Benedict XVI, the shy former disciple of that most media-friendly of popes, John Paul II, has entered an area of the mass communications market that his predecessor apparently never tapped.
The Polish pope could easily have filled out a wall calendar had he wanted to.
"He would have had his foreign journeys and St Peter's crammed from one end to the other as he made saints, and then he would have probably had himself doing lunch with his bishops and cardinals around him, tucking in and furiously debating stem cells or something," says veteran Vatican-watcher John Wilkins.
"With John Paul II, you hardly had time to breathe - when he went to America, his entourage called him the White Tornado. He was an actor, he loved the stage, he had enormous charisma."
Had such a calendar existed - and as far as Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana is aware, it did not - there might well have been a glimpse of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger standing shyly in the background somewhere.
In his new incarnation as Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II's former right hand man has come into the foreground, and he agreed this summer to be photographed for a charity wall calendar produced by the magazine.
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