On Saturday March 17 I was browsing the Internet looking for information about an obscure character, Pope Benedict X, who was elected pontiff in 1058, ruled the Church for a few months, and then was chased out of town by a competing faction. He is not on the official list of popes. Don’t ask why.

I was surprised to find that an Italian website, treccani.it, had a two-page article about him written by a professor of medieval studies at the University of Bologna, Ovidio Capitani. The article, it turns out, was actually an entry in the Enciclopedia dei Papi, a 2,000-page tome that I had not previously even heard of. In fact, every entry in that book is available at treccani.it. It is a good thing, too; the original three-volume set is out of print and is not even available at Amazon.

I soon located a few additional entries by Professor Capitani (including a long one about my favorite pope, Benedict IX), and over that weekend I struggled through the process of translating them. He employed an obtuse style that is notoriously favored by many academics and politicians in Italy. On the other hand, his conclusions were remarkably even-handed and were thoroughly documented. Many of the citations were from foreign journals that I could not possibly get my hands on, and, even if I did, I would need to get someone to translate them for me.

I was so elated with my discovery that I decided to try and get in touch with the professor by e-mail and let him know about my interest in this subject. I was shocked to discover that he had died at the age of 88 on the precise day that I had come across his work, March 17, 2002.

George Noory often says that he does not believe in coincidences. I wonder what he would say about this.