Eight years is a long time in Washington (ask any Democrat or Republican right now), but not in Rome, where most developments of any significance are measured in centuries.

That may be why an item this week in the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano struck at least one U.S. news outlet as something like a breaking story.

It was certainly news to this reporter that the famous prayer beginning “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace,” ordinarily attributed to the 13th-century St. Francis of Assisi, may actually be less than a century old.

But it turns out that Wikipedia users were, as they all too often are, ahead of us all.

The online encyclopedia’s entry on the prayer cites a book, written by an historian quoted in the L’Osservatore article, debunking the attribution to St. Francis. The book was published in 2001.