Simcha Fisher’s greatest fan suggested rerunning this piece for Throwback Thursday. This post ran in March of 2013, during the Papal Conclave, back when things were stupid. I had forgotten all about the “Pope will be arrested if he leaves Vatican” rumor! Enjoy this glimpse into all that we have left behind, before this year’s stupidity train has a chance to gather steam.
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Catholic Memes has a nice summation of the stupid things the secular media just can’t stop saying:
This feeding frenzy of factoids, irrelevancies, red herrings, and bogus trivia is just going to accelerate. These are people who don’t know anything about the Church, don’t want to know anything about the Church, and, most importantly, are willing to believe just about anything about the Church.
All right, it’s fun to track this kind of thing, why not take it up a notch? It’s getting easier and easier to fake people out. I mean, if “Friends of Hamas” grew legs because it was too good to check, then why not . . .
Amigos de Torquemada. A super elite cabal open only to men descended from cardinals who have done things that even Alyosha Karamazov is still mad about. On hot summer nights, the Amigos can be seen skulking about the seedier districts of Rancho Santa Fe, kicking over recycling bins and maybe even playing a few rounds of ding-dong ditch, because they are MIRED IN SCANDAL.
Pretty please, if some talking head sticks a microphone under your nose on your way out of confession this Saturday, won’t you, oh won’t you bring up the Amigos de Torquemada? I want to see Chris Matthews gagging on his own tongue in his hurry to break the story. Or maybe we could send up a trial balloon about . . .
The Prophecy of Wallaby. Even more obscure than the Prophecy of Malachy, scholars have recently uncovered these ancient lines etched on the side of a termite hill on the outskirts of Yarrawonga, Victoria, presumably during a short-lived and ill-conceived attempt by an especially ambitious band of Carthusians to re-evangelize the Irish convicts, who had no time for that. The Prophecy of Wallaby predicts that the next pope will have been born in a month which doesn’t not have an “r” in it . . . or does it???
Or wait, have you heard? Some of the more conservative cardinals still retain the archaic tradition of using nuns as hassocks. And some of them haven’t changed their socks in weeks!
FLASH: As soon as Benedict XIV settled into his helicopter and the pilot turned off the “no smoking” sign, he burned a photo of Ashton Kutcher. Just because.
DID YOU KNOW? We all know that if the smoke is white, we have a new pope; if it’s black, the conclave could not come to an agreement. Well, as one of his final acts of barbaric oppression, the former Pope Benedict XVI signed his name to a new bit of dogma: if the smoke is yellow, that means it’s now a mortal sin for women to complain about their husbands leaving the toilet seat up.
THIS JUST IN: In order to squelch any possibility of transparency or an open and honest dialogue, the Swiss Guard has been spotted in and around the Sistene Chapel, installing super sensitive metal and explosive detectors, electronic device jammers, and an eleven-ton ball made out of stone that will CRUSH YOU. The Catholic Church. That’s how we roll. With eleven-ton balls of stone.
Little known fact about the inner workings of the conclave: Of course they could elect a female pope if they wanted to. They just don’t want to.
And finally, the greatest tip of them all: Cardinal Mahony is actually horse meat.