Catholic Leader Suddenly Discovers Keen Interest In Something Other Than Sex

Just as education secretary Michael Gove orders an investigation into whether Catholic schools acted illegally in urging pupils to sign a petition against gay marriage, Cardinal Keith O’Brien - the head of the Catholic church in Scotland - has suddenly found that he is vitally concerned with the welfare of the poor.

How is it fair that some people live like me? demands the Cardinal

“Imagine my surprise when I heard that, in the rare moments when Jesus wasn’t ranting about the evils of bum sex, our Lord and Saviour expressed a passing interest in the less well off,” said the Cardinal. “’My word,’ I thought to myself, ‘That seemed to go down rather well with people. Perhaps I should try going down with people myself.’"

Cardinal O’Brien admitted that, engrossed as he was in saving the world from the awful plight of gay weddings, he had somehow failed to notice that the rich get richer and the poor get - children, and that this had apparently been considered “fun” for quite some time.

“This is, of course, entirely the fault of governments,” he maintained, speaking from his lavish mansion in Edinburgh’s Morningside district. “As a leader of the Catholic church, I positively welcome any measures which encourage people not to breed.”

Strike Strike Strike Strike Strike Strike Strike Strike Catholic Paedo Review Strike Strike Strike Strike

It's in there somewhere

With two million public sector workers taking part in the biggest UK strike since 1926, the Catholic Church decided that today offered its best chance to let the public know how very, very sorry it is about all those kiddy-fiddling priests it sheltered for years.

“Obviously, today there’s really only one story happening, so I’m sure journalists will be grateful to have something else to report on such a slack news day,” said Philip Bréagadóir, the bishop of Dun Faoghlin. “We really, really want this report to get maximum coverage, to be sure.”

“We do, we do, we do, we do, we do,” he insisted.

Kiddy-Fiddler Palace Not Really A Proper Country, Suggests Ireland

Ireland has belatedly realised that Vatican City - the ancient sanctuary for sex-starved old pervs who want you to agree that touching another man’s bottom is an unpardonable abomination, but molesting small children is just a minor embarrassment – might not actually be a bona fide country at all, as it announces the closure of its embassy in a wing of the vast palace whose cellars and corridors are overflowing with the Pope’s looted riches.

Ireland's guide to how to spot a country

"This is really bad for the Vatican because Ireland is the first big Catholic country to do this, and because of what Catholicism means in Irish history," said a Vatican diplomatic source in a big red dress. “Er… not the history of serial child abuse we cheerfully covered up for decades. I mean getting rid of all those snakes, eternal damnation for divorcees - you know, the good stuff.”

The Irish government, for its part, insists that the embassy closure has been ordered purely on cost grounds - further irritating the Vatican, which is proud of its vital role in promoting civilised human values such as damning women for the wicked sin of thinking about family planning, or displaying the divine spirit of Christian forgiveness towards priests who, it insists, are understandably led astray by the constant, shameless flaunting of smooth young bottoms by sinful children entrusted to their pastoral care.

Experts believe it can only be a matter of time before the God tells the Pope to retaliate, by pastorally excommunicating the republic until it comes crawling back in a suitably chastened spirit of repentance with an offering of tempting, fresh young winkies.

Condoms Are Only Sanctified For Sex With Depraved Hellbound Blasphemies, Warns Vatican

The Pope has surprised many of his followers

The Catholic authorities are today seeking to downplay the Pope’s unexpected change of heart on the use of condoms, explaining that the “exceptional circumstances” cited in his announcement referred specifically and exclusively to situations in which practicing Catholics may find themselves required, within the context of their obligations to Christ, to fornicate for purely procreative purposes with an obscene, sinful homosexualist monstrosity who is assuredly damned to hell for all eternity.

“Or Father Donnelly, as some of you may know him,” explained a Vatican spokesman helpfully.

Pope To Beautify Cardinal Newman

Hitler’s favourite gunner, Pope Benedict XVI, is to formally beautify Cardinal John Henry Newman later today, in the hope that God will be so taken by a layer of slap that he later promotes the academic Victorian prelate to full-blown sainthood, complete with halo and all the trimmings.

There, now God will definitely go for this

A necessary requirement before the Pope can apply the first layer of foundation, however, is that the recipient must be proven beyond a shadow of doubt to have performed a bona fide miracle.

Happily, despite his frequently-expressed scepticism concerning the existence of miracles, the Cardinal was nevertheless found to have performed one anyway – presumably in a posthumous change of heart – when an entirely unbiased Catholic deacon explained how a routine laminectomy operation on his back ten years ago had enabled him to walk in a miraculous way to his seminary classes on time. An equally neutral Catholic doctor confirmed that this typical outcome was indeed proof of divine intervention, pointing out that if the trainee deacon had not prayed to the Cardinal for a bit of God’s special magic he would almost certainly have been laid up in bed for an extra day or two, just to be on the safe side.

The Pope later confirmed the miracle with the traditional declaration of res contentus mihi (‘well, that’s good enough for me’), and began ordering the official paraphernalia of beautification from Boots - including a request for tips on which lippy would look best on a 120-year-old corpse.

Vatican Presented With Cut Out ’n’ Keep Identification Guide To The Third World

Catholic spin doctors as still trying to come up with some kind of plausible explanation for Cardinal Hitler Kasper’s views on Britain, which are threatening to overshadow the Pope’s state visit.

After the 77-year-old German prepared to fly into the UK, he told reporters that "when you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country." He was promptly pushed back into his taxi by red-faced Vatican officials, who explained that the Cardinal was clearly suffering from advanced gout of the head.

“Cardinal Kasper was obviously referring to the militant state atheism which makes Britain indistinguishable from North Korea, especially after you’ve finished off the communion wine,” said a sweating PR priest. “No? OK, try this – he was merely making a jocular reference to all the jungle bunnies… er… degenerate melting pot of inferior races… er… can I get back to you on this?”

Britain’s ambassador to the postage stamp-sized religious city-state – which, having a birth rate of zero, is composed entirely of immigrants - later presented the Vatican with a helpful guide to spotting Third World countries, which includes the following helpful tips on a handy cut-out cribsheet:

1. Is governed solely according to whim of charismatic leader appointed by self-perpetuating oligarchy;

2. Stages frequent highly-orchestrated public spectacles full of spurious pageantry;

3. Places petty minor officials in every neighbourhood, interfering with every aspect of private life;

4. Cultivates blind obedience and widespread ignorance in poverty-stricken subjects;

5. Blithely ignores world opinion;

6. Badly-equipped army maintains order by hiring foreign mercenaries.

A typical third world army

Priests With Tits? That’s Like Fondling Small Boys, Explains Pope

Moving in a mystical way that has even left God scratching his head, Pope Benedict XVI has condemned the attempted ordination of women by a Catholic pressure group, calling it “a grave crime” which is as serious as child abuse - although the Vatican later stressed that although one is clearly as bad as the other, in fact it isn’t and anyone who can’t see the distinction is a wicked heretic.

The latest papal declaration of nonsense is a response to futile but determined attempts from Catholic Women’s Ordination to drag their medieval superstition kicking and screaming out of the 11th century.

“The Holy Führer has carefully examined all of his collected paintings of Christ and his disciples, and can confirm that each and every one of them has an unmistakeable cock-shaped bulge in their garments,” explained Cardinal Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s sex crimes investigator. “And although His Holiness is no clearer on what a magnificent pair of charlies might look like than the rest of us, he’s pretty sure none of them have any. Well, that about clears that up, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll set aside for a minute the absence of any liturgical requirement for a penis to be waved around during services,” retorted Mrs Doyle of Catholic Women’s Ordination. “According the Pope’s own logic, the only people who should be ordained as Catholic priests are Jews living in the Middle East. Now correct me if I’m wrong, father, but haven’t I heard somewhere on the radio about the Jews in the Middle East being generally quite into the whole Jewishness thing in a fairly big way?”

“Nevertheless,” she conceded, “Despite this apparent mismatch between supply and demand, I’m prepared to accept that all the priests in the world fulfil the Pope’s strictly Biblical criteria, if you and the Holy Father will lift up your cassocks and show us all where you had the snip. Go on.”

“Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on,” she added.

As a purple-faced Cardinal Sicloony called for the implements of holy persuasion to be brought forth and displayed to the witch, billions of people around the world somehow managed to go about their daily business undisturbed by the vital theological debate.

Juju Priest Urges Cultists Not To Listen To Mumbo-Jumbo

Stern appeals from mumbo-jumbo Catholic witch doctors not to listen to mumbo-jumbo from a man who is not a witch doctor have fallen on deaf ears, with 10,000 deluded Irish cultists descending on the tiny village of Knock in the hope of catching a glimpse of their mythical fetish-figure's mother.

"If you screw your eyes up and look at the sun for long enough, I promise you that you will receive a holy vision of the great juju-virgin herself," chanted goatherd and self-proclaimed 'heap big sky magician' Paddy McGinty. "She will appear to you in her pure spiritual form, i.e. a sort of big purple spot, and grant you three wishes. Straight up, no shit."

"Hear me, silly wives of the mighty warrior sons of Ireland," pleaded local obeah-man, Archmage Michael Neary to the gathering womenfolk. "Do not listen to rambling nonsense spouted by a humble goat-herder who makes a comfortable living off your gullibility. I tell you now, the wrath of the great sky spirit can only be kept at bay by listening to rambling nonsense spouted by a robed child-fumbler who makes a comfortable living off your gullibility."

Some of the mighty warriors' silly wives claim they saw the great purple juju-virgin yesterday; but a few ouspoken heretics have risked being stricken with a plague of boils to claim that the so-called 'visions' are not all that either Mr McGinty or the Archmage say they are.

"I saw the sun spinning," a wise woman from a rival tribe told the world's smoke-signallers this morning. "Who is to know it isn't climate change or some shit like that causing that? Gaia the mighty earth mother is angry, and it is altogether more probable that she has finally risen up to smite the sun god a tremendous clout - sending him reeling through his kingdom, the starry firmament, in a bit of a daze."

"I skimmed through a book once that wasn't the Bible," she explained. "Now I believe in the superior magic of rational scientific observation. So I'm going to be looking at the sun through a telescope later, to see if I can spot the bruise."

'Bah' Says Archbishop

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Vincent Nichols has accused social networking sites such as Facebook of killing young people, claiming that teenagers - misled into accumulating "transient relationships" where quantity is more important than quality - can be forced to commit suicide when all their Facebook friends remove them because they failed to put an emoticon after the ironic comment they made about the BNP.

In an interview in the Sunday Times, the Archbishop of Westminster also took the opportunity to disapprove of every single aspect of life in the 21st century.

The Archbishop's views in full:

Clarification of assisted suicide laws: "Particularly worrying"
Footballers who transfer for higher salaries: "Mercenaries"
Mobile phones: "Dehumanising"
Facebook: "An invitation to your own funeral"
The internet: "Satan's sticky web of deceit"
MP3 players: "Like having the Gadarene swine running about in your head"
Freeview+: "Recording without tape is witchcraft"
Pop-up toasters: "The fiery pit of damnation in your own kitchen"
Sexual abuse by priests: "Courageous in facing up to their crimes, and we shouldn't overlook all the good they also did"

An increasingly purple-faced Archbishop Nichols also said that he found the rise of individualism in modern society to be particularly worrying.

"Individuality is a wicked myth propagated by the Prince of Darkness, which leads inexorably down the slippery slope to Protestants, Methodism and touching other men's bottoms," shuddered the 63-year-old primate, shaking his crozier in righteous indignation. "God created man for one purpose only - to cram themselves into churches and chant meaningless slogans in unison, preferably in a dead language they don't understand, while an elderly virgin tells them what to think about everything."

Some damned atheists have suggested that if the Archbishop wants to call people mercenaries, he might cast a critical eye at the swarms of 'private security consultants' operating above the law in Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of a fairly harmless bunch of overpaid dullards who occasionally kick a ball around a field in between visits to nightclubs.

Doomed Two-Headed Mutant Is A Gift From God, Says Deluded Mumbo-Jumbo Woman

A Catholic woman from Portsmouth has bravely decided to ignore sound medical advice, claiming that the medieval misogynism of a former Nazi made far more sense to her than the pleading of doctors to terminate two-headed foetus.

The staunch twaddle-addict said that the rare dicephalous twins deserved to have the chance of becoming Catholics in the brief days of life they are probably going to experience between birth and death.

"To me, my twins are a gift from God," said superstitious Lisa Chamberlain, 25. "A bit like the hand-knitted sweater you get from your great-aunt at Christmas with three-foot sleeves, in fact."

The Pope is said to be urgently considering the weighty theological question of whether the two-headed child should be baptised once or twice.

"There's probably an encyclical in this," said a cardinal. "Still, at least it refutes allegations that the Pope is still influenced by his Nazi past. If he was, surely he'd be calling for the 'merciful' abortion of this hideous mutant thing."

He went on to advise the unclean woman to disburse herself of any notion that her selfless decision would in any way reduce the length of time she would spend in Purgatory for the cardinal sin of being born with a hole where her John Thomas should be.

Meanwhile, a passing bus urged Mrs Chamberlain to reconsider her decision.

"If that's a gift from God," it commented, "I really wouldn't want to receive any hate mail from him."

Catholic Church to Test Would-Be Priests With Tempting Images of Tender, Fresh Young Bottoms

Candidates for Catholic priesthood should be screened for homosexual tendencies, according to the latest guidelines from the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has been rocked in recent years by a series of embarrassing scandals in which it was found that most Catholic boys spend their entire childhood being rogered senseless every week by their local priest.

In the document, published on Thursday, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education suggests that the early detection of what it calls “sometimes pathological” defects before candidates enter the priesthood would help to avoid tragic experiences.

“The screening process is both simple and infallible,” said the Pope. “Each candidate will be stripped naked and thrust into a small cubicle, where he will be relentlessly bombarded with hundreds of lewd photographs of naked boys which we have confiscated from our clergy. A video camera will be trained on his shameful area, and the slightest twitch of arousal will result in the naked, engorged candidate being immediately hurled from the seminary into the streets, where irate tabloid readers will know exactly what to do with him.”

Gay rights groups have questioned the church’s apparent equation of disgusting child-molesting perverts with homosexuality, while non-Catholics who are destined to burn in hell forever have even suggested that the church’s policy of ordering perfectly normal men to spend their entire adult lives tormented by the strictly-enforced denial of every natural sexual urge could perhaps have something to do with so many of them turning out to be revolting sexual deviants who abuse their privileged position of trust by preying mercilessly on innocent children and then threatening them with sulphurous damnation for all eternity if they tell their parents.

“Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ seems to have managed OK,” snapped the Pope, reaching for a thumbscrew. “I mean, if a supernatural earthly manifestation of the Lord God Almighty could keep His john thomas out of little boys‘ arses, how difficult can it possibly be?”

“Excuse me,” he added. “I have to go to the lavatory.”

Jesus, meanwhile, is reported to have wept.

Obriena Calls For Catholic Jihad

Audio experts in the UK are still studying a recording, said to contain the voice of Cardinal Obriena bin-Ranten, in which the fugitive Scottish Catholic leader apparently called on the faithful to engage in a holy jihad against stem-cell research.

The Cardinal, who continues to evade capture by hiding out in the remote, lawless mountains of the Scottish Highlands, said that “the forces of Satan and all his little wizards” were attempting nothing less than the blasphemous creation of a two-headed mockery of Christ, with fins, and that it was the duty of every godfearing Catholic to walk into their local doctor’s surgery and kill the evil Frankenstein within by exploding in a ill-informed outburst of scientific ignorance.

“Twisted Nazi paedophile scientists want to take unfertilised, good Catholic DNA and inject it into eggs from the crawling serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden,” says the Cardinal’s message. “Do you want to give birth to an abomination with compound eyes, which feeds by injecting venom into its mother, turning her insides into organic soup, and deposits its hungry, hellish spawn in her paralysed body? I urge all true Catholic believers to switch off their brains, and put and end to the evil heresy of medicine once and for all. Particularly Catholic MPs, who should have the moral courage to disobey the undemocratic dictates of their party whip, and obey me instead. In nomine patri, filii et spiritus sanctus, amen.”

However, in an Easter sermon to the Daily Telegraph, TV’s Lord ‘Dubya’ Winston poured scorn on the fugitive Cardinal’s latest message, saying: "His lies are hilarious. They are quite funny, but just a tad misleading - and I'm afraid that when the Church, for good motives, talks out of its arse, it brings discredit upon itself. I have huge respect for the Catholic Church, which does great good somewhere, probably - but it will be destroying its probity with overblown statements of this kind. Even now our coalition of freakish genetic mutants is making a final surge to corner the discredited terrorist leader Obriena in his squalid grotto and bring him to justice."

Atheist commander Richard Dawkins was not available for comment, and was said to be heading north on the Euston train with a bazooka, looking rather angry.