As long as we’re fixating on the new pope, we should talk about St. Malachy.

Malachy was a bishop in Ireland who allegedly had a vision in 1139 in which he saw a procession of 112 future pontiffs, each of whom he described with a single, frequently oblique, phrase. The recently retired Benedict XVI, for instance, got “the glory of the olive.” Who knew? Then, after the olive, came the final pope, “Peter the Roman,” whose flock would suffer “many tribulations” not the least of which was the end of the world.

So, in theory, we’re down to our last pope. True, he’s Jorge the Argentinian, not Peter the Roman. But we can figure out a way to make the prediction work. (St. Peter was known as The Rock, and Buenos Aires probably has a lot of rocks.) True, the Malachy list seems to be a 16th-century forgery, whose remarkable spot-on accuracy comes to a screeching halt in 1590. But the point is that we have not had a serious doomsday discussion since that Mayan calendar thing last December, and I miss it. The nice thing about apocalyptic panics is that all you need for a feel-good moment is the earth not coming to an end.

Also, it behooves us to keep talking about the papal election for as long as possible. Once it’s over, we’re back to the federal budget deliberations, and I prefer a story in which nothing gets sequestered but the cardinals.

Or, ideally, we could go for a merger:

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WASHINGTON — White smoke poured from the Capitol today and crowds of onlookers broke into shouts of jubilation, crying: “We have a budget!”