Another Week of Infallibility

Last week’s news of Infallibility revealed that the Vatican probably hired the services of the same team that vetted Tom Daschle and Tim Geithner before they decided to welcome a schismatic Holocaust denier back into the fold. Or, alternatively, the Vatican spends much more time asking un-excommunication candidates if they’ve raped any children lately than they do checking the lapels of those candidates for Swastika pins or Iron Crosses. Even the Infallible have priorities.

Besides, nasty schisms have to be eliminated. (Incidentally, the schismatics were originally excommunicated because they were consecrated as bishops by a guy who thought the French Revolution was wack. Seriously.) If I had to guess at what a Pope likes to do best, I’d say it’s smoothing over a nice juicy schism. Here is what a Pope’s ideal daily To Do List probably looks like:

1) Get rid of a schism.
2) Offend a bunch of people -- millions if possible -- by saying something infallibly stupid.
3) Warn people against the great looming threat of Humanism, or any other movement which has already been widely accepted as a pillar of civilization for centuries.
4) Vespers.

Well, this week the Vatican added something new: giving science its due. They admitted that Darwin probably hit pretty close to the mark with his theory of evolution and that the idea of Intelligent Design is, well, kinda stupid.

What are they going to acknowledge next, you say? That objects in motion tend to stay in motion, etc, etc, or that the shortest distance between two points is a line of the straight-ish variety? (We haven’t heard the Pope admit to those things yet, but we have hope.)

So can we add something new to that To Do List?

5) Admit to something everybody already knows.

I can’t wait for the press conference in the year 2250 when the Pope of that time finally states that steroids are a problem in baseball and that homerun records should be viewed with suspicion. I imagine reporters looking at each other and asking, ‘What’s baseball? Is it anything like soccer?’