Miracle Snob, by Edwin Decker, San Diego City Beat, May 25, 2011

Miracle Snob

By Edwin Decker
San Diego City Beat
May 25, 2011

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/article-9106-miracle-snob.html

I happened to be at the Vatican while they were gearing up for the heavily anticipated beatification ceremony of Pope John Paul II. What a spectacle!

Beatification is the last stage before canonization, which is when a particular holy-person is recognized as a saint. To be beatified, the Holy-Person-in-Question (HPQ) must have performed a Vatican-approved, posthumous miracle. Then the HPQ must perform a second miracle to be canonized.

The first miracle has already happened. A Parkinson’s beleaguered nun prayed directly to Deucey (my pet name for Paul II) and lo, was her disease promptly cured. The alleged miracle was investigated and approved by current pope Benedict XVI, leaving Deucey to perform only one more miracle—which explains why every Catholic you know constantly keeps checking his or her tortillas.

Controversy surrounds Deucey’s canonization, largely because Benedict is rushing the process. He waived the traditional five-year waiting period and pushed the rest of the phases through so quickly that Deucey’s beatification has become the fastest in papal history.

On a side note, I wonder what Deucey will be a patron of when he is canonized. There’s a patron saint for everything: bankers, blacksmiths, black people, bikers, beggars and babies. Saints can be patrons of more than one thing, including goofy ones such as a patron saint for greeting-card manufacturers, because, you know, blessed are the card-makers! There are also embarrassing patronages, such as patron saint against scabies, warts, hernias and hydrophobia. I hope when Deucey’s canonized, he’s assigned an embarrassing patronage, something like, “patron saint of fromunda”—because the whole thing stinks!

So, why the rush to canonize? Probably because any discussion of Deucey’s potential sainthood must include the fact that it’s his fault that God’s Church became such an enormous smoking and sparking engine of sexual molestation. (Talk about a Deus ex machina!). This is why the instant some miracle-hungry Bible clutcher finds a grease-stained tortilla that vaguely resembles a man’s face, Benedict and his Vatican experts will rubberstamp it as a miracle faster than anyone can say, “Hey! That stain looks like Lady Gaga!”

They’ll canonize Deucey even though any clear-thinking person (who, um, happens to believes in miracles) knows no real saint would’ve let the abuse scandal happen. Any clear-thinking person (who believes in holy dead people who return to Earth in the form of magical ethnic foods) knows that not only is the former pontifex maximus not a saint; he’s the exact opposite: He’s an Aint: the Patron Aint of Letting Children Get System atically Sexually Abused (and also of diarrhea and dingleberries).

And he let it happen alright. Consider the case of Father Marcial Degollado, who continued to receive Deucey’s protection even after a guilty verdict. Consider Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, whom the former pontiff scuttled out of Boston (moments before his arrest) and rewarded with the ultra-cushy job of Archpriest in charge of Basilica Maggiore in Rome—instead of granting Law the more appropriate title of Arch-Pederast in Charge of Lava Pit 36 in Hell.

Deucey didn’t punish a single child-raping scumbag or any of the high-ranking scumbags who shielded child-raping scumbags. Because he either didn’t know what was going on (which means “The Holy See,” didn’t see shit) or he knew and kept oiling and gassing the engine—the great Rapus ex Machina— anyway. So it will take more than your standard, Cure-One-Case-of-Parkinson’s kind of miracle to make me believe that assface was a saint. Admittedly, I’m a miracle snob but, c’mon—curing Parkinson’s? Cancer? That shit don’t impress me. Diseases go into remission. It’s rare, but it happens; it’s just plain silly to confuse our ignorance about disease with divine intervention.

I was talking about this with my wife’s parents. We pondered the age-old question, “How come God never heals amputees?” I’m sure lots of people throughout the centuries have prayed for their limbs to be returned, so why has that type of miracle never happened? Because that type of miracle would be a freaking miracle! The real deal! It’s the kind of thaumaturgy necessary to even consider canonizing Deucey. Here are a few other acceptable miracles from Paul II:

• Replace every gun on the planet with a toy, “BANG”-flag gun.

• Make NFL players and owners suddenly realize their greed and agree to reduce everyone’s salaries enough that parents can bring some of their kids to a game without having to pawn the others.

• Make all traffic-control video cameras also record the bedrooms of the City Council members who voted for them.

• Make Fox News self-aware.

• Make a strip club ATM that doesn’t charge more than the amount you’re trying to withdraw.

• Make the CEO of every oil company suddenly realize his greed and—actually, just smite all the oil company CEOs.

• Turn Newt Gingrich into a newt.

• Sarah Palin / Michelle Bachman lesbian sex tape—free download!

Are you hearing these prayers, Deucey? Screw this Curing-One-Person-At-A-Time, noise! How about curing everyone who got AIDS because of your medieval, anti-condom crusade? Or, if you really want to impress me, go back in time and un-molest all those kids whose lives were destroyed on your watch. Now that’s a miracle I could rubber-stamp.