Vatican "forgives" Lennon

Via the BBC comes the news that the Vatican has decided to "forgive" John Lennon for claiming that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

How nice.

Of course, the Vatican finds itself, as the Americans say, a day late and a dollar short. See, they've decided that Lennon's comment was a "boast", whereas anyone who knows the truth behind the story realises that it was nothing of the sort.

So I guess that 40-odd years after the fact it's nice that they're acknowledging it at all. Actually, I think that this is just an indicator of how far behind the Vatican is in their paperwork. Maybe some overworked clerk finally got around to reading the original article and realised the mistake.

Think about it. The Vatican is always coming out and saying things about events that happened decades ago. They've only recently acknowledged that the then Pope might have done more when it came to the question of Hitler. And before that we had the admission that the Spanish Inquisition might have been a wee bit on the harsh side.

So there's hope. It seems like they are catching up. They've probably just hired on some new, eager young firebrand who is working through the backlog.

At this rate the Roman Catholic church should be ready to admit that overcrowding is somewhat of a problem some time around 2012, by 2017 they might be telling us that AIDS is a threat, and by 2020 they may finally come out and tell us that abstinence-only education doesn't work. Who knows, we may yet see them endorsing condoms and producing their own blessed "packet of three" under the name "His Holiness's Swiss Guard*".

I wouldn't hold my breath, though. It's been two thousand years and they're still clinging to the myth that Jesus was a peace-loving lamb who was killed by the Jews instead of the Romans.

* I can't claim this joke as my own. It appeared in an old Dark Future novel by Games Workshop.