Goa, May 10 -- ALEXANDRE MONIZ BARBOSA

The choice of name of Leo XIV, completes in a manner of speaking the Papal trilogy of Morris West, where fiction has come as close to reality as possible.

As an avid reader of fiction, one writer whose works came rushing back to memory as the announcement of the new Pope was read out from the balcony at St Peter's Square are those of West.

West may not be too familiar a name in Goa. He was an Australian writer who died in 1999, but what triggered the mind were his three books on Popes and the Vatican, and how what he penned has turned almost prophetic.

West's first book in this trilogy was published in 1963 and is titled 'Shoes of the Fisherman'. It was about Kiril Lakota, a Pope who was elected ...