Pope Deni I

OK, so after reading all of the stuff that has been written in the news about picking a new Pontiff and how its done and all that I've noticed something. I'm actually eligible to become the Bishop of Rome. It's true. I am a baptized Catholic male. That is the only requirement for Supreme Pontiff. I'm still four months away from being eligible to run for president but I can become Pope next week! Now my odds might being longer than Kucinich '04 but hey, Karol Wojtyla was an unexpected choice too, back in the day. Now it will be an uphill battle for sure, what with my only having been to a Catholic church about twice since I was 10 and those were a funeral and a wedding. So I'm going to have to explain that. And I haven't taken communion since my grandfather's funeral when I was 15, which I think may have been the only time I ever took communion, and don't really want to again since the body of Christ is some foul tasting nasty cardboard thingy. But I have taken communion, so that's covered. I figure after I'm Pope I can switch it to something like rum balls anyway.

But I'm going to have to change a lot of my ways and make some serious campaign promises if I plan to pull off the big upset next week.

First, I don't hate women enough. So I'll have to pledge to continue the long tradition of treating women as second class citizens. Sorry girls, that means no priesthoods or reasonable family planning for you. And I'll need to find a way to tell my wife that after all those years of medical school and training she'll need to now dedicate her life to raising children since that's all women are supposed to be good for.

Then there's the pretend caring about the poor. I figure what I need to do this weekend is get a good photo-op with a dirty poor family. I can find some HIV-positive single mother with twelve kids somewhere and preach to her about morals and tell her what a good Catholic she is for not using those evil condoms to save her from her disease and having more children than she could afford as I bless her forehead with my bejeweled hand. I'll then take my leave back to my castle by way of bullet-proof limousine for my nightly seven course meal served on sterling silver by faithful butlers amid billions of dollars of centuries old art before retiring to my feather bed with silk sheets, where I fall asleep while watching The Daily Show on my satellite TV and looking over the church's stock portfolio. That will give me a great image of caring for the poor.

And then there's the fags. Now my attitude towards them has been waaaaayyyy off church teaching for a long time, so I'll have to lose all my gay friends. This will make my social circle significantly smaller but the tradeoff is that so many more people will be kissing my hand everyday. So that's cool. I'll have to wiggle my way through the reasoning behind condemning gays while protecting child rapists, but the American Bishops have already got that covered for me. We just blame the fags for the child rapes instead of the Cardinals who moved them from school to school. Kill two birds with one stone. Sweet.

Looks like I've got a long weekend ahead of me. I'll need to have a strong kick-off to my campaign. I've got to make up for a lot of years of neglecting my Catholic duty of oppressing and demonizing women, gays and rape victims. Most of my competition are years ahead of me. But maybe, just maybe, with a little hard work that white smoke you see coming from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel could be me.

For my name I've decided I will call myself Pope Junipero Serra I, in honor of the 18th Century Franciscan priest. He's the one that ran missions in California where he enslaved Native Americans, forced them to convert to Christianity (sometimes at gunpoint), shackled and whipped them for disobedience, and hunted them down if they ran away from the mission. John Paul II beatified him (one step 'til Sainthood!) in 1987.