By sheer coincidence, I was in Rome on Feb. 11, 2013. My wife and I had already moved back to the United States from Rome, but on that date I had returned to give a talk on religious freedom at the Italian Foreign Ministry, which is why I happened to be in town when the announcement of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was made.
Here’s how I became aware of it: I was standing at a coffee break talking to other speakers when my mobile phone rang, with a BBC reporter asking if I could confirm the pope was about to quit. Because I had received countless calls over the years asking me to run down bogus pope stories, I snapped, “This is probably total BS, and I don’t have time for it!”
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