Nepotentiaism: The Pope’s Signature Scent For A Personalised Burial
ANORAK is often asked: “What does the Pope taste like?”
The Pope appears caught in fey ambivalence of superiority, as though once he’s got to be Pope no other Earthly achievement can match it. With the only hope of fighter elevation thought death, the Pope must wonder what it’s all been for.
Maybe it’s time for a party?
Pope Benedict’s elder brother, Georg Ratzinger, a retired priest and former director of music at Regensburg Cathedral in Germany, is to turn 85 birthday on January 15.
What more fitting celebration but for the Catholic Diocese of Regensburg to spend 100,000 dollars flying 90 boy choristers and 37 musicians to Rome to perform a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart mass in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican especially for him.
Has not the Vatican enough catamites of its own? Do more boys need to be imported? Do their parents get to travel with them?
Mr Ratzinger Senior may not have all that many birthdays left, and nepotism never did the church any harm.
But does any of this help us answer the question as to what the Pope smells like?
While the birthday boys get ready to sing for the birthday boy, the Catholic Cemetery Conference is contemplating the “disposing of human bodies in which a lye solution dissolves tissues into a sterile, syrupy substance that can be safely flushed down a drain”.
Add some germicide and you can be put to some sue unblocking drains after your death.
Might this process, known as alkaline hydrolysis, enable us not only to turn a birth bath or puddle into a cemetery, and so free up land for the living, but also give the Papacy its signature scent?
Deacon Glenn Tylutki, outreach coordinator of cemetery services for the Archdiocese of Chicago, says:
“I guess I don’t know how to say it any better than it’s a desecration. The process has no dignity and respect for the human body. In our faith, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.”
It is our point, precisely. A few dashes of alcohol and the world beyond the Vatican and the immediate Ratzinger family can discover that the Pope smells of newly opened packet of Top Trumps and exercise books…
Posted: 27th, October 2008 | In: Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
