#pope-posting

For another, more accurate look at the papal conclave (note, in its original form, this piece is broken up a bit to read like the poem it is, but here it is :

"How The Pope Is Chosen" by James Tate

How The Pope Is Chosen

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy. Almost always a toy is an imitation of something grown-ups use. Popes with unclipped hair are called "corded popes." If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked, it becomes extremely long and twists into long strands that look like ropes. When it is shorter it is tightly curled. Popes are very intelligent. There are three different sizes. The largest are called standard Popes. The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes. I could go on like this, I could say: "He is a squarely built Pope, neat, well-proportioned, with an alert stance and an expression of bright curiosity," but I won't. After a poodle dies all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven. They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up and then he's the new Pope. He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone, day and night in all kinds of weather. The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope, like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill." He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front. Most Popes are called "Babe" because growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun. All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger, but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy. They have to go to the bathroom by themselves, and they spend almost all of their time sleeping. Parents seem incapable of helping their little popes grow up. Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows, but the sky is full of them. It looks as if they are just taking it easy, but they are learning something else. What, we don't know, because we are not like them. We can't even dress like them. We are like red bugs or mites compared to them. We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper, but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands. We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes. When a Pope is ready to come into the world, we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well. Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us. They open their mouths at regular intervals. They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips. Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.

(James Tate, from Worshipful Company of Fletchers, 1994 Ecco books)

Fun fact: Gambling on who the next pope will be is one of the very few things explicitly punishable by excommunication.

When you absolutely need coverage from multiple saints, get yourself one of these heavy mamma-jammas.

Note: as a last resort when going up against an evil religious megaboss (Joel Osteen, Rupert Murdoch, the Pope of the Phantom Zone, nKorlok the Destroyer, JD Vance), pour all the relics into a spice/coffee grinder, set that thing to espresso, grind it, and then grab your handy dandy straw or a rolled up indulgence and snort a few of lines of sanctity. Effects should last about the time it takes to say the rosary in full twenty times. Have sex during this time and you will bring about the Kwisatz Haderach whether or not you want to, so... there's that. A bit on the Cadaver Synod (probably written during a manic episde):

View the following scene:  Europe, the late ninth century. Rome is a game piece between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, largely controlled by small-time warlords, and wanted by pretty much everyone who was anybody in central Italy, for some reason, even though the place had, by papal admission, gone to shit. Everyone, including Saracen pirates, had sacked the city, stolen all the pope’s stuff several times over, and generally made a mess of things. After a few years of mediocrity, Pope Formosus dies. Pope Boniface VI becomes pope, dies. Pope Stephen VI becomes pope, promptly conducts the Cadaver Synod. Stephen had Formosus exhumed, tried in Saint John Lateran (Stephen and his pals placed Formosus on a throne and questioned him repeatedly about certain acts of which he was accused, and getting no reply other than a vague musty smell, presumed the late pontiff’s corpse was remaining silent because it was guilty of all charges), and found guilty of not being worthy of the office of the papacy, and punished accordingly: every act he passed was annulled, his papal vestments and rings (by this point, he was a tad bit moldy) were stripped from his body, three fingers on his right hand (those used for consecrating) were chopped off, and then he was tossed into the Tiber. However, a monk wandering along the Tiber, noticed his body, and remembering that one time Formosus gave him a sandwich, secretly buried it. Somehow, the washed up, eight-fingered ex-pope’s corpse became the source of rumors relating to its miraculous healing abilities (not, unfortunately for Formosus, on his own departed form, but rather on folks who touched it or asked nicely to be cured of an ailment in its presence), and Stephen VI promptly found himself with angry mobs pissed that he had exhumed, tried, defrocked, and unhanded their favorite pope. Shortly after the mob arose, Stephen was imprisoned and strangled by his political enemies (of which he had quite a few). The next few popes tried to gloss over that one time Stephen went out back with a shovel and started digging up former pontiffs, and so they passed laws that forbade the exhumation, trial, and sentencing of the deceased, because, apparently, it hadn’t been clear enough tosome people that you probably shouldn’t go around digging up the bodies of your political enemies and putting them on trial(and then yell at them when they didn’t answer your questions). There was also the matter of the bishops Formosus had created, who, under Stephen’s orders, needed to be re-consecrated as bishops due to Formosus not being pope enough for the job, one of those bishops was, awkwardly, Stephen VI. The papacy largely just shuffled papers around until everything looked legitimate, and did its best to pretend that nothing weird at all was going. So, Formosus rested as serenely as a seriously beaten corpse could rest in the crypt of Saint Peter’s for about a decade. But then Formosus was reexhumed by Pope Sergius III, whom, after teabagging Formosus and saying “No, you’re a douche,” recondemned Formosus for being a sub-par pontiff, reinvalidated all of his rulings, and then according to some rumors, ordered the corpse beheaded (because chopping off a few fingers and tossing the rest into the Tiber hadn’t been enough, apparently), before dropping dead dying himself and leaving it to his ecclesiastical successors to not so secretly bury Formosus in St. Peter’s, and just try to put the whole thing behind them without too much therapy or paperwork. Sergius III’s trial of Formosus was largely viewed as having been a ‘political’ matter, and not one questioning the faith of Formosus, so the Church ruled once and for all that the rulings made by Formosus were valid, and everyone should really stop digging him up to yell at him. Political matters in the early middle ages, you see, were those that involved digging up or otherwise utilizing a corpse in order to make everyone else just shake their head and mutter under their breath as they wonder just where they went wrong.  

(The stuff below is from my brief run as Pope in 2014, when I had a seizure and a bit of a brain injury):

Bidding the vile webcam to work while wearing my awesome new spacepope tiara. "Once again, I am the Pope of the Sand!" -I screamed that in my sleep a few weeks ago, now I know why.