Spadaro wins prestigious satire prize

Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ has been awarded the prestigious Vatican II Prize for Catholic Satire, named after the congress that spawned more parodies of Catholic teaching and liturgy than any before.

"I laughed until I cried" - emeritus Pope Benedict VI.

The hysterically funny blurb for the book makes it clear that it will be a bundle of laughs from start to finish:

[Pope Francis] has turned the Catholic Church upside-down, flung open the windows of the Vatican and purged the Augean stables of corruption, simony, nepotism and financial skulduggery. ... Where there are trouble spots in the world, he goes and invariably people say his visits change everything. ... Unlike his predecessor, he does not sit down in a room in the Vatican and write learned books. ... He likes being asked questions and finds it easy to respond. ... The Franciscan revolution is under way and in spite of his vehement critics the revolution will roll on and new horizons will be opened for the one and a half billion Catholics in the world today.

Raymond Cardinal Burke is one who agrees that Pope Francis likes being asked questions and finds it easy to respond. Another is Archbishop Viganò. Both assured me that this was not satire but a perfectly true description of the Pope's reactions to questions, whether on doctrine or on his own record.

Henry "Marcantonio Colonna" Sire, on the other hand, merely commented "This satricial book makes Eccles's blog look like Holy Writ in comparision."

Cardinal "Foxy" Napier was highly commended for comparing Francis to Jesus.

Previous winners of the satire prize include Austen Ivereigh, for his biography Pope Francis, the great Redeemer, Fr James Martin SJ for his wonderful works explaining that homosexual relationships were best conducted on bridges, and Prof. Tina Beattie for her book comparing the Mass to an act of homosexual intercourse (a theme now taken up by Fr Rosica).

A good try, Rosie, but this is just unhinged, rather than proper satire.

Satire about Pope Francis is nowadays as common as heresy from a Jesuit, but Spadaro's book goes further than any before, explaining how the Holy Father can walk on water, travel in time, leap high buildings, cure diseases simply by touching people, slay dragons, glow in the dark, and turn people to stone merely by staring at them.

Very cruel satire on Pope Francis.

Anyway, the final word must go to Fr Spadaro himself. "I am delighted that my book has won this prestigious Vatican II Prize," he said. "The first thing I shall do is to hold a wild celebration party with some of my closest friends."

"Let's get legless!"

Parodies make me depressed

Today we are luck enough to have a guest post from Marvin the Paranoid Deacon. The Reverend Mr Marvin writes his own blog, with a special password-protected section that his bishop cannot read.

Our guest blogger.

Parody is the last bastion of the bully (with apologies to Dr Johnson). I've heard of Dr Johnson, and his remark about patriotism. So I thought I'd do a clever parody of his epigram and... no, not a parody. Oh dear, can I start again?

Sir! The Tablet is a scurrilous rag, not worthy of the house of a gentleman.

What I was trying to say is that I get very depressed when I see parodies. For example, there's this organization ACTOR that everyone keeps talking about. It seems to be a parody of the Church of England, or at least its liberal tendency. Abortion, same-sex marriage, homosexual priests, defying the Pope... We've seen all this before, and these ACTORs (who are doubtless all true and faithful Catholics) are simply trying to bully the liberal Anglicans by parodying their views.

Six wives? I left the Catholic Church because I really wanted six husbands!

Excuse me while a pour a bucket of water over my head. You'd like to see a deacon in good standing with water streaming off him, wouldn't you? It would make you laugh, wouldn't it? All right then, here goes.

As a deacon, I am expected to be a martyr.

Now, I was looking around for examples of parody, and, apart from Eccles's blog, I found that the worst examples are in the Bible. That's a book that we deacons like to read in the bath. I've got a special waterproof edition, as I keep dropping it into the water.

You may be familiar with a man called Jesus Christ. We deacons get told about him when we go to deacon classes. But Christ could never have been a deacon in good standing, because he kept telling jokes, being satirical and even making parodies.

Consider that poor Pharisee. By all accounts, he was a Pharisee in good standing. Probably he was a spiritual life coordinator, so that he used to fast twice in a week, go on Twitter to insult Catholic women, and give tithes of all that he possessed. Note that A. Pharisee was his real name - Anthony Pharisee, at a guess. He's more likely to be a real person than the publican, who called himself Mr Peccator, an obviously made-up name. But Jesus bullied him unmercifully.

A Pharisee in good standing.

Christ also made stupid jokes about people straining at gnats and swallowing camels. How depressing. I don't often eat gnats, but I see nothing wrong with swallowing camels. Here's one of my favourite recipes.

I'll swallow camels if I want to!

Well, I hope that you will all take my remarks to heart, and continue to be really nasty to anyone who engages in satire or parody. We're not in this world to have fun... well, I'm not... you try being a manically-depressed deacon sometime.