This is me, Eccles

This is me, Eccles
This is me, Eccles

Sunday 18 December 2016

Francis is Redeemed

As a blogger who endeavours to provide spiritual nourishment, I do regularly look at the writing of other satirists to see what the "competition" is up to. For example, Fr James Martin SJ, with his nuggets of made-up doctrine such as "Mary Magdalene was the Church" is a well-known star, as is Prof. Tina Beattie with her "human flourishing" that rewrites Catholic teaching as an over-the-top parody of feminism.

Pope and birthday cake

"And you say that Cardinal Burke's head is inside this?"

But now is the first time that I have encountered a parody of my own blog. Francis is Redeemed is clearly a spoof of "Eccles is saved", and very funny it is too, even if the author's name, Austen Ivereigh, is not quite as witty as, say, Fr Todd Unctuous or Archdruid Eileen.

Francis is Redeemed was written to celebrate the 80th birthday of the pope, and presented as if it were a genuine piece by the official hagiographer of the 2nd most powerful Catholic in the world (after Antonio Spadaro).

It is very tongue-in-cheek, and you have to be on the lookout for the clever bits of humour. Apparently Francis is interested in the Enneagram - and, in particular, is an "Eight", like Fidel Castro, Ignatius Loyola, and Martin Luther King. Of course he's also a Sagittarius and a thetan of the twelfth level, but that would be going too far with the joke.

enneagram

The Vatican has promised to purge all 5s from the cardinalate.

Then again, Francis is said to model himself on General Juan Domingo Perón, although presumably without the same fondness for fascism and love of torture. I must admit I would never have dared write anything quite so rude about the pope, but I am a mere novice at this satire game.

Yes, this new kid on the block, with his Francis is Redeemed blog, is writing some of the top Catholic humour of the day! Well done, man!

Bruvver Eccles, not an Eight, but a humble and dubious Five.

20 comments:

  1. Austen Ivereigh's "Francis is Redeemed" is pure rubbish. It's exactly what the liberal media wrote about Obama when they described him as the Great Uniter of People when all Obama - like Pope Francis - has ever done is divide the populace exactly in half...split down the middle until war is practically in sight, as is a schism in the Church.

    However Ivereigh did clear up one thing, for me at least, and that is that Francis is a POLITICIAN first, not a shepherd of souls. Being a shepherd/priest/pope is secondary and merely the channel through which his politics are directed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wouldn't the 4 be sixes? -40

    ReplyDelete
  3. I started reading the article by Ivereigh but gave up half way through once it got to the parallelogram bit. Could not see the screen owing to tears of laughter.

    It begins with the fact that Pope Francis 'has the task of building a new creative synthesis out of disparate elements.' Can't he use Lego like everyone else?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Not sure religious satire is entirely appropriate. For true spiritual nourishment try this one:

    www.thesocietyofsuchpiousgents.blogspot.co.uk

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sorry Eccles, you have met your match. :( Ivereigh is beyond parody - he is the new David Icke of Catholic fake-news journalism. Its impossible to take the p@@s out of pure p@@s.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well dunno, Eccles, not sure about him being a number eight. Any man with a core life task is clearly modelling himself on Eve, or more particularly on the the Late Great Don't Cry For Me Evita, and is plainly a number four.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dr Ivereigh is become a poor parody of Dr Weigel, perhaps. (Whatever disagreements &c &c I may have with Dr Weigel or his sainted subject, I venerate the saint and respect the writer. Not sure about AI.)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Mr Ivereigh is a very clever man to understand what he wrote. He lost me with the title of the piece. After that he could have been writing pure gobbledygook.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The desert fathers created the enneagram? Out of which orifice did he pull that one out of?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Doesn't AI stand for Artificial Intelligence? Chloe

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It also could stand for Artificial Insemination.

      Personally, I prefer the translation attributed to Bishop Schneider: The Joy of Adultery

      Delete
  11. Britain is missing from the birthday cake but there is a new island further to the south (Atlantis?). Does the cake-maker, and Francis, know something we don't know? I think that we should be told.
    I see that Francis is a 'conductor' is that why there are so many lightening strikes on the Vatican?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We all missed the headlines, tucked away in the business pages - Pope eats Britain, Portugal and Western Spain and France. It's been non-stop comfort eating ever since he lost his job as a bus conductor.

      Delete
  12. That is a very mundane cake.
    The other cake pictured in the media is dedicated to migrants.
    So, no religious themes for the cakes. No Magdalene as first Church, no scene of salvation of Judas. Well, maybe next year.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sincerely hope that his birthday will be a very small private celebration next year.

      Delete
  13. Thank you, I feel spiritually nourished now. When the enneagram was forced upon me years ago, I was found to be a 6; thus I seem set to be spared from the current purge if it extends beyond the cardinalate. Such a relief.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Come off it Eccles. We all know that with the help of Putin you hacked into the Crux website and wrote that piece yourself.

    ReplyDelete
  15. What odds on Austen Ivereigh (Such a Catholic name!) becoming a high-up Vatican official - say Consultant to the Dicastery for Marriage and the Family (But is he married, I wonder? We should be told...)

    ReplyDelete
  16. Sorry, folks, but one or two potentially libellous comments about Uncle Austen could not be published. This may explain why:
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jan/29/daily-mail-libel-catholic-abortion

    ReplyDelete