Maybe Pope Francis is thinking of changing papal election rules, maybe he isn’t. But don’t say it hasn’t happened before…..

H.L. Mencken once famously quipped that love is like war, in that it’s easy to begin but very hard to stop. Had Mencken plied his journalistic trade in the Internet age, he might well have added rumors to that list, which are notoriously easy these days to put into circulation and virtually impossible to extinguish once they’re in the digital ether.