THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. Several minutes ago, I concluded my private audience with Pope John Paul II, and I want everyone to know that we had a very good chat. I gave him the nickname "Hunchy the Popo," and he taught me how the Vatican is really its own country - the smallest one in the world. So I asked him who the president was, and he just started mumbling in Polandese and banging a little gold pocket bible against his forehead.

I had wanted to talk with the pope about four or five different things, but we only got through two before I had to be on my way. You see, it's very busy and distracting in the pontiff's chambers, what with the constant stream of lanky, flaxen-haired young male attendants sashaying through to massage his grotesquely stooped shoulders and empty the emerald-encrusted bedpan which lives in a little drawer beneath the seat of his throne. So I stuck to the key issues and made my hasty retreat.

Now, I know that any Americans are very anxious about the situation back in the United States, where the news media has finally decided to shine its spotlight on the fact that 97% of the pope's clergymen are child-poking homos. Personally, I don't see what the big story is. Where I come from, everyone has always known they weren't called Cathy-Licks for no reason. I remember one time when I was around fourteen years old. I was back in Midland on winter vacation from my elite New England boarding school, and I was walking home after a long night of funneling Schlitz with my buddies and sticking M-80's up the asses of armadillos, when I passed by St. Ann's church. It was around 2 a.m., and damned if I didn't look up and see about fifteen priests wearing nothing but their collars, out on the lawn playing extreme Twister with the whole boy's choir and just licking at everything in tongue's reach. Saw it with my own eyes. So to everyone out there who's surprised about this, I have some other shocking news to lay on you: Gomer Pyle never saw combat.

Anyway, I told old Hunchy the Popo that maybe he oughta think about letting his boys settle down and get hitched like they did way back in the Middle Ages, but he told me that wouldn't work. You see, the whole reason they made priests swear off sex and marriage in the first place was so that they would have no heirs and have to leave all their savings to the church. Well when I heard that, I didn't push the point any further. As a Republican, I certainly understand and empathize with the need to shamelessly manipulate the disempowered to your personal financial advantage.

Speaking of money, I also assured Hunchy that despite the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Americans, that I would remain committed to a blindly anti-abortion and anti-science platform, thereby making me eligible for plenty of funding from those gilded Catholic coffers when my 2004 re-election campaign swings into gear. Never mind that deep down, I'm positive that Hunchy's version of Jesus is all wrong, and that for believing in it, he'll spend eternity chanting Heil Mary's in HELL. (Laughter.)

Once I had the pontiff's assurance of financial support, I listened to him babble something about world peace and the coloreds in Africa, and then I was off, because not only was I tired, but because Hunchy has that funny old person sour smell, and it was making my eyes burn a little bit. And then I came directly here, to talk to all of you reporters.

Thank you, and God Bless.

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