With The Editor away on his annual holidays it falls to yours truly to address the crucial issue of the day – namely, how we are going to defend Mother Church from the depredations of the trendy evangelists who want to drag her kicking and screaming into the 19th century, at least?

I refer to newspaper reports this week that an English evangelical magazine with the impossibly catchy name of Christianity & Renewal has canvassed the opinion of the Khameleon advertising agency on how church attendance might be increased.
As you might expect, the godless heathens who populate the venal world of advertising saw this challenge as an excuse to rip the good book to pieces and start again from scratch. According to the boys in red braces, “traditional approaches such as showing Jesus on the cross and Bible quotations are a turn-off to non-churchgoers”. Quite how something in a church could be a turn-off to non-churchgoers is a bit of mystery, but then what else can we expect from organised religion?
Of more concern to those of us who like to stress the mental in fundamental is the idea that the venerated cross – what my old mucker Keith Richards once accurately described as “the logo of the Catholic Church” – should be hauled out of the building and stuffed in a wheely-bin behind the sacristy.
But there’s worse – wait’ll you hear what the ad men reckon should be put in its place. Instead of “traditional images like Jesus on the cross”, they propose an image of “a lone goldfish in a bowl with the line ‘when did you last really need someone to talk to?’ or a vicar with the words ‘when was the last time you saw some really good stand-up…for free?’”
Pause to allow those terrible words and images to sink in.
Deep breath. The less said about the comic vicar the better, other than to note in passing that quite a few of the stand-ups who have appeared in RTE light entertainment shows over the years, already know only too well what it’s like to be crucified.
As for the goldfish in the bowl, this is so far removed from good, old-fashioned, healthy religious pornography as to border on the blasphemous. Is there room for compromise? I don’t think so. The image of a goldfish nailed to a cross, for instance, whilst pleasingly surreal, doesn’t quite carry that authentic ring of brutal oppression and grotesque suffering which is so central to the Christian ethos. Plus, the crown of thorns would surely keep slipping off.
Happily for those of us who view with contempt the whimperings of the a la carte brigade, the top man in Rome, like the proud ex-goalkeeper that he is, continues to hold out as the last line of defence against the waves of homesexualism sweeping along the flanks and through the middle of Mother Church, like a spectacularly gay version of Real Madrid.
If our Anglican brethren had a man like him between the sticks, that bloke who looked suspiciously like Elton John would never have been in with even a chance of promotion to the first team.
Yes, these are difficult times for The Faith. Why, even I, an ordained Minister in the Church of the New Truth, whose only ever experience of a long dark night of the soul was 24 hours in Wigan Casino dancing to Stax and Tamla Motown, yes, even I have Certain Doubts.
Perhaps they were best expressed by the eminent Fr Dougal Maguire when he told that bishop: “You know the way God made us and everything and then he sent his son down to save us and so when we die we’ll all live again in heaven and everything… That’s the bit I have trouble with”.
Amen.
Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq

Editor Niall Stokes is on holidays