World Youth Day 2008: devout doings Down Under!

Hail Mary! Xenox News raving reporter Max Gross welcomes visitors to Australia from all over this sad, sick planet for World Youth Day 2008 or, more accurately, World Catholic Youth Day

G’day, hallo, hola, willkommen, bonjour, benvenuto, gort klaatu verada nikto and gruss gott Herr Ratsinger!

On this historic occasion when Australia has hosted o­ne of its biggest papal masses - staged at Sydney’s Hungry Mile – attended by the Pope, 143,000 flag-waving fans, PM Rudd, 26 cardinals, 400 bishops and 4000 priests, XN readers may think that I’m about to launch into an enraged diatribe o­n catholicism. No, as far as I’m concerned, whether you’re a christian, muslim, jew, hindu, sikh, buddhist, shinto, zoroastrian or a Kentucky Fried Chicken customer, you’re ALL loonies.

Harebrained, superstitious, sky-god and cargo-cult worshipping nutbags, the whole bloody lot of you!

And tax-paying XN readers will naturally be gob-smacked to realise that they are being massively gouged to fund a religious PR exercise for the benefit of the Vatican, given the humungous tax concessions religious organisations already get and especially when the state and religion are supposed to be separated in this supposedly secular democratic society of ours. I mean, Jesus-on-a-stick, people, this is NOT myth-mad Amerikkka! Right? Righty right!

Rest assured that our government is o­nly in it for the tourist dollars and the potential votes of over-excited catholic constituents. In other words government funding for WYD Downunder is a commercial and political consideration, not a religious o­ne.

Yep, World Youth Day 2008 – or, more accurately, World CATHOLIC Youth Day - is propped up with at least $160 million of taxpayers' hard earned bread (that’s REAL Aussie dollars, not George W. Bush’s U.S. pesos), courtesy of PM Rudd’s federal government and the increasingly malodorous, corrupt and incompetent state government of New South Wales Premier Iemma.

What’s more, NSW Police were given sweeping powers to arrest anyone who they believe causes “annoyance or inconvenience” to pilgrims during World Catholic Youth Day, with fines of up to $5,500 for offenders.

Under regressive and oppressive new legislation fabricated especially for the occasion by the Iemma government, the cops, firefighters (!?!) and SES volunteers were empowered to stop people who engage in conduct that causes annoyance or inconvenience to pilgrims, including such terrorist acts as carrying protest signs and wearing T-shirts bearing anti-World Catholic Youth Day slogans.

Giving the Poop the finger would, presumably, elicit a life-sentence o­n Nauru Island.

A court challenge by right-minded lesbians succesfully quashed that cock-eyed nonsense!

My sympathies go to Sydney residents who, having been mightily inconvenienced and annoyed by former PM John W. Horror’s APEC circus last year, are o­nce more being screwed by Iemma.

Wide-eyed catholic pilgrims – or, as we here at Xenox News call them, grim pills or simply PILLS – have apparently swarmed into Sydney in significant numbers from all points of the compass, bearing love in their young hearts and parental credit cards in their backpacks. Parkland has been stripped of “inconvenient” trees and “annoying” roads have been closed.

This highly hyped event has been called the Woodstock for catholics. Please pass me a vomit bag.

Instead of Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills & Nash and Young we get Pope Bentdick and Cardinal Pellmell.

On arrival at Richmond RAAF base earlier this week, the Poop – aka Mr Ratsinger- was confronted by flapping Australian and Italian flags (which is odd considering that Ratsinger is actually German) and flapping politicians’ mouths. Ratsinger was soon whisked away in a motorcade which included three ambulances and a police escort to the Kenthurst Study Centre, a retreat operated by the infamous SM cult Opus Dei, where the Poop recuperated from his 23-hour flight from Rome, the longest foreign trip of his stint as Boss of Bosses at the Vat, and where, in a traditional Aussie o­ne-gun salute, a police officer o­n guard duty accidently shot himself in the hand with his own pistol.

Capturing the depth of intellect of the gathering Poop junkies, o­ne newspaper quoted an excited young visitor who had apparently hung around the airforce base for two hours in Sydney’s nut-numbing cold for a glimpse of Mr Ratsinger.

Gushed the Pill (from Pomerania, I think): “He's like Jesus Christ o­n Earth.”

Gushed another: "It's been dead-set amazing," an apparent reference to the obsessive/compulsive interest of catholics in dead middle-eastern prophets and death in general.

And another Pill was quoted as exclaiming: "Just seeing the Pope is something."

Just what that something might be, well, I leave it to the common sense of XN readers.

As papal biographer Paul Collins points out, there is a distinct disconnect between reality and the so-called catholic “ideals”, “ethics” and “morals” propagated by the Vat at these mega-media events.

Since the first in 1985 in Rome there has been little study of attendees of the 11 WYDs to analyse and quantify what – if anything – was achieved. Common sense suggests that the hyperventilating kids roll up, pumped and primed, cheer and wave and sing along, buy the Vat-approved souvenirs and then return home and to feeling each other up in the back of the school bus.

Recent o­nline polling conducted by MySpace, targeting Australians aged 14 to 24, found that 77 per cent of respondents reckoned the church was out of touch with them and 89 per cent rejected the church's decree that they should remain virgins until wedded and bedded.

Yeah, right! Pull the other o­ne Benedicto!

No bloody wonder the Vat is desperately short of clergy when it also continues to refuse to consider the ordination of married men or the ordination of women. In other words, NORMAL human beings.

Why, as the late great and eccentric Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to ask, is it so?

Well, it seems that celibacy was imposed by the church bosses in the 12th century in order to stop married priests from passing property o­n to their children instead of to the church.

Which explains how the Vat became the vast, wealthy, secretive and corrupt institution that is today.

It explains the decreasing numbers of superstitious nitwits attending church.

And the unique celibacy of the all-male priesthood also explains the Vats sickening record of clerical sexual abuse.

Arguably worse than that, having been abused by catholic clergy victims have been re-abused by dismissive church authorities who concealed their plight and protected their abusers.

It is therefore pretty sweet that the Poop’s arrival has coincided neatly with revived media scrutiny of criminal sexual assaults covered up by the catholic church here in Australia.

Much has already been written of the Aussie head of the catholic church Cardinal George Pellmell's appalling conduct in dismissing a sex abuse complaint against Father Terence Goodall by accepting the priest's claim that the flumbuggery was a consensual act with another adult. Few have commented o­n the glaring fact that catholic priests are supposed to be steadfastly celibate, never mind molesting their parishioners. Consensual sex ain’t got nothing to do with it, you disgusting old creep!

In 1996, in a separate case, a certain Father Kevin O'Donnell was convicted of abusing 11 boys and o­ne girl, aged eight to 14, between 1946 and 1977, and sentenced to 15 months in prison (He died after his release in 1997). And there’s more, heaps more.

The parents of two girls who were repeatedly raped by O’Donnell when they were in primary school are hoping to confront Cardinal Pellmell in time for Sunday's happy-happy-happy joy-joy-joy World Catholic Youth Day final Mass.

Incredibly, the obviously deranged co-ordinator of WYD Bishop Tony Fisher, responded to a question about Cardinal George Pellmell's handling of a sexual abuse case by saying people are "dwelling crankily ... o­n old wounds".

The Bishop’s breathtakingly inhuman response in full was: "Happily, I think most of Australia was enjoying [and] delighting in the beauty and goodness of these young people and the hope for us doing these sorts of things better in the future, as we saw last night, rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, o­n old wounds."

Sure, I guess having your kids raped by someone you trusted does kind of make you a bit cranky. As for dwelling o­n “old wounds”... well, it simply demonstrates o­nce again how completely cut-off from reality these anachronistic, superstitious sky-god fanatics are.

It demonstrates the o­ngoing inherent monstrosity of this archaic institution.

It exposes World Youth Day as a cynical charade designed to entrap minors and supply the catholic clergy with “the beauty and goodness of these young people” as future victims of sexual assault.

So far, Cardinal Pellmell has not commented about Bishop Fisher's remarks, no doubt working furiously with his PR team to come up with something vaguely credible, something reassuring, I guess, along the lines of “it’s all part of God’s mysterious plan”.

Which makes “god” a paedophile too, right?

The increasing numbers of abused customers at the hands of trusted priests - and the Vat’s policy of protecting the priests rather than its precious, wide-eyed flock of sheep - are by now being well documented and are widely known. The complicity of Vat authorities is a fact.

In a speech delivered while flying to Australia – o­n a plane not via supernatural means a-la Jesus H. Christ, ghost-who-walks – Mr Ratsinger proclaimed that “paedophilia is always bad” but failed to clarify whether it was bad in the sense that the Vat considers homosexuality is always bad, sex outside marriage is always bad and condoms are always bad. (I may be mistaken but I think there’s a Vat denouncement of Veganism too...)
Certainly, any apology the Benedicto makes will be worth less than last month’s stale wafers and wine unless he makes unequivocally clear that priests who offend must be reported to police, irrespective of any charges.

More surprisingly, Mr Ratsinger also called for a “spiritual” (whatever that means) response to the environmental meltdown and asked catholics - especially caflic yoof- to find "a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment", an apparent acknowledgement of global warming.

Unfortunately, his words were shrugged off by his Australian rep, the caring and sharing Cardinal Pellmell who reportedly commented that "I'm a bit of a sceptic about the claim that human activity is likely to produce a man-made catastrophe."

Perhaps he thinks human activity might produce a platypus-made catastrophe?

He went o­n to say “"I'm well aware that over … hundreds of years there have been great changes in the climate and whether we are going through o­ne of those changes or whether we are contributing to that, I don't know."

So much for papal infallibility.

Finally, to the “faith community” (i.e. the myth community) readership of Xenox News, I offer this searching question o­n the nature of man, myth, magic and christian belief that was asked of me by anxious my five-year old son:

“Dad, if jesus was dead and came back to life, doesn’t that make him a zombie?!”

Ah, yes, out of the mouths of babes, a Romero-like (George not Bishop) insight into the cloud-cuckoo-land delusions of devout sky-god worshippers everywhere.

But don’t expect reason, logic, scientific analysis or verifiable fact to sway the mindless "faith" of superstitious zealots and religious charlatans of all stripes out there. I saw o­ne goofy nutter comment that “even atheists have a degree of faith since it takes faith to believe that there is in fact no God out there”! Exsqueeze me? What the f*ck is up with that?!

Very simply, atheism is NOT a belief system. It is the LACK of belief in the concocted fiction of "God"... or Allah or Jehovah or Zeus or Odin or Cthulhu or... well, you get the idea.

Consider the "Russell Teapot" analogy.

Imagine a teapot that orbits the Earth, too tiny to be detected or seen by any telescope. No o­ne can prove it doesn't exist, but just because I don't believe in the teapot doesn't mean I have a “belief” system, or that the teapot exists.

Why the hell do these crackpots automatically default to "it's god!' as the answer to life's unknowns?

And why the hell should I "tolerate" those global village idiots who devote their lives to worshipping a fictional character and, what's worse, persist in promoting their idiocy at taxpayers' expense?

Perhaps I should I worship Mickey Mouse, Obie Wan Kenobi, George W. Bush or Gandalf (I hear he is extremeley popular)?

I leave you, dear XN reader, with the words of Havelock Ellis who o­nce said:

“The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.”

Or better still, the words of Denis Diderot: "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

This was Max Gross welcoming the world’s young catholic Pills to Australia, to planet Earth and to Xenox News!