Tag Archives: San Marino

Chile Just Elected A 35 Year Old President, BUT Who Was The Youngest Ever, In The World?

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by Anura Guruge
on December 20, 2021

Click to ENLARGE & read here. Click here for the CNN original.

That is pretty young. It was his age, i.e., 35, rather than anything that caught my eye to begin with — even though the gratuitous ‘leftist‘ part did make me smile. Leftist is not always a bad thing. Some folks call ‘Bernie Sanders’ a leftist & he is, for the mots part, good & decent. But, let’s get back to the age.

35, coincidentally, is the STATED minimum age in order to be elected President in the U.S. or to be a Catholic bishop. [In the case of being U.S. President, that 35 refers, alas, to physical age rather than mental. I will leave it at that.]

Who was the youngest U.S. President is kind of a TRICK question. Depends whether you mean elected President or became President. At 43.65 years, ‘John F. Kennedy’ was the youngest elected. ‘Theodore Roosevelt’, who had been V.P., stepped into the Presidency when he was 42.88 years when ‘William McKinley’ was assassinated in 1901. So, the new Chilean President is much younger.

Wikipedia, bless them, has a list of the 10 youngest serving state leaders. Currently the youngest, at 27, is the Captain Regent of ‘San Marino’. [Coincidentally, I mentioned San Marino just last week in another post!] Then it is the Prime Minister of Finland — ‘Sanna Marin‘, who came to office when she was 34. That is impressive. New Zealand’s admirable ‘Jacinda Arden‘, who was elected when she was 37 is 8th on the Wikipedia list. She is quite the lady.

Wikipedia, alas, does NOT have the youngest ever! The best they can currently do is ‘from 1942‘. That is not that useful — PLUS the first 9 are all Kings. That doesn’t count. But, #10 is ‘Baby Doc’, viz. Jean-Claude Duvalier, of Haiti. Hhhmmm. He wasn’t elected & he was NOT a good man. He came to power when he was 19. I will, when I have time, dig into this more.

The youngest Prime Minister of the U.K. was the estimable ‘William Pitt the Younger‘, at age 24.5 in 1783.

Francis, Who Turns 85 On Friday, Easily Becomes The 2nd Most Travelled Pope In History — After John Paul II.

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by Anura Guruge
on December 14, 2021

Click to ENLARGE.
Click to ENLARGE.
Click to ENLARGE.
Click to ENLARGE. I created this using maps from Wikipedia.

To be fair, this wasn’t a hard record to achieve. As yesterday’s post highlighted papal travel, outside of Italy, is quite a recent phenomenon — pioneered by Paul VI in the 1960s.

Then John Paul II took it to new heights. He made papal travel commonplace. Given his lengthy tenure, 26.4 years, during which he travelled during each FULL year of his papacy, his record is going to hard to beat.

Benedict XVI, as you can see from the figure above, was not a great traveler. He tried to keep his travels short — never undertaking a trip with more than 5 stops. John Paul II, in 1983, made a trip with 11 stops. Paul VI’s last trip, in 1970, had 9 stops. Francis, in 2019, did a 7 stop trip. So, of the last 3 popes, in terms of tenure, Benedict XVI has been the pope least travelled. [You may come across references that say he only made 24 trips to 28 countries. That is wrong. San Marino, that he visited in 2011, is NOT a part of Italy!]

Note that Francis, though he has visited Latin America multiple times, has yet to visit his motherland, Argentina.

In marked contrast, Benedict XVI visited Germany 3 times; John Paul II Poland 9 times. In both instances they visited their motherland more times than any other country. They also both managed to make it home during the first year of their papacy. Ironically, Francis’ first visit, during his first year, was to Brazil which borders Argentina.