Colophon has watched with fascination the way in which the media and blogosphere have picked over a few sentences in the latest papal interview (which is, apparently, of book-length. Gone are the days when a few lapidary sentences could express the deepest truths of Christianity). It has been reminiscent of doing "gobbets", little chunks of medieval Latin containing highly controversial words and phrases, hotly argued over at the time they were written and still capable of raising the temperature of interested students.The trouble with gobbets is that they lack context, and unless one is prepared to do the proper amount of background reading, one can go seriously astray. The pope is a learned man who thinks in footnotes, so to say. Perhaps we should wait for the full text before deciding what he means. In the meantime, pity the pope. It seems everyone is prepared to argue with him, about him, over him; but listen to him, that depends.