Straightening Out the Pope

THERE SEEMS TO BE  a bit of a bad taste in the wine and wafers of salvation. Pope francis, not exactly your prototypical screeching liberal, recently made quite a liberal sounding comment. He said that if a person spends his or her life doing good works, he or she will go to heaven, regardless of faith, or lack thereof.

Maybe he should have considered his words a bit more carefully. Such unchristian tolerance is bound to inspire a spate of righteous outrage from conservative catholics throughout the world, and in a church with a billion plus members, that could add up to quite a lot of wailing and gnashing.

The spate was launched in high fashion by a direct assistant/spokesperson of the pope, who declared categorically that his spiritual father is dead wrong, that not only does one need to be a christian to enter unto the kingdom of god with salvation, one must, absolutely must, be catholic. Lapsed catholics are, presumably bound for hell as well, even if they spend their entire lives rescuing people from fires and floods.

Will the papal assistant survive to see tomorrow's sunrise? Pretty gutsy, you have to admit. If I'm gonna argue with the pope, I sure as hell aint gonna do it in the vatican, or anywhere close. Talk about entering into the lion's den...rumor has it that the two men will square off in the sistine chapel, in a special WWE style event, at a time to be announced, to be braodcast live on CBS (catholic broadcast system), and that one christian warrior will walk out, and the other will receive extreme unction. Smart money is on the pope, at about three to one, though his adversary obviously has spunk and scrap.

this sudden , unexpected outburst of papal spiritual liberalism is indeed shocking, considering how conservative the pope is, politically and economically. On both those topics he sounds just like rush limbaugh; you know the drill; all government is bad government, socialism is evil, and antithetical to the teachings of christ - the free market, with its freedom of choice, provides for everyone a perfect opportunity to chosse wealth over poverty, and anyone who becomes impoverished in a free market has only him or herself  to blame... the whole nine yards.

by the time this has all blown over, el papa might wish he had listened to jerry falwell and oral roberts, along with rush limbaugh. They could surely straighten him out, and eliminate this tolerant, blasphemous crap right away. Of course, it would have to be translated into catholic terms, but, a litle scaramental wine, a few wafers, and some good robust signing of the cross, and the holy father pope francis the whatever number he is should be right back on track.