Monday 23 February 2009

Holy Intrigue

In a shock comment the Roman Catholic Church has effectively declared that the Pope is not infallible.

His spokesman, Father Georgio Theswein, who has said, "No one gets to the Pope except through me," and who in future will do all his duties, including Mass, stated, "He's only human you know, and keeps making mistakes." Theswein is known affectionately in Vatican circles as 'Miss Diane' and has exclusive access to the Pope and decides who may see him.

Rumours are flying through the Vatican that the Pope, who was Cardinal Philip Pope before he became Pope, could be his doppelganger called Benny, who used to star in ITV's Crossroads. When Benny left the series, he joined the Iceland Italiano Bank as a cashier, where the worker priest Pope worked as an executive. A year later Benny was apparently mysteriously found swinging dead from a bridge in Dublin, having deposited his soap fortune in the Bank, where Pope was Head of Human Resources in the Ireland branch. However, the police investigation was put on hold as the detectives were unable to penetrate priestly confidentiality. When it was then rumoured that Pope the Head of Human Resources had spent too much time head hunting in the staff nursery, he was rocketed up to Cardinal status and went to live in the Vatican City, where no one is allowed in except through the heavily fortified barriers staffed by men in funny costumes. From there Pope became Pope the Pope.

It was said at the time that staff at the bank bullied Benny the cashier for looking too much like Pope the Head of Human Resources, and started to undermine Pope the Head of Human Resources for looking too much like Benny the cashier.

Now, no one is quite sure whether the Pope is Benny or Pope, or Pope is Pope the Pope. Cardinals are said to be going around deliberately creating confusion about the identity of the Pope. Police in Ireland are going to go to the crematorium to see if they can do a DNA test on some ash next Wednesday.

In 2006, after becoming Pope, Pope the Pope (if it was him) wrote a book called Taking Leave of Jesus (ScuM Publishing) that was said to be his private opinion and should in no way be seen as stating any official position. This puzzled many who wondered how the Pope could be two people at once, and how one of them could have a private view of reasonable theology while the other was authoritarian. If so it was said that the Pope as Philip Pope was not the Pope but Pope the Pope was the Pope despite being one person. In other words, this mirrored Christ in some sense because the Pope is the Vicar of God and also a man.

Pope the Pope is criticised as fundamentally lazy, but, as has been pointed out by some wag, Crossroads has been off the air a long time and he is old. Anyone who wants to see the Pope apparently has to see Theswein. The Pope never looks at newspapers nor receives a briefing. It was said that he takes a lot of Tablets, but this turned out to be medicinal rather than the Catholic magazine. He gets up quite late, like a lot of clergy do (a legacy of evening meetings) and signs papers while watching daytime television. He is a fan of Dickinson's Real Deal daily on ITV and always has a go at the competition. During the later afternoon and evening he reads theology books and comics or falls asleep.

To add to the confusion, Father Georgio Theswein is said to look a bit like the Pope himself, as well as a woman known to some as Amy Turtle.

Pope the Pope has stated that he wants a pure Church, and he doesn't care what happens so long as everyone is as dogmatic as him. However, an alternative theory is that the doppelganger Benny is wreckless and is seeking to bring the edifice down from within. Whatever, the policy towards extremism is long developed anyway, and was seen with his predecessor, the Polish Pope called Poke. The Pole Poke the Pope had a populist charismatic streak with persons that belied his own authoritarian streak when it came to personnel. Poke the Pope was hopeless in human resources, relying on Pope, but as Pope, Pope the Pope proved no better at human relations, as indeed shown by events at the bank.

The new instruction that, on top of celibacy, Roman Catholic clergy cannot drive vehicles any more (because it conflicts with the alcohol - no drinking and driving) has clashed with the sheer number of parishes individual priests now have to cover. In places like Latin America and Africa, old Catholic Churches are now being converted by the neglected laity into places of Pagan worship again. Anglicanism's top in-depth researcher, Peter Co-op Jones, noticed this as he raced around the world in 80 Days, finding that lay Roman Catholics are either becoming polytheists again, or starting brand new religions, or turning into extreme Protestant lunatics like the Virgin Mary teenager in Australia during World Youth Day, an event which led to 'Miss Diane' having to use a wet flannel on the excited Pope the Pope every day during the Australian trip.

The latest scandals to hit the Roman Catholic Church are being laid at Theswein's door. First the Pope decided that the Church could be really authoritarian and doctrinally pure if it had a rank fascist bishop back into the hierarchy. It had to be done through complete deniability, but thirty years ago there was a Unitarian minister who was frustrated in front of his sceptical half a dozen congregation, and this spurred him on to become completely mad and to win the Roman Catholic Gold Medal for personal transformation and conversion. However, his negative description of a long ago Italian reforming Pope, Pope Pepperoni, got him and his small bunch of associates kicked into some clerical back alley - but he now seems just perfect for promotion today.

Now the Pope has even converted a Bishop of Carlisle, who has stated that global warming and heavy rain is God's judgement on abortionists, prostitutes, homosexuals and condom wearers. This man will also add to the purity of the Church.

A man called Tony Blair was also converted to Roman Catholicism, which created a stir as he introduced Civil Partnerships in Britain.

So all is going very but has come at a cost of transition as the Church unravels into its state of purity. As expected it has been attacked from the outside by other 'ecclesial communities' and others. Anonymous Christians, such as Jewish leaders, have condemned the slide back into a position the Church held for hundreds of years about the Jews, and Muslims have told the Pope to stop name-calling against their revered Caliphs. Secular authorities are also attacking the Church: the German Chancellor reminded the Pope that the Holy Roman Empire vanished long ago. Most unexpected, however, has been criticism from within the Church at the highest level, but thanks to 'Miss Diane' the Pope hasn't a clue that they are telling him to resign and to go and spend the rest of his days in the local library. There is turmoil in the Church all around the world, with people resigning and being expelled, such as clergy being forced to leave Argentina which, historically, has been a destination for fascists, but these are no longer wanted once identified.

It is understood that some Cardinals are even considering a full-scale revolution, by exposing Pope the Pope as really being Benny from Crossroads, and instituting another Pope from somewhere else, even a woman who passes for a man or perhaps a closet homosexual. However, Theswein is said to possess sufficient political skills to hunt them all off, by employing Dan Brown as a masterstroke of deception and making plotting all the more difficult inside one of the holiest cities on earth.

7 comments:

Michael Santomauro said...

Dear Friends,

Sample Chapters and Contents for New Book:


http://www.DebatingTheHolocaust.com


DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton, PhD

Pluralist (Adrian Worsfold) said...

I'll let this through, though a few passages in this offered chapter 1 seem rather thin and pointless, like discussing hocus pocus.

The interest here is about Williamson, who by press accounts takes an extreme denying view.

My point is this: the Nazi regime subjected people to untold cruelty, and once the decision was made for extermination, there were rounds of people uprooted and taken, even as the Nazi regime crumbled they moved and killed Hungarian Jews (for example).

Whole areas of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, and its language, have been lost, a vanishing in towns and villages. Many Jews never made it to any camp: they were killed in groups in forests and also one by one and their property taken. So many died in forced labour.

It is a period that cannot be repeated: and yet in the war of the former Yugoslavia such behaviour was repeated.

What the Nazis did further was industrialise killing.

In one sense, with so much uncertainty about, everyone was affected, and if you were one of those without rights you soon found yourself despised and living day to day, and often walled off until those areas were cleared.

I'm suspicious of the motivation for revisionism, and this has clearly to be separated from criticism of Israel today - that's why the Iranian leadership was suspect, as well as comments made.

Erika Baker said...

This is just disgusting.
It's only because younger people are gullible and woefully ill informed that this "debate" could even be taken seriously.

Holocause denial is rightfully a criminal offence in my home country.

See also this article in The Times

http://tinyurl.com/crf3dm

"Rescued Auschwitz plans on show to shame deniers"

Pluralist (Adrian Worsfold) said...

I agree with you Erika. It's the sheer horror and misery that was taken to such a desperate condition for so many. And had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, and Britain been compromised (as many in the elite wanted), the slavery to death, the casual killing and deliberate mass killing would have gone on and on.

Erika Baker said...

Michael Santomauro

You emailed me more information about the book, asked me to be open minded and said that the "the veracity of Holocaust assertions should be determined in the marketplace of scholarly discourse and not in our legislatures bodies and courthouses."

This is a smokescreen.
There IS no serious doubt about the veracity of the Holocaust, just a dishonourable campaign by self styled "scholars" to obscure the truth.

I shall never be "open minded" about attempts to treat this as a serious academic enterprise instead of leaving it in the gutters, where it belongs.

The more you elevate nauseous talk like this to the status of academic research, the more people will believe that it has credibility.

Most will not be educated and historically trained enough to make genuine judgements, and it will end up being a matter of "belief".

This most horrifying, planned and carefully executed event in history could happen only because people were "open minded" and because they did not want to believe the possibility of the rumours and the evidence before their eyes being true.

Please do not write to me again.

Frank Remkiewicz aka “Tree” said...

Adrian,
I am disappointed you would even truck this comment. My father and my wife's father both fought in world war II. One of my college professors/friends opened up Bergen-Belsen and had first had pictures. The treat of one group of people by another is abominable. There is NO debate. This can never happen again. This is not good debate, this is pandering to the basest instincts.

Pluralist (Adrian Worsfold) said...

Well I thought about it and thought about it before I passed it through. Also it detracts from the whole point I was making, which is a general immorality about the Roman Catholic Church as it reaches for ever purer dogma. To me, people like Williamson are plain evil.

I think these revisionists undermine the horror of the holocaust and it cannot be treated as just one more subject. Under the Nazis life was cheap but it was also cruel, intensely cruel.