Homometer

The new broom in the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI, is out sweeping the Catholic seminaries in the United States. According to the New York Times investigators have been appointed to search for "evidence of homosexuality" among the seminarians and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching on the subject. All such persons are to be given a quick ecclesiastical swoosh into the dust pan.

The newspaper says that, “The issue of gay seminarians and priests has been in the spotlight because a study commissioned by the church found last year that about 80 percent of the young people victimized by priests were boys.” Experts say the reason for the disproportion is because of the shortage of girls to vamp on in seminaries. They explain that the vampers are not after boys particularly but young meat regardless of gender or sexual orientation, so farmers, lock your lambs up at night lest they be gobbled up by portly men in black cassocks.

Some Catholic clergymen are expressing qualms. They wonder how the investigators are going to know who is and who isn’t under the new Vatican do-ask-maybe-they’ll-tell policy. But the Pope is a hop, skip and jump ahead of them. A Dominican priest who has been clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has invented an electronic device which can tell. It’s called a homometer with accent on the second, not first syllable so as not to sound bigoted.

Rumor has it that Rome is mulling over hooking up on this project with Massachusetts Governor Mit Romney who is hot for launching a program to wiretap mosques to catch terrorists, according to reports published in the Boston Globe. Some high Vatican officials believe that putting the Romney program together with the Benedict program would result in catching gay terrorists, a real plus. But a Rome-Romney alliance is still in doubt because Romney is a Mormon, a non-Christian religion according to certain cardinals who place it somewhere between Ba’hai and Hinduism.

If the Romney deal goes through priests caught doing the nasty with each other will be turned over to the Massachusetts governor to be dealt with according to Mormonian law. Otherwise offenders will be exorcized since Pope Benedict says the devil made ‘em do it.