Guest columnist Sam Anthony reports on the latest news from the Vatican and the newest people they have condemned to eternal damnation.
Yesterday behind closed doors the College of Cardinals met to discuss the possible existence of an eighth deadly sin, and a corresponding tenth circle of hell for its un-confessed perpetrators. Dean of the College, Cardinal Sodano, confided his own feelings on how the proceedings went to our inside source. “We [the Catholic Church] now have the knowledge, the means to fight back… to pay these sinners their just due. We cannot reveal this discovery to the world until it has been approved at a formal council.” According to our source, who has been excommunicated and is currently in hiding from a hit-force of Vatican pikemen, the cardinals met to discuss a plague that has long afflicted humanity but only recently became relevant when it reared its ugly head at Cardinal Benedetto’s house-warming party last Sunday.
On that night, Cardinal Benedetto entertained several local politicians and the heads of thirty or so various charities, as well as some of the boys (figurative) from the dockworkers union and a few of the other cardinals, all-in-all no more than sixty people. The party went swimmingly-or so he thought- until Monday morning cleanup time came. To his horror, the good Cardinal stumbled upon no fewer than two hundred and fifty half-to-mostly-full beverages left in obnoxious locations throughout his villa. A good portion of the secret meeting was taken up by Cardinal Benedetto trying to explain how exactly $6000 of alcohol, including the entirety of what he had thought was his securely-locked private wine collection, was now worth little more than the sweat of a Protestant seeking salvation.
To the best of Cardinal Benedetto’s memory, the politicians and the dockworkers all took one drink and drank half of it, then left to go smoke outside, but got so high they forgot to come back in for three hours and then didn’t know where they had left their drink so of course they had to get another one. This group, dubbed “A” by the Cardinal, went out to smoke a total of three times, accounting for 60 half-empty drinks. The charity people (group “B”) each drank half of three or four drinks over the course of the evening, because they kept feeling too full from all the hors d’oeuvres they were eating but then changing their minds once they had put their drink down and lost track of it. This brought the total of unfinished drinks to 165. The three Cardinals, dubbed group “C” (for Cardinal) swore that they finished everything they took as good Catholics are behooved to do, leaving 85 unfinished drinks that the College could only imagine had been left “ex invidia,” or “out of spite.” The Cardinals could not agree whether only those responsible for these 85 beverages were guilty of this damnable sin- which so far lacks an easy name- or whether all those who had left unfinished beverages were in dire peril of damnation, lest they confess their sin and maybe bump Cardinal Benedetto some cash.
Much of the disagreement stemmed from the fact that all the unfinished beverages had been seemingly placed in prime positions to destroy Cardinal Benedetto’s most valuable property and make cleanup a stressful, painstakingly slow process. Our source remembered this particular appeal of Cardinal Benedetto’s well: “There is no reason guys, no FUCKING REASON, why anyone needed to balance their drink on top of my TV. There was plenty of space on the tables. And what about the ones I found on my bed this morning that spilled all over me? Did some asshole come in and put them there while I was sleeping?”
The College of Cardinals did agree, unanimously, on the exact nature of the region of hell where those who committed this sin and failed to repent would be damned for eternity. Our source knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the existence and nature of life after death, being a (former) clergyman himself, and privy to that sort of knowledge firsthand. He had this to say on the new “10th Circle” of hell, as postulated by the cardinals: “So first, Satan is in the 9th circle, frozen in ice. But he’s frozen, right? He can’t get up to use the bathroom. So he has a bedpan. The 10th circle of hell is that bedpan.” This new revelation blends well with what is already well known by Catholic theologians, that since Satan is the epitome of all evil, he must excrete the foulest of substances imaginable: week-old, room-temperature Natural Light. Those who are confined to Satan’s bedpan therefore, in a sense, will be forced to finish every free drink they ever left for their sucker hosts to clean up, and then some.
We righteous folk of all faiths stand behind the College of Cardinals in sincerely hoping that this can become official doctrine and convince at least the alleged 1.2 billion Catholics to stop shitting on our hospitality.