Pagans in Communion Conference

Yes, presented by www.christrecovery.com, it's the conference for all whose pagan leanings have been affected by Catholicism!

Nothing to do with this event, honest!

If you are a Pagan formerly associated with or affected by Catholicism, or are seeking to understand the effects of Catholicsm on our Pagan faith, then this conference is for you!

We feel your pain. Rigid Catholics who use words like "sin", "redemption" and "Christ" can cause untold distress to good Pagans such as ourselves, and it is important for us to have a conference as a way of giving each other support.

Two keynote speakers!

Yes, we are honoured to welcome Joe Biden, part-time president of the United States, who will give a keynote address on the subject of "Urgle burgle who am I splunge where's the ice-cream?" explaining how he was traumatized when a Catholic told him that killing babies was wrong.

We shall also be hearing from Fr James Martin LGBTSJ, author of "Are you gay? If not, why not?" - a manual for seminarians.

We shall hold synod-style bonding sessions!

We shall obviously play down the religious side of our beliefs - it is much more important to focus on OURSELVES rather than GOD - but we shall certainly sing a few happy songs (we don't use the h-word these days!) such as "All are welcome", "Gather us in", "On eagle's wings", etc.

As we meditate on just how horrible Catholicism is, we shall discuss the wonders of alternative beliefs, such as in Pachamama or the following message, seen at King's Crescent Railway Station.

The Stations of the Crescent - a lesson to us all.

Actually, some of us are a little unhappy with using words like "sinners", so there will be a trigger warning on this, and those likely to be offended may wish to miss out on this session. We are now trying to persuade the station to display more friendly messages such as "Remember, you are perfect already!"

Anyway, we are not here simply to moan about Catholicism, we will be partying as well! One of our keynote speakers, Blase Cupich, has donated some birthday cake, and all are welcome to share it (except Arthur Roche, who has his own cake).

This gluten-free, vegan and climate-friendly cupcake is also guaranteed Catholic-free!

LATE NEWS: Some orthodox Catholics have been detected trying to gatecrash our conference. All future bookings must be accompanied by a letter of support from either (a) a Jesuit; (b) Austen Ivereigh; or (c) Someone who writes for "Where Peter Is".

A successful week for Pope Francis

As Pope Francis keeps telling us, he is an old man, and starting to slow down. He hasn't slapped a pilgrim for several weeks, nor personally insulted a cardinal for a month or two. So it is with great pleasure that we can list some of the achievements of his recent trip to Canada.

Confined to a wheelchair but still in control!

1. Idolatory. Pachamama is so 2019, and a go-ahead pope who wants to troll the Catholic Church has got to find a new object of pagan worship. So we are delighted to welcome the Western grandmother, invoked in a "smudging ritual", in which noxious smoke is wafted round the room. Whether she will catch on with Francis-Catholics (now mainly Ivereigh, Lamb, Faggioli and Spadaro) is unclear, but here's Granny!

2. Fake confessions. Who are we to judge, but it may be thought that most Catholics - even the pope - have enough sins of their own to confess without confessing other people's. But no, in a brilliant innovation, Pope Francis has apologised to the Canadians, expressing deep shame and sorrow for various abuses that may or may not have taken place. Well, it certainly stopped anyone from asking embarrassing questions about Gussie Zanchetta!

"Don't worry, Gus, some future pope can apologise for us!"

3. A ritual kick at traditional Catholics. They just won't go away, will they, Francis? That TRADGON deodorant that Arthur Roche bought you doesn't seem to be working. A few bishops share your vindictive attitude to people who are used to the older forms of worship, but most are still ignoring you and hoping that the men in white coats will soon cart you off to the loony bin. Meanwhile, however, carry on insulting! Today's new one is BACKWARDIST. A good one, eh? When your popemobile is rushing down the hill towards a chasm, it's the backwardist who tries to stop it. Austen Ivereigh thinks it's brilliant!

4. Evolution of doctrine. As Pope Francis keeps stressing, doctrine evolves. What was a sin in the 1960s (or even the 1st century) may no longer be a sin! Conversely, there are new sins, such as advertising a Latin Mass in your parish bulletin, which earlier popes would have thought hilarious. Watch out, Humanae Vitae, we're gunning for you!

A nasty rigid backwardist pope! Which idiot canonized him? Oh...

Beatitudes for popes

Since Pope Francis has kindly produced eight modern non-rigid Vatican-II compatible platitudes beatitudes for bishops (yes, really), we felt it would be helpful to produce a similar set for the use of popes. It may be regarded as the latest in our "How to be a good pope" series.

1. Blessed is the pope who makes poverty and sharing his lifestyle: this could include spending his humble wealth on financing lewd films, or perhaps speculating in the property market. For with his witness he is building the kingdom of Heaven, or at least some very nice apartment blocks.

For sale. One infallible owner. Cash only.

2. Blessed is the pope who does not fear to water his face with tears, or if he cannot manage this, at least does not fear to scowl a lot. His face will mirror the sorrows of the people, which may mysteriously seem much worse these days.

3. Blessed is the pope who considers his ministry a service and not a power, who serves his flock by stamping out old-fashioned forms of Catholic worship. He will inhabit the land promised to the meek (having first kicked out the meek).

4. Blessed is the pope who does not close himself in the palaces of government, who welcomes visitors with Dubia to ask, or those with severe reservations about the state of the Church in distant oriental countries. For he will become a Zen master. [Is this what you meant to say? A. Spadaro.]

Welcoming the pilgrim.

5. Blessed is the pope who has a heart for the misery of the world, who is not scandalized by the sin and fragility of those such as Uncle Ted who helped him get the job. For he too may need some powerful friends one day.

6. Blessed is the pope who wards off duplicity of heart, who avoids every ambiguous dynamic. Although for a Jesuit this may be impossible, so let's leave this one until later.

7. Blessed is the pope who works for peace, who accompanies the paths of reconciliation, who welcomes new religions, especially pagan ones. For Mother Earth will bless him as her son.

"Pachamama will be along later."

8. Blessed is the pope who for the sake of modernism does not fear to go against the tide, inventing new doctrines. For he knows that the Catholic Church must take a U-turn and go in a new direction every few years.

From the Sermon in the Plane.

How to be a good pagan pope

This is of course the latest instalment in our series "How to be a good pope", providing essential advice for anyone expecting to be launched into the Chair of St Peter. (However, be warned, Pope Francis is taking the 93+ years of Leo XIII and Benedict XVI as a challenge, and has lots of exciting plans for making the Catholic Church unrecognizable in the next ten years...)

"Thank you for sending me the idol of Pachamama. I have thrown it into the Tiber."

It's been a frustrating summer, and you haven't been able to hold your usual audiences in front of great crowds, nor to take aeroplane trips (your usual opportunity for inventing new doctrine). True, you had another chat with Scalfari, who at 96 is even older than Benedict and Leo, even if he does make everything up from memory. But it turned out to be a bit of a non-event.

You were so desperate for company that you were reduced to allowing Austen Ivereigh to interview you - somehow he misunderstood your groans of "Let me sleep!" when he phoned you up at 3 a.m., and he is going to call the resulting book "Let us dream!" (Memo: remind Austen to brush up his Italian.) More on that some other time.

No, seriously...

Well, you amused yourself a little by tinkering with the Italian liturgy. The bits quoted from the Bible always looked wrong to you, so you were happy to rewrite them in the way Jesus would have put things if he'd been as wise as you. But this is merely trolling the traditionalists, so you need something bigger to keep yourself in the public eye.

Got it! For the next month we're going to celebrate the Jubilee for the Earth, the Season of Creation. That is, paganism. Here are a couple of wise things you might preach. Don't mention Jesus, sin, redemption, Heaven, Hell, or any of that stuff. It just confuses people.

What's that strange voice I hear?

Listen carefully, folks, that's the voice of creation speaking. Forget all that nonsense about being masters of creation - rewriting Genesis is next on your list - and remember that we are all spiders in a web, not just your friend Tony Spidero.

I got rhythm...

Speak out about the rhythms of creation. You may go down in history as the rhythmical pope, which is better than the web-bound pope. However, be warned: one of your likely successors, Cardinal Taggle-Waggle, is already putting in a claim to be the most rhythmical pope, and his dance moves are better than yours.

"I got rhythm AND I got music."

Anyway, keep muttering about the Rhythms of the Earth, the Jubilee of Creation, the Season of the Voice, the Voice of the Season, the Creation of Rhythm, and the Jubilee of the Season of Creation of the Rhythms of the Voice of the Earth... and that will keep people in a state of confusion until your next encyclical gets written.

The true facts about the SSPX

I don't think I have ever blogged about the Society of St Pius X before, but there has been too much acrimonious debate about it recently, involving people like Field-Marshal Taylor, Lieutenant Steve Kojak, about sixteen people called Gordon - one of whom wants me to @askyourantimoli - and so on. Even Father Z has waded in, guns blazing.

A snapshot of Catholic Twitter.

Clearly everyone is waiting for me to give a ruling. Right, here goes.

SSPX is wonderful. Schismatic. The only true faith. A bunch of disobedient weirdos. The best hope for mankind. With invalid orders. Much better than the "ordinary" post-Vatican II Church. Unable to organize a decent clown Mass. But its priests are approved of by all Popes. Although not Pius X. Well of course not you numbskull he wasn't alive then. Condemned by all decent people. Perfectly able to conduct Masses and Confessions. Yeah but only in emergencies if you can't get a proper Jesuit. You're starting to annoy me, buster. Get lost and take your poncy Latin with you. Just watch it or you'll get a schism in the back of your head. Oh yeah you and whose army? BAM! POW! OUCH! YAROOH! BEAST!

Well, we seem to have reached a consensus there.

Meanwhile, the "liberal" wing of the Catholic Church continues to misbehave while nobody's watching. Recently, Blase Cupich, the World's Worst Cardinal, blessed a pantomime horse (well, it was billed as a Chinese 'lion-awakening' ritual, but we know that the pantomime season hadn't quite ended).

Hail to thee, O Pantomama!

Uncle Blase has also been a bit dismissive of the power of prayer. That could just be because he's been addressing the Chinese lion-god by mistake.

Now, when the SSPX wars are over, can we go back to smiting the real heretics?

"The pantomime Cardinal will be along soon."

The Diakonia of Beauty

Continuing our exploration of the Cannes Festival we came to an event of spiritual nourishment.

The sacred festival of beauty. The "off" of the soul (!?)

This event is organized by the local diocese in conjunction with La Diaconie de la Beauté. At first I thought this was something to do with deacons, who are often beautiful creatures with beautiful minds, but in fact a Diaconie is better translated as Diakonia, which is concerned with the poor and needy.

Now, who are the poor and needy in this context? Well, as far as I could ascertain, they are actors. The sort of poor and needy actors you see at the Cannes Festival.

Brother Bosco blends inconspicuously with the beautiful people.

Indeed, one of the events (next Thursday if you can make it) features Michael Lonsdale, a.k.a. Sir Hugo Drax, the villain of the James Bond film Moonraker. Not poor, not needy, not even a poor actor.

Possibly not a saved person.

Another event that the church is organizing is a Concert inter-religieux "Les Trois Religions". Apparently the three religions - which seem to be regarded by some as interchangeable, equivalent, and all as good as each other - are Christianity (yay!), Islam (hiss!) and Judaism (somewhere in between on the Eccles "how saved is you?" scale). I guess that if a passing fakir had walked in and wanted to lie down on his bed of nails, he would also have been welcome.

Gratuitous cat-picture from Cannes to make the blog more popular.

We did drop in to one event of this festival; it was a concert called De Marie-Magdeleine à François et Claire d'Assise, which might reasonably be expected to have some religious content. However the bit we heard consisted of rock music and a man singing (if I understood it correctly) about Earth and Water. I guess the pagan wing of the Church would have appreciated it.

The angel of the diakonia.

Now, when we landed in Nice, I tried to emulate the great Father Z. and take a picture of the aeroplane seat in front of me - that sort of thing always makes a blog popular. However, by mistake, I was facing ad aquilonem rather than ad orientem, and so I took a liturgically-incorrect photo out of the window. Mea culpa.

Cannes, as seen from my plane.

Eccles visits the wilderness

Prayer and relfection is a great way to spend Lent, but for a saved pusson like me it's a bit too easy. Therefore, I asked my bishop - a man of great spiritaul insights - to recommend somefink extra, as befits a trully saved pusson.

"Eccles, you is right," he said. "Go ye forth into the waste lands of the world, where the word of God is never heard, and bring em spiritaul nuorishment."

A place for prayer and relfection.

"Not Croydon again!" I remonstarted. "Even Jesus didn't spend forty days locked in a shed wiv a deacon."

"Nope," said +Thingummy, "I have something even worse for you. Do the words 'custard', 'hair salon' and 'Gladys Mills' suggest somefink to you?"

"You want me to visit Damain Thopmson's blogg?" I gasped. "You know, Croydon isn't so bad, reely. Even deacons in sheds is almost human."

A nightmarish vision, caused by playing the "2048" game too long.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I registered on Diqsus as "ecclesiis" (for it is Eccles, I is), and went along to the holy smoking wastelands.

Is David Cameron a saved pusson?

That was the title of Thopmson's blost, in which the author gave an in-depth analsyis of the spiritaul state of our Prime Minister, concluding with the mysterious comment: "Personally I don’t care if Dave is a Chinese frog-worshipper..." (I spose he means Chinese-frog worshipper,as it don't seem very likely that Dave is reely Chinese).

David Cameron communicates with his deity.

As usual, Damain didn't have enough material to last him to the end of the piece, so he includded some stuff about Charles Hawtrey, Monty Python, and Vaughan Willaims clibming up his wall.

So I rolled up my trouser legs - sorry, I meant sleeves, I was thinking of ACTA for a moment - and took a look at the comments section. It seemed to be populated mostly by the resident troll, one "Phil", posting anti-Cathlic sentiments under half a dozen different usernames. There was one or two other trolls around, mostly based in South America, so clearly there was a crying need for the contributoins of a saved pusson.

The new avatar of Ecclesiis.

I challenged a few of the nastier comments of "Phil", offered a cup of tea to anuvver pusson who was gettin a bit incoherent, and basically shone the light of my widsom on the poor desolate blogg, wot had seen better days.

In less than one hour, all my posts had been deleted, and I had been banned.

Well, we knew that the muddlerators on the blogg were creul unsaved pussons, and that even the bloggs editor had no control over em. But this was quick work. Apparently, Phil is a pusson wiv a mark on his head like Cain, wot says he is under specail protectoin.

So I has given up on the wilderness of Damain, and has decided to convert pagans instead. Phew, at least it's nearly the end of Lent.

A pagan dances round a stone circle.

Ordinariate for pagans announced

Following the announcement that the Church of England is to welcome pagans - which most people thought to have happened many years ago - Pope Francis has announced the creation of a new Ordinariate, enabling pagans to convert to Catholicism while still preserving all that's best in Pagan Patrimony.

Ancient stones - these are considered holy by many pagans.

Originally, it was thought that Pope Francis was hostile to the Ordinariate - simply because there are not many disillusioned Anglicans in Argentina - but he has now seen the wisdom of Pope Benedict's ideas, and is prepared to take them further.

The first step will be to set up an Pagan Ordinariate church in London. This is already proving difficult, simply as there are no convenient stone circles at hand. It is thought that it will be necessary to import some, and install them in a convenient open space, perhaps just in front of Westminster Cathedral.

The Twelve Apostles (Ilkley Moor). Will they move to Westminster?

Some aspects of Pagan Worship may be hard to assimilate into the Catholic Mass. For example, it was thought at first that taking off all one's clothes and dancing in the light of the moon was too far from established Catholic tradition. However, having been shown examples of liturgical dancing at Liverpool Cathedral and elsewhere, the Pope no longer believes that this will be a problem.

Liturgical dancing (alternatively, the choir may perform a Gregorian chant).

Following the "Stonehenge II" council in the 1960s, human sacrifices are no longer part of mainstream pagan worship, but they are still be allowed for "traddy" pagans who request it from their local Archwizard. For such traditionalists to join the Ordinariate, suitable provision will be made in the Catholic liturgy. A papal encyclical De Humano Immolando is in preparation, which will clarify this issue. Many other Pagan traditions should be assimilated with little trouble.

A Catholic "cage" mass, where the priest pretends to be a budgerigar.

Reactions to the Pope's proposal have been mixed. Said the Tablet, "This is the sort of brilliant idea that we would never have seen when we were crushed by the iron jackboot of Pope Benedict. It takes the emphasis away from God, and focuses it on ourselves, so it must be good."

After all, this is very similar to some existing Catholic Masses.

On the other hand, pagan leaders are furious that the Catholic Church is attempting to "poach" its believers without any consultation. Said Arch-Pendragon Getafix (formerly Jim Tharg), "It's a disgrace. They're even asking Paul Inwood to publish a Pagan setting of the Mass, including animal noises and the sounds of witches screeching - apparently, this will only require minor modifications to his existing work."

Monsignor Snape prepares for Mass.

Finally, the "Magic Circle" of Catholic bishops in England and Wales is also showing enthusiasm for the idea of a Pagan Ordinariate. Archbishop Nichols has long had excellent relations with Rowan Williams, a druid who rose to a senior position in the Church of England, and he is therefore expected to be very responsive to the idea of Pagan Patrimony.

We'll now sing "All things bright and beautiful."