Wondrous events

And, as long as RtO is reminiscing about half a century ago, can anybody explain how Roncalli got elected pope?

I was a Catholic student at the time, and while we recognized then that Pope John XXIII was going to be very different from the only pope we'd known, Pius XII, what we couldn't know then was that Roncalli would be followed by a bunch more Piuses, including this Francis, who looks to be another in that same line.

The more I think about it, the more I believe the election of Roncalli was the blackest of black swan events. In fact, while checking a date, I ran across this:

"The following article (below) was originally printed in the Portugal Daily News on November 11, 2002. It provides documented evidence that 'Cardinal' Angelo Roncalli was a practicing Freemason, which incurs automatic excommunication from the Catholic Church. Also, Roncalli's illegal usurpation of the papal throne by force, at the 1958 Papal Conclave, from the lawfully elected and true Pontiff, Gregory XVII formally Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, Italy (Click here for information, including recently declassified FBI documents pertaining to this sinister crime) makes the use of the term 'Pope' in this article, in reference to this gluttonous agent of Satan [Roncalli] an impossibility."

Gluttonous agent of Satan, eh? This quotation is attributed to Opus Dei. If accurate, much is explained, but not how Roncalli got elected.