Late night bar meeting --> Vatican gossip.

So Monday night I got fucked up at 7 bars, and at the 7th and last (this shitty Irish bar in the a white yuppie residential neighborhood), I was sipping my Miller Lite when an older bald (hispanic-looking) gentleman with an arm crutch on his right arm comes hobbling in and sits up at the bar a few seats down from me.

He was having a big of dinner, and somehow we started speaking, and it turns out that he's from the Dominican Republic, originally, so I asked him if it as originally called Santo Domingo, since in an Opus Dei memoir that I'm reading a numerary who was in Venezuela went there with 2 others to start a colony and ended up in the middle of a revolution and had to go to the American embassy and ended up on a ship to Miami with all the Americans in the country.

As it turns out, the guy had studied to be a priest at one point and had lived in Rome for 5 years, and his uncle is a cardinal.

Highlights of the conversation (I even got a 2nd beer):

- Years ago in Rome he was at a dinner with his uncle, another cardinal, an archbishop, and a bishop - and one of the bishops was Bergoglio.  Bergoglio didn't say much, but when he did speak, it was gently, yet "black was black and white was white"...  He said he's almost certain it was him, since the man looked like him, with big ears, but a more drawn face, since he was thinner then.

- His uncle the cardinal says that the 1st day of the conclave Maradiaga went around to all the Latin Americans and said that Bergoglio was the one to pick, to represent the 1.9 billion Catholics of their continent.  I ascertained that it was indeed during the conclave and not the conclave period, and the guy was like, "Yes yes, it is not supposed to happen, but it always does, that is the way things work."

- He said that Benedict's papacy was a result of how much money Germany gives the Vatican (according to him, it's the 2nd biggest funder after the U.S.).

- According to him, American and Italian cardinals perennially butt heads, since Americans expect respect for their $, but Italians are like, "Who the fuck are you?".

- Francis is stirring things up, esp. at the Vatican bank, but he probably won't get assassinated, "since things don't work that way any more."

. . .