People kept saying they thought the pope was younger then they expected. I decided to check the unlikely hypothesis that it is us getting older. And it looks like that might be true.

Python code and data is up here https://gist.github.com/cavedave/5cb6c262238828ee8d02232833d7604f feel free to remix away. You could have order not country for example.

Data originally taken from https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/13/popes-full-list and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes Before 1404 the data is full on NAs

And I saw this graph format first in  David Goldenberger's 'Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying'

Posted by cavedave

27 comments

  1. Submission comment

    Python code and data is up here [https://gist.github.com/cavedave/5cb6c262238828ee8d02232833d7604f](https://gist.github.com/cavedave/5cb6c262238828ee8d02232833d7604f) feel free to remix away. You could have order not country for example.

    Data originally taken from [https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/13/popes-full-list](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/13/popes-full-list) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes)

  2. Makes sense to me. People live longer generally than they used to. Pope is a lifetime appointment, so they use death as a term limit.

  3. No, the pope, like any other human, can only ever age up. Reversing aging, while being something many humans dream of, is reality only in science fiction novels and movies.

  4. Til there was a pope from the Netherlands, and one pope was actually young pope.

  5. What’s the reasoning behind labelling Pius X as German?

  6. Does it make sense to impose today’s national boundaries on people from the early modern period? “Italy” didn’t exist for most of the period you cover.

  8. Seems like Benedict’s and Francis’s ages were outside of recent historical norms not Leo’s. 

  10. What type of graph is this? Like a box plot mixed with a scatter graph? I like scatter graphs

  11. As a percentage of life expectancy they are getting younger, that’s the metric you should measure by as people live much longer now compared to 100 years ago let alone 600 years. This data is a huge nothing burger without that

  12. Kind of insane that in all those years only two popes died. Big, if true!

  13. So, we can likely expect to wait 15 to 20 years before the next one.
    This is good I think.
    My reason is based on the accelerating evolution of society, so the youngest generations will be more and more distant from the pope as he ages. He won’t understand the new generations , and the church cannot adapt to this challenge.

  14. Maybe do a 20-year moving average of the age of the pope by month or something. Might be easier to figure out the answer

  15. Oh I like that representation of ages and time, those lines make it so instant to see.

    Reminded of Richard Herring’s running gag of The Curse Of The World’s Oldest Person

  16. That’s what I love about popes, man. I get older, they stay the same age.

  18. So younger than 4 of the previous 16 since 1800 and older than 12 of the previous 16.

    Benedict and Francis were older, and being the most recent 2, that makes it seem like Leo is “getting younger.” And the reason they were selected so old was after JP2’s long run, they didn’t want someone else being in place that long again.

  19. The graph would answer that question a lot more clearly if it didn’t include the lifetimes of all the popes, just the age they became pope. The rest is just noise and making it hard to see any trend.

  20. Looking at that data pope’s aren’t getting elected at younger ages, they are surviving longer into older ages. If you look at papal elections over the centuries, conclaves are more hesitant than the past to elect a pope who is in his 50s.

  21. Boomers are clawing on yo relevancy globally. The boomer/ millennial gap is massive in terms of understanding in how digital technology has changed the wirkd socially

  22. It’s pretty cool that you can tell from the lines being parallel that popes all generally move at approximately the same speed relative to us.

  23. I’m confused, the data shows a clear trend that the elected age is going up for each new pope?

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