Dan Taylor

In honour of Pope Ratzinger’s state visit to the UK, I want to celebrate with some of my favourite infallible representatives of the divine Godhead. It’s fitting that a third-world state like ourselves should fork out the estimate of up to £13.5 million for the blessing and grace of the Bishop of Rome. After all, what a great bloke Ratzinger is, and as a citizen of this nation with a marvellously ‘great history of anti-Catholicism’, I feel a fitting tribute is in order.

Pope Rat has done some great things in his position as Cardinal  and Pope.  He has continued denying abortion to women, including victims of rape. He continues to rail against and reject contraceptives like condoms, thereby condemning populations in India, Kenya and the Phillipines where Catholicism is actually on the rise to HIV and Aids.  Well you don’t want to waste your seed after all.  Although yes, he may have expressed remorse at the huge scale of child sex abuse in Ireland at least (though nowhere else), there has been no fulsome apology, and no real action. No released documents, no resignations of bishops or priests. In fact, Channel 4 found that over 1/2 the priests caught out for sexual abuse in England and Wales are still part of the priesthood. Result there, Pope Rat. The actions of the Prat demonstrate he finds homosexuality and atheism far more insidious and dangerous than systemic child abuse. Lovely guy. How much are we paying for him to stay over again?

He also hates our freedom of thought over here, our ‘aggressive secularism’, the fact that women are allowed to have unorthodox opinions, that the ‘immoral’ ‘disorder’ of homosexuality is even legal, that church services are no longer in Latin when the dumb Flock could be brainwashed from birth, not being able to question their faith when they could only rely on the diagrams on the walls to work out what the stories and services were about. Even our secular Saints of Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller are anti-christians here, as Rock music is anti-Christian for Pope Rat.  Hopefully at least his visit will curb the disturbingly bad trend of Christian Metal.

Anyway I don’t want to be a sanctimonious bore like our hacks describe Stephen Fry. To celebrate the Pope’s views on sex, here are my top five sexy Popes for you, readers.

1. Pope Paul II (1464-71)

Fast-tracked to the papacy after his uncle became Pope, the paranoid Paul II was an elusive character. After bullshitting the cardinals to get elected, he would only conduct audiences at night, refused to see friends and tortured his critics.  A fan of horse-races and nicknamed by a contemporary as ‘Our Lady of Pity’, Paul II died from a heart-attack after being apparently sodomised by a page boy. The official record says death from indigeston after eating melon, a euphemism unfortunately no longer in use today.

Pope John XII (955-964)

Elected Pope at around the tender age of 18 after a favour from dad Alberic II, John made full use of the powers of the pontificate. As well going publicly hunting, raising a glass of wine to Satan, invoking demons to help him win games of dice and ordaining a 10 year old bishop in the city of Todi, or castrating or blinding critics depending on mood, John was a prolific shagger, with widows and nieces being a particular fetish.

Not being one for boring religious conventions like transubstantiation, he ordained a deacon in a stable and took Mass without communion (ho, so boring!). He turned the Sacred Palace of St. John Lateran into a brothel according to the Patrologia Latina, having sex with most of Rome, including his mother, sisters and his niece. After being kicked out of Rome for intriguing, he returned with a band of mates and went round killing and excommunicating his critics. Sadly John XII died in his late 20s after shagging another man’s wife – sources are unsure whether he was attacked or it was just a heart attack.

3. Pope Benedict IX (Pope 3 times between 1032-1048)

Although 18 is a certainly a young age to be Christ’s representative on Earth, Benedict IX emerged from a family of dynamic go-getters and first become Pope at the senior age of 12. That’s right. Think of any 12 year old you may know – a child, niece or nephew, or your own playful self in Year 7. Now imagine how you’d fare as Pope. Benedict IX understandably struggled with such responsibility, with all that expectation and tough theological decisions. Benedict amused himself with sodomy and bestiality, and like his forebear John XII, was a particular fan of sponsored orgies, rape, murder and adultery. His contemporaries, when not being killed by him, accused Benedict of being ‘a demon from hell’, and his preference for the arse hole prompted the production of the Liber Gomorrhianus by Peter Damian, attacking Benedict for homosexuality, masturbation and dry-humping.

The citizens of Rome booted him out in 1036, but he returned with the help of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II, and it was business as usual until he got bored of being Pope and sold the Papacy to the highest bidder, his godfather. But you know how it is, the grass is always greener eh! So after marriage, Benedict wanted to be Pope again, so he came back and was Pope for a little bit longer, until finally he was kicked out after a confusing time in Rome when there were 3 Popes. Violent cover-ups and sexy times are nothing new here.

Pope Alexander VI(1492-1503)

Another fan of a good time, Pope Alexander IX loved nothing better than hunting, dancing and a traditional papal orgy. Whilst Pope Alexander sired up to 9 children with his mistress, and like a good dad he spent Church money on magnificent marriage ceremonies. One of his children was Cesare Borgia, the model of the ‘fox’ for Machiavelli’s Prince and a generally the most amoral/canny military commander of the Renaissance and one-time ruler of Rome.

Alexander introduced quite novel ways of making money for the Church, including charging Cardinals with trumped-up crimes, confiscating their wealth and then poisoning them. Alexander XI also has the honour of granting the Spanish the rights to enslave the indigenous Americans of the ‘New World’. He died after being accidentally poisoned by his son after the pair tried to kill another cardinal, and his body became so hideously disfigured and swollen that a contemporary, John Burchard, had to stamp on his body to fit it into a coffin before wrapping it in an old rug to hide the smell.

Pope Joan/John VIII or John XI (1oth or 13th century)

or 

Man or woman? Pope Rat is very much opposed to having women ordained even as priests in our own era, but back in the 13th century they were far more tolerant and open-minded. Does having a vagina make one a bad Christian? Although quite likely mythical, Pope Joan (later known as Pope Agnes) was apparently Popess according to various sources during the 13th century. Reputedly disguising herself as a man (John of Mainz, of English origins), she wowed the Cardinals with her unparalleled knowledge of Scripture, and was later referred to by Boccaccio and Jan Hus, and now perhaps memorialised in the 15th century Tarot as the Papess, or High Priestess in modern packs. Sadly Pope Joan died on the way to the Lateran Church after giving birth to a child, wherewith the unruly Roman crowd stoned the drag Pope to death upon discovering her real gender.

Pope Joan has had a naff film made about her, but has generally been whitewashed out of Catholic history. Some have argued that Pope John VIII, a relatively able and reportedly effeminate Pope (882-892), was the real Pope Joan; others that it was Pope John XI (931-935). John XI is another curious candidate: the son of previous reigning Pope, critic-killer and shagger Sergius III, he was a bumbling tool around at the aptly titled-Pornocracy, when Rome was full of would-be Popes and corruption.

So there you have it. Being a Pope can be sexy, albeit the corrupt sort of orgies, bestiality and covering up Holocaust-denial and child sex abuse across the world by wayward Priests. Hail Pope Rat!

NB all this is for entertainment purposes only, and to highlight a far more important point about the State Visit…