Personality test for holy orders

These days, people applying for jobs are often asked to fill in an online personality test, or situational judgement test. Just in case any of my readers is thinking of applying to become a priest, bishop, cardinal, or whatever, here is a selection of the sort of questions you may be asked to answer.

1. You are a young woman vicar in the Anglican church, hoping for a successful career. You have seen how Kate Bottley has managed to draw attention to herself by self-centred fooling around in the House of God. Do you:
(a) Go one step further, and become the first stripping vicar, after which media fame and fortune will await you?
(b) Learn to play the saxophone, so that you will quickly be promoted to the executive position of bishop under sax-discrimination legislation?
(c) Pray "God help us"?

Ite, Missa est!

2. You are a member of the Magic Circle of English and Welsh bishops, and currently a lowly Blessed Prestidigitator, but hoping to be promoted to the inner ring of Sacred Conjurers. Unfortunately, one of your deacons has set up a blog "Safeguard the Bishop of Rome" in which he lists many threats to orthodox Catholic doctrine (ACTA, The Tablet,... all the usual suspects). The Grandmaster of the Magic Circle is leaning on you to do something. Do you:
(a) Tell the deacon that he will spend the rest of his life in a brief period of voluntary prayer and contemplation if he doesn't want to end up locked in a garden shed?
(b) Set up your own rival blog in which you tell of all the exciting things bishops do, such as eating cake with nuns?
(c) Tell the Grandmaster to mind his own business, and take the plank out of his own diocese before trying to remove the speck from yours?

3. You are a fairly inexperienced pope, who is very popular with atheists but totally distrusted by Catholics. Do you:
(a) Pick an easy target such as the Curia, and insult them in fifteen exciting new ways?
(b) Promise to write an encyclical on a topic almost totally unrelated to the Catholic faith, e.g. climate change, pizza toppings, or which football club Catholics should support?
(c) Look around for anyone who may be more popular than yourself (Burke, Müller, Pell, ...), and appoint them to an "invisible" position looking after the Knights of Cyprus, the Bishops of Crete, or the Rooks of Gibraltar.
(d) Proclaim some new and absurd piece of doctrine infallibly, e.g. "From now on, everyone is saved"?

"My usual fee for an audience is $100,000, your popeship."

4. You are a young priest whose well-meaning but totally clueless aunt has given you a gift subscription to the Tablet. When the first copy drops through your letter-box, do you:
(a) Phone your bishop and ask if he will come round and exorcise it?
(b) Read it from cover to cover, and comment "My, that Tony Flannery's a smart young chap, isn't he? If only he were on our side"?
(c) Thank your aunt kindly and wonder whether it would be any good for lining the parrot's cage?

5. You are an embittered old Swiss Catholic priest and theologian. Although you are not allowed to teach Catholic theology, you have written 348 books, with titles such as "My struggle for freedom" and "Why I am still a Christian". But you are still not regarded as a Great Prophet. Do you:
(a) Fill your garden with more statues of yourself?
(b) Phone up Tina Beattie and ask her if she can get you a job at Roehampton?
(c) Buy yourself a New Testament, to find out exactly what Jesus really said.

And finally... a horror story.

6. You have been appointed priest at a parish that has a regular Tridentine Mass, attracting worshippers from other parishes. The worshippers have been led to believe that things will carry on as normal. Do you:
(a) Carry on as usual, in an attempt to become as well-respected as your distinguished predecessor?
(b) Close down the Latin Masses, for that is surely the will of God, as expressed in the Spirit of Vatican II?
(c) Like (b), only you get in some good ranting at the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker?

Answers: there are no right answers. But you didn't get the job.

The Pope's Encyclical on Climate Change

Blessings upon you, my flock. Before we start, may I just mention that you're all suffering from spiritual jetlag and climatological hangovers, you brood of vipers. Indeed, the purpose of my addressing you today is to warn you that you are destined for the furnace of fire, as warned in Matthew 13:50. For unless we instantly ban all cars, lightbulbs and washing-machines, the Earth will be consumed by flames, and that can be pretty disagreeable, I'm sure you'll agree.

You have been warned!

Now, in this letter I want to concentrate on the teaching of two doctors of the Church. The first is his eminence Michael Mann, who saw a mystic vision of a hockey-stick, which, like the Holy Grail, turned out to be very elusive when people searched for it in this world.

Sir Michael de Mann seeks the Holy Hockey-Stick.

The second learned doctor is his eminence Albert de Gore, author of An inconvenient truth, which correctly predicted that the world's temperature would rise by fifty degrees in five years, the seas would rise by twenty feet, and that the whole of the UK would disappear under the waves, except for Ben Nevis, UNLESS we bought carbon credits from him and banned all things that emit carbon dioxide, including pet cats, bishops, and bottles of Coca-Cola. A prophet is without honour in his own country, as someone once said - I can't remember who, off hand - and it is to the shame of the human race that the blessed Albert was so cruelly mocked.

Albert Hallin Kensington Gore.

I myself have noticed a change in climate. Since I moved to Rome, I have observed that July and August have become far hotter than they ever were in Buenos Aires. Admittedly, January and February have been a bit disappointing, but since they insist that I wear heavy papal vestments, rather than the humble rags favoured by St Francis, I never find it very cold.

You may think that there are more serious issues we need to address in the world: the complete massacre of Christians in the middle-east is undeniably irritating, and I shall be writing a stiff letter to Mr Jihad-John pointing out that he is slipping into neo-Pelagianism. Some of you may think that world famine is an inconvenience, and others may wonder whether letting 600,000 people per year die of malaria is a Good Thing or not. But that's all peanuts compared with the threat of having to turn the heating down by a degree or two in the next hundred years.

Dangerously hot weather in Egypt!

The Catholic Church is taking a lead here: from now on we'll have no more candles, and no more burning of incense - these are nasty traditionalist warming rituals that smack of Donatism, as my expert on heresy, Cardinal Nichols, assures me. Stop sniggering at the back there, Cardinal Pell. I'll deal with you later.

Right! Stop that at once!

Since China is building dozens of new coal-fired power stations, you may wonder whether there is really any virtue in our turning off the heating and dying of cold this winter, simply in order to reduce our own CO₂ emissions. Well, when the Apocalypse comes, the unbelievers will suffer first, mark my words. In the words of Jude 1:7: Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the neighbouring cities, in like manner, were made an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.

Meanwhile, I am doing my bit for the salvation of Cardinal Burke, by driving him out into the cold. What a thoughtful pope I am.

Addendum: I did not make this up. Just as Richard Dawkins became an instant theologian, the Holy Father has become an instant climatologian.

Yet more bloggs

St Gordon of Kirkcaldy
By Mary Drilled

Mary Drilled's photo marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker

Gordon Brown now spends his days in retirement in a darkened room in Kirkcaldy, his only reward being an MP's pittance of £65,000, together with necessary expenses (most recently, an invoice from Jock McBogey's Glazing Repairs, for a window damaged by a flying laser-printer, £300+VAT). But until 2010 he was the most powerful man in the free world, the saviour of civilization as we know it. The verdict of history on Gordon Brown will surely be: We Owe So Much.

 Of course Ed Miliband is wonderful too, so handsome, so masterful. He can't make his eyes revolve in opposite directions at the same time, as Ed Balls can, but let's face it, is that really a necessary qualification to be PM? But it is Gordon whose photo I have on my bedside table, the Pride of Scotland.

Surely this man is a god?

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Viagra, sex, and pianist envy
By James Hordes

As a famous but iconoclastic pianist  - I'll get a better picture later, but I never really understood the instructions in those photo booths - I went to a concert recently. It featured a new sensational Chinese pianist, Miss To Tee. I can't remember much about what she was playing (it was one of those seriously uncool dudes, Beethoven, maybe) but I did notice that she certainly wasn't "flat". As I munched my way through a packet of Viagra tablets, and swelled to a climax with the melody, I said to myself, "Yes! This is what classical music is all about!"

Damian Thompson can keep his Bach (that Baroque wig he wears when he thinks nobody is watching doesn't suit him anyway). Give me To Tee tickling the ivories any day. Or the new CD set  from Cora Bimbo, in the deluxe edition with extra photos. YES!!!

Playing Fauré's Dolly Bird Suite

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Is Monbiot trying to kill me?
By James Goldenpile

I was eating my cold toast for breakfast today (no warming required), when I was struck by a terrible thought: is George Monbiot trying to kill me? Call me paranoid if you like, but I remember that the last time I appeared on Any Questions? with him, he was carrying an umbrella, and I am fairly sure that it was he who jabbed me in the leg half-way through the programme. I was explaining once more how Michael Mann had produced his hockey-stick graph by massaging his data, adding in his friends' telephone numbers and converting them to Fahrenheit. But the warmists are up to their dirty tricks as usual.

There's definitely a Libtard conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, the man on the Sainsbury's fish counter looks suspiciously like Al Gore, and is obviously ready to slip me a poisoned haddock if I let my vigilance slip. But Monbiot is at the centre of it. He's a master of disguise too - the old lady who nearly barged me off the pavement yesterday didn't look anything like him, so that proves it.

Phew, it's cold today, isn't it? I told you there was an ice-age coming.

There's something sinister about him, don't you think?

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Concluded here.