Humor

A reader sent me the following story.

Vatican City, 18 Dec. (AKI) – The Vatican could soon have a top football team, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has said. "I am not ruling out that the Vatican could in the future have a soccer team of great value able to compete with (Italian top Serie A league teams) Roma, Inter, Genoa and Sampdoria," Bertone, the Vatican’s equivalent of a prime minister said on Sunday. The cardinal, a staunch supporter of fallen Serie A giants Juventus – which was relegated to Serie B this season following a match-fixing scandal – is a football expert who used to comment soccer matches for a local television when he was archbishop of the port city of Genoa from 2003 until his appointment as secretary of state this year.

Bertone had already hinted a few weeks ago at the Vatican’s football ambitions.

"If, for example, we were to recruit Brazilian players from our pontifical universities we could set up a great team," Bertone was quoted as saying by Rome daily La Repubblica. The cardinal added that the Vatican could also discover young talents in parish teams saying that "in the 1990 World Cup I noticed that 42 players from different national teams originally came from parish recreation centres."

Bertone is not the only soccer enthusiast at the Vatican.

Another cardinal, Fiorenzo Angelini, a supporter of Serie A team Roma, is a commentator of premier league matches for Vatican Radio and Sat2000, the TV network of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI).

This is a serious story as evidenced by this exclusive photo of Pope Benedict XVI trying out as goalkeeper.

* I first saw the photo at Shrine of the Holy Whapping with their own hilarious caption.

My reader suggests a name that team contest for the Vatican Soccer team.

Pope John Paul II previously set up a sports department at the Vatican with ""the very intention of making the Holy See’s solicitude felt in the world of sports". I did a previous post on this topic and include part of it here with some additions.

Here is the previous Holy Father doing his part.

This appears to be a Vatican department to help to help re-inject fundamental values of fairness, ethics, transparency and legality into sports as its stated aim. Now I think real Vatican sport teams would be cool.

Like the Vatican Cardinals.

Where all passes are Hail Marys. Since there is a college of Cardinals certainly they can have college football.

Now the Vatican must have some real good athletes because newspaper headlines are always using adjectives like, bash, attack, smash, flay, irk, assail, denounce, hurt to describe their actions (and this small sample was taken from headlines just this week).

Other possible sport team names are:

• Tiber Tigers
• Spanish Inquisition (nobody would ever expect them)
• Fighting Papists
• Milwaukee Brewing Monks
• Papal Bulls
• The Mighty Magisterium
• The Church Militants
• Crusaders
• Flying Cupertinos
• Curia Commandoes
• The Dye is Casteries
• Holy Seehawks
• Peter’s Bite – After all the Barque of Peter is not worse than it’s bite

I am sure you can come up with some great names of your own.

This picture is via Father Stephanos, O.S.B.

This is obviously a collector set of Franciscan nuns since they have not yet been take out of their packaging decreasing their retail value. You can tell though that these are faithful nuns because progressive ones would obviously be wrappedn in tinfoil.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue released these remarks today on the latest round of anti-Christmas incidents:

“Like most Jews, Olympic skater Sasha Cohen is not offended by Christmas carols. But that didn’t stop a government employee from trying to protect her. While Cohen was skating at a rink in Riverside, California, a high-school choir started singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman,’ immediately sending Michelle Baldwin into orbit. She summoned a cop and got him to institute a gag rule: he ordered the choir to stop singing. Baldwin maintained that because Cohen was Jewish, she would be upset by the carol. But she never bothered to ask the skater if she objected. As it turns out, Cohen couldn’t have cared less. As usual, those who say we must be careful not to offend non-Christians at Christmastime are the ones who object to Christmas—not those whom they falsely claim to represent.

“Like Baldwin, Sandra Byrne, principal of an elementary school in Delray Beach, Florida, has a need to show how inclusive she is. That’s why she has no Christmas tree, nativity scene or menorah in her office. Instead, her spot is adorned with teddy bears wearing sweaters. Moreover, only ‘winter parties’ and ‘winter celebrations’ are tolerated. ‘We’re very careful about this,’ she says. No doubt she is.

“Here’s another example of anti-Christmas fever. In a Detroit suburban school district, they’ve instituted a quota system on religious songs that can be sung at school concerts. That’s right, only 30 percent of the songs at Howell Public Schools can be religious. It’s not certain whether the choir director will be fined or imprisoned if a multicultural monitor finds that 31 percent of the songs are religious. We recommend incarceration.

“After Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, Castro made a good-faith gesture by allowing Cubans to celebrate Christmas again. Maybe we should hire Fidel to talk to these madmen.”

If only they had hired the singers from my last years parody and none of this would have happened.

PORTLAND, OR (Roto Reuters) A new children’s choir groups is getting lots of attention and bookings during the winter season. The Silent Night Seasonal Semi-Singers sidestep the problems inherent in a multi-cultural society and what has been called the "Christmas wars." Secularists are upset with the lyrics of explicitly Christian carols and Christians become upset when these carols are left out. To solve this problem Ms. Giesel of the the Glencoe school elementary choir decided instead of hymns to do hums. Students are gagged while performing to ensure no actual Christian carols are ever sung. The instrumental portions of traditional Christmas carols are slightly altered to ensure no one in the audience might attempt to sing along. Silent Night is sung just as intended – totally silent. To ensure fairness winter holiday songs are also hummed.

Parents at first were hesitant to endorse the idea until they found out how enthusiastic their kids were. Now even students with no musical talent can join the choir and hum along. The provided humnal makes it very easy for kids to learn songs since they do not have to memorize any lyrics. When the audience is invited to join in and hum along nobody ever feels bad or put down since they don’t know the words or only know the first refrain.

The idea is catching on in neighborhoods where kids bundle up and go around the neighborhood from door to door humming or what some have called humoling. People are thrilled to find hummers at their door humming along to slightly familiar tunes invoking the winter season. So if you see a group of humolers approaching your door this season then open your door to the joys of holiday humoling.

Pope Benedict XVI and Greece’s Orthodox Church Archbishop Christodoulos
race to complete their entry in the first annual East/West Icon and Calligraphy contest.

A tense moment occurred later during the first East/West Dance. The Holy Father asked Archbishop Christodoulos to follow his lead. The Archbishop declined though he said he would consider him first among equals.

Regal is giving theatergoers free popcorn and a gadget that lets them bust annoying cellphone users in the theater.

Regal is testing devices at 25 of its theater locations, handing them out to frequent customers and may roll it out nationwide in the next year if it proves successful, Campbell said. Regal operates 6,400 screens nationwide.

About the size of a pager, the gadget has four buttons. One alerts theater managers about a disruption in the audience, such as a fight over a cellphone.

A second button gives notice of faulty movie projection, a third button can be pressed if the room temperature is off and a fourth button, marked “Other” covers any other problem.

The device is part of Regal’s efforts to keep fans coming back to the box office by making sure they still enjoy the experience, even as the movie industry faces greater competition from other media such as the Internet or video games.

The blogger at Threshing Grain thought that I could adapt this story.

I think we need religious displays like the advertisements in the movie Minority Report. In the movie advertisements were keyed to the person waling past them. With the recent debacle of the Christmas trees at the Seattle airport that were first removed because of a complaint and then subsequently returned after even more of an outcry – this technology is needed.

Though I have heard that they were working on this type of display but came up with big time problems. It works part of the time. When a Christian passes it shows a holographic Christmas tree or a Nativity. Religious Jews get a menorah. Atheists some nice primordial ooze with a clock representing billions and billions of years. The problem came to tests with agnostics. The displays kept burning up. They would switch rapidly between trying to show something possibly religious then back to nothing and back and forth in rapid succession since the displays were unable to sync to the muddle of agnosticism.

A reader sent me a link to this description of some USCCB programming on the USCCB’s Catholic Communication Campaign website.

In this week’s “Fact of Faith,” Paulist Father Larry Rice explains why the Holy Days of Obligation were the same for Catholics everywhere and now they no longer exist.

The show itself make no such assertion.

(AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)

"This is the last time I let Emeril Lagasse select the amount of coals and incense to use."

"I will never buy incense from a warehouse club again – it is just too big!"

"The Holy Father as usual prefers to be upstaged by the Holy Spirit."

"The smoke of Santa has entered the Church."

Today being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception I have to wonder what some think about the date of the feast. Many people including some reviewers of The Nativity Story mistake the Immaculate Conception as referring to Jesus’ conception and not Mary’s. So by their confusion they must think that either we believe that Mary experienced either the shortest pregnancy (17 days) or the longest (a year and 17 days.) The first is too reminiscent of some alien implanted baby movie and the second idea would probably bring chills to any women who had a child. Fortunately the gestation period for God-men is the same as for regular men.

Pope Benedict belts out some carols with his backup singers. The group sometimes go by The Pope and the Pips or Benny and the Jets.