"Nah! That's a bunch of hooey!"

Pope Benedict XVI, famous the world over for his infallibility, has declared that concerns over global warming amount to undue alarmism.

Apparently, the pontiff's underlying point is that Earth never will become hotter than hell.

UPDATE: Hold on! This guy says the pope's position on global warming has been misrepresented. If so, The Rascal begs Benedict's forgiveness.

How dumb can you get?

Bill O'Reilly, the dim-witted commentator on the Fox News Channel, waxed offended the other night because a liberal blog site had referred to Pope Benedict XVI as a "primate."

O'Reilly seems not to know that one of the definitions of "primate" is: a bishop of highest rank.

Read about it here and follow the links therein.

Now that's the Catholic Church I remember

When The Rascal was growing up in the Catholic Church in the pre-Vatican II days, we had our masses in a language nobody understood, with the priest's back turned to us, and we believed that Protestants were pretty much full of crap.

Pope Benedict XVI seems bent on bringing back those good old days.

Did you hear the one about the pope and...

Well, never mind. I'd better not tell that joke. I don't want to be accused of terrorism.

Pope coming to America

The Vatican confirmed today that Pope Benedict XVI will visit the United States on some unspecified date at the invitation of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

It'll be interesting to see if the pontiff makes nice with any prominent officials of the Democratic Party. I mention that matter in light of how Bishop Thomas Doran of the Catholic Diocese of Rockford feels about Democrats.

You might recall that Doran kicked up something of a fuss last August when he wrote a column in the diocesesan newspaper denouncing the Democrats as the party of "abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation."

Democrats should be unelected, Doran wrote: "Their continuance in public office is a clear and present danger to our survival as a nation."

Perhaps Doran expects that the pope will avoid pleasantries with any Democrats before first asking them where they stand on the issue of buggery.