Sentenced by the papacy

... Shakespeare had Mark Antony say, with solemn insincerity, that he'd come to bury the assassinated Caesar, "not to praise him".

Now it's the Pope's time. Having survived assassination in St Peter's Square, he died in comparative calm, to be buried in praise, much of it as coded and careful as Antony tribute to his friend.

But with so much talk of the Pope's death, now is the time to talk about the Pope and death, of his record on the life and death issues of life, from the Holocaust to AIDS, from the war in Iraq to the electric chair.

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