Guest blogger Slubgrip teacher Popular Culture 101 at Bowelbages University in the seventh circle of the Infernal Kingdom. His letters of diabolical instruction have been published as The Gargoyle Code and a volume of his lectures on popular culture will be published next year as Slubgrip Instructs.

Ooh! So much hot Catholic gossip to spread about this morning! Before I start, let me remind readers that they should believe every shock, horror headline they read. It makes life so much more interesting! Please don’t check the facts, and for badness’ sake, do not attempt any sort of subtle or nuanced explanation. Believe the worst and remember, if you can’t say something nasty, don’t say anything at all.

First of all, I’m pleased to report that Pope Francis has had another interview with the decrepit Italian journalist and composer Antonio Salieri. Salieri, who is very jealous of Pope Bergoglio’s happy go lucky ways, is always trying to undermine him while appearing to be his friend. He invites Pope Francis down for an intellectual conversation in a little pizzeria in the Borgo and then writes up the conversation as an “interview”. Salieri doesn’t record the conversation or even take notes, but has reported to the world that Pope Francis thinks 20% of Catholic clergy are pedophiles and most of the cardinals are probably sexual perverts.

We succeeded to catch a few headlines and hammer home our message that Catholic priests are a bunch of low life creeps. The fact that we got Pope Francis himself to say so was a considerable coup on our part. Our servant Salieri did a good job.

Just when we’ve managed to put words into Francis’ mouth again that very unpleasant Fr Lombardi wades in with his “clarification”. I do wish they’d put that man to work doing something sensible like being a missionary to Outer Mongolia. One of the enemy’s minions– a nauseating little deacon named Kandra (he takes vacations to Disney World of all places! How common is that?) writes about it here and thinks he is “setting the record straight.” He’s living in his own Magic Kingdom. What he doesn’t realize is that no one really wants to be bothered with things as tiresome as facts. It’s much juicier to believe the gossip, so it is our job to keep churning it out.

One of the deacon’s friends is a “single mother” who calls herself The Crescat. This disgusting creature writes a blog which calls itself Catholic but is never pious, self righteous or somber. She works hard at an ordinary job and we can’t seem to get her down. Not even when I got Dogsworm to appear in the form of a chupacabra could we frighten her off. She simply dashed some holy water in our direction, swore and told poor Dogsworm to get lost. Crescat? Catastrophe more like. She comments on our attempts to besmirch the Pope with more lies by suggesting that Catholics needn’t hang on every casual word, phone call and eyebrow twitch of the Pope anyway. Her witty piece here is most annoying because some Catholics might take it seriously and get on with the ordinary work of praying, serving the poor and worshipping the enemy rather  than gossiping about the Pope.

Another juicy morsel this weekend was the headline that a German cardinal thinks same sex relationships are on a par with marriage. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki was reported to have said, “If two homosexuals take responsibility for each other, if they are loyal to each other over the long term, then one should see this in the same way as heterosexual relations.” Diane Korzeniewski actually took the time to track down the actual interviews and their translations from German. What a little rat! Why do these Catholic bloggers do this? Don’t they have anything better to do than expose the shoddy journalism we have been so diligent in producing? Don’t they have anything better to do than to nit pick over “words that are taken out of context” or “faulty mistranslations”? Not only did “Lady Di” do the research, but she then went on to write this nasty little piece in which she goes all hoity toity and self righteous about “gossip and the sin of slander”. Oh, give me a break! Doesn’t the sickening blogger know that the world turns on gossip? How else are our servants in the mainstream media going to sell papers without some gossip?

At the end of last week we were just about making some headway with another tidbit from the mouth of Pope Francis when we were undermined yet again. Bergoglio went out of his way to meet with some Evangelical Charismatics, and in a private conversation over lunch he supposedly told them that he did not want to convert them to Catholicism. No doubt he was assuring them that any kind of arm twisting conversion would not be worth it in the long run, and that he wanted to befriend and encourage them. No matter. We were able to twist this into a headline that upset some traditionalist Catholics. If we can divide them from the Catholic Church we will have made some good progress, but the commentators observed that once again, this was a report by one individual based on a private conversation, that nothing was formal or in written form from Bergoglio.

Well, we mustn’t be too downcast. We never pretended the battle would be easy, but I do wish some of these Catholic bloggers would stop tapping away and do something useful–like getting involved in politics.

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Check out my Screwtape Letters type book The Gargoyle Code here.