2024

With apologies to George Orwell.

Winston Smith's route to Mass took him past the People's Aborturama. Here, citizens were encouraged to punish their unwanted children with painful execution, so that their organic components could be recycled for the good of the state. Seeing officers of PrayPol, the Prayer Police, standing nearby, Winston hastily put his hands in his pockets and arranged his features into a large smile. That way, nobody would accuse him of praycrime.

A scene of explicit praycrime.

Naturally, Big Brother had no objection to the use of prayers, provided that they were taken from the Synod 2021-2045 Handbook. This had been compiled by the late Citizen Ivereigh of the Ministry of Religion on the instructions of Pope Francis the Godly, whose remarkable brain was now operating for eternity thanks to the miracles of science.

The Pope (aged 148) continues his work.

State-approved prayers were mostly addressed to Pachamama, the People's goddess, and involved repentance for environmental wrongs, such as plasticstrawsinning or candlecrime. Unauthorized prayers outside the People's Aborturama, the Youthinasia retirement home, or DragonQueen, the children's gender reassignment playground, were of course severe examples of praycrime, and the offender was liable to compulsory re-education.

A doubleplusungood example of praycrime.

Re-education mostly consisted of the guilty citizen being imprisoned in the Greta Thunberg Education Facility (formerly Oxford University), where the offender was forced to listen to endless lectures on Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory and of course Climate Change (scientists had recently revised their estimates, revealing that the World would be consumed by fire no later than 2090).

Winston arrived on time at the Pachamama Cathedral Mosque. Mass would start with a two-minute Hate of White People, who, it had been established by the Big Sister of Oceania (formerly President Meghan of the United States), were responsible for all the evils of the world...

To be continued? I hope not. Just read the newspapers if you want more.