top in the College of Cardinals. Whther or not this will reignite the question of whether to get rid of the College and substitute a fairer, more open and democratic system remains to be seen.