Electing the Pope

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualified majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public gure with publicly available personal data and well-known positions on public matters. This provides excellent grounds for a study of spatial voting: In this brief note we study voting in the Papal Conclave after the resignation of Benedict XVI. We describe the method of the election and based on a simple estimation of certain factors that seem to influence the electors' preferences we calculate the power of each cardinal in the conclave as the Shapley-Shubik index of the corresponding voting game over a convex geometry

Pope John Paul II, the Assassination Attempt, and the Soviet Union

“The attempt to murder the pope remains one of the century’s great mysteries,” wrote Carl Bernstein and Marco Politti in their 1996 biography of Pope John Paul II. Indeed, the mystery has remained unsolved since the pope was shot and wounded on May 13, 1981. A recent investigation concluded that the Soviet government was the perpetrator, but the situation should be examined in a broader historical context. What actually happened on May 13, 1981? Was it the sole decision and action of Mehmet Ali Agca, who was expressing his opposition to “Western imperialist policies,” as he had written in a threatening letter to a newspaper in 1979? Or had “someone else commissioned him to carry it out,” as Pope John Paul II alleged in a memoir written in 2005? Before evaluating the question from an historical standpoint, it is necessary to provide some background in order to establish a potential motive for the Soviet Union to support such an assassination attempt. Was Karol Wojtyla (the Pope’s birth name) really “[their] enemy,” as a party directive warned in 1979? Only then can we evaluate the Soviet Union’s involvement, or whether there was a conspiracy behind the attempted assassination of John Paul II at all. Finally, we should step back and look at the significance of the assassination attempt and the impact of the pope on the Cold War and Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe

Pope Pius XII to the Guild of St. Luke

EDITOR\u27S NOTE: The address of Pope Pius XII, given November 12, 1944, to the Italian Guild of St. Luke, was perhaps the most comprehensive of all of his talks on medical morality. Moreover, it seems to have been the first of his many discourses to the medical profession; and it contained in germ many of the subsequent and very important addresses. We believe that all Catholic doctors should be familiar with its content; hence, we are presenting here a very complete digest of the Pope\u27s words. This has been made possible through the generous cooperation of Daniel T. Costello, S.J.; Mario Jaccarini, S.J.; and Richard J. McPartlin, S.J

Groaning with Creation: ecological spirituality in Laudato Sì

In this sequel to his overview of Pope Francis’ second encyclical in the August issue of Open House, an environmental engineer reflects on the spirituality it advocates

Pope John XXIII has composed the prayer that follows

Pope John XXII has composed the prayer that follows, to be offered for the success of the forthcoming Ecumenical Council. We ask that our readers join in its recitation for His Holiness\u27 intentions

Laudato Si’ and ecological education: implications for Catholic education

In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis has offered a ‘position paper’ on care for the common good. Chapter Six ‘Ecological Education and Spirituality’ is especially relevant for those overseeing the operation of Catholic schools. A deeper understanding of Laudato Si’ can be gained from comparison with two Magisterial documents written by the Pope Emeritus: the message for the World Day of Prayer of Peace in 2007 and the encyclical Caritas in Veritate (2009). Study of the issues raised in these texts offers a broad frame of reference. Using the method of document analysis, our understanding of Laudato Si’ can be viewed in context of contemporary Magisterial teaching on education. This term now marks a fresh direction in the underpinning principles of Catholic education

POPE: Partial Order Preserving Encoding

Recently there has been much interest in performing search queries over encrypted data to enable functionality while protecting sensitive data. One particularly efficient mechanism for executing such queries is order-preserving encryption/encoding (OPE) which results in ciphertexts that preserve the relative order of the underlying plaintexts thus allowing range and comparison queries to be performed directly on ciphertexts. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to range queries over encrypted data that is optimized to support insert-heavy workloads as are common in "big data" applications while still maintaining search functionality and achieving stronger security. Specifically, we propose a new primitive called partial order preserving encoding (POPE) that achieves ideal OPE security with frequency hiding and also leaves a sizable fraction of the data pairwise incomparable. Using only O(1) persistent and $O(n^\epsilon)$ non-persistent client storage for $0<\epsilon<1$, our POPE scheme provides extremely fast batch insertion consisting of a single round, and efficient search with O(1) amortized cost for up to $O(n^{1-\epsilon})$ search queries. This improved security and performance makes our scheme better suited for today's insert-heavy databases.Comment: Appears in ACM CCS 2016 Proceeding