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"I have always been opposed to the Marian doctrines," explained His Holiness. "You know I have always disliked those repetitive clichés about Mary and those hundreds of meaningless Ave Marias, recited incessantly so the words lose any real sense. I have always opposed the rhetorical epithets about Mary and worshipping her as Queen of Heaven, Heavenly Mother, Our Lady of Sorrows, Mary of the Seven Joys, Mother of all Grace, and so on. I have always considered them to be flatus vocis, just hot air..."

"What? You dare say that? You forget that the Black Madonna of Jasna Gòra in Poland rose to prominence recently because you were behind it? For the benefit of your church, naturally. You forget that superstitious mass hysteria dubs as a miracle any blood issuing from plaster idols. Anyhow, history is full of weeping statues: Isis wept in Egypt, Juno and Minerva wept in Rome, and Lakshmi and Parvati continue to weep in India. The latter even has a holy weep every month, as regular as clockwork.

"The Madonnas who weep are now so numerous that it is exceptional if they don't. The apparent caution exercised by your church about these phenomena, the desire not to condemn such irrational manifestations of faith, smacks of compliance and complicity. However, the truth is to be found in the true tears and blood shed by Jesus, not by dubious clay statues. It is precisely that premeditated silence by the church that propagates absurd beliefs and spawns unlikely miracles of weeping simulacrums of Madonnas. You forget that in Southern Italy alone over sixty different Madonnas are worshipped, not to mention those of Lourdes, Guadaloupe, Aparecida, Fatima, Loreto, Syracuse, Medugorje, Grosseto and so on, with all their amazing graces."

"Eternal, I have only given my seal of approval to an expanding cult; one which basically does no harm to anyone," explained His Holiness.

"You don't think my role in all this has been overlooked at all? Me, the Creator, to whom everything is due."

"But Eternal, the Church has established that it is You and Your Son only whom the faithful should worship; while Mary has a cult called latria and the saints and angels get something called dulia. However, it was deemed proper that Mary should be worshipped differently from dulia and latria, so it became iperdulia," His Holiness carefully explained.

"That word has had a lot of success which can be put down to the mystic fervour of Paul VI."

"Well yes, because he believed Mary had the right to special treatment," His Holiness confirmed, pretending not to notice the sarcasm.

"Unfortunately it's just the latest fashion of your church, which is perpetually recycling clichés and definitions," He retorted. Then He paused before saying: "Tell me, Holiness, how can a believer distinguish between latria, dulia and so on? How does he assess degrees of worship? Adoration for me, iperdulia for Mary, and common or garden dulia for the saints. In other words, you expect the poor old believer to know how much weight his prayer will carry, taking care not to exaggerate when he is praying to a saint, for example, because he risks adoring him and that would never do for a saint. I never endowed man with such powers."

He stopped again, closed His eyes for an instant as if to concentrate, then continued:

"You speak of loving your neighbour. That is not what you have shown over two thousand years, when you persecuted and killed millions of Jews, my chosen people, or sponsored crusades to murder defenceless people, or to set up the Inquisition to torture and annihilate so many people that all the wars put together have caused fewer victims! And all in my name!"

"Eternal, those are past misdemeanours - errors which history has condemned. The Holy Inquisition has not existed for centuries..."

"Of course, history has condemned it, but not the church! As for your Holy Inquisition, it disappeared right enough but was soon back again, first called the Holy Office then some years later the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Even if it does not burn heretics at the stake it still works behind the scenes and condemns. Therefore, it is not the church which acknowledges the errors of its ways, but mankind which has come to its senses and made other crimes and terrible errors of this kind impossible.

"Anyway, you cannot be so snide as to speak of charity and loving your neighbour. You have no more right to do so than those who preceded you, because you have shown very little of this charity and love. Maybe with words, or with blessings like urbi et orbi which cost nothing or with your usual Sunday sermon... But when it meant doing something, when you had to act, the church suppressed charity by pride and love by intolerance.

"From the day of the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, when Christianity was granted religious freedom, the church has done nothing but show intolerance and fanaticism. And yet no other document in the history of your church has been so liberal as that edict, which raised it up from the shadows of the catacombs. Ironically, the edict was drawn up by a man totally lacking in morals and bloodthirsty to boot called Constantine the Great."

"The love of orthodoxy of faith sometimes meant the Church had to stand firm. But myself, I have always shown understanding..." His Holiness ventured.

"So orthodoxy meant excommunicating those who did not pay Peter's pence or exterminating the Jews?" He interrupted.

"But the Jews, Eternal, killed Your Son. The Christian reaction was understandable."

"And the church tried to take its revenge!"

"The Jews themselves knew that Christ's blessed blood would pour down on them..."

"You pretend you don't know how things went!" Said the Omnipotent impatiently, furrowing His imposing brow threateningly.

"My Son was not killed by the Jews but the Romans. If you read the Gospel carefully you will find clear evidence of this. It's ridiculous to attribute a crime to them which, even if they had wanted to they could never have committed seeing as they were subject to Rome and had no ius gladii - the right to pronounce sentences of capital punishment. My Son was crucified, and the crucifixion was a Roman torture. The Jews' conception of the death penalty - if they had been allowed to exercise it - was stoning and strangling, which was the ancient custom. But you don't need me to tell you this."

"It is true that Pontius Pilate condemned Him, but only when the people had opted to save Barabbas the thief rather than Jesus."

"These are fairy tales, which your similars relate to the masses. You, Holiness, are a man of culture and you know full well that things went differently. Incidentally, don't forget the Romans took justice very seriously. So it would be absurd to claim that when Pilate issued his sentence he was swayed by the feelings or decisions (as you call them) of a hysterical crowd. What I don't hold with is that according to the laws of Rome, Jesus had only committed political offences. You know that my Son was rather sympathetic to those among His people who proposed that the Romans be driven out of Israel.

"As far as Barabbas is concerned, you might recall that he was not a thief, as you say, but a revolutionary, a lestos as John the Evangelist called him - someone who was armed and risked his life fighting in my name against the oppressors of his people. He was no ordinary criminal. What is also written in the Gospel (as you should know) is that under Roman law there was no way a guilty prisoner could be released in place of another equally guilty one."

"But the Jews - all right, Barabbas was no doubt a special thief - but the Jews..." blustered His Holiness, "they hated Your Son. To see Him condemned they accused Him of blaspheming and told Pilate..." he added naively while his thoughts wandered.

"Just imagine how much Pilate and the Romans cared about anyone blaspheming against me! They had illusions of grandeur those people, a thirst for power and to pursue those ends they needed good brains and legions, not me" He pronounced. "I do not intend to justify the Jews, because they certainly caused me a lot of problems, but if the Jews - all of them - had killed my Son, according to you, this would have authorised the church to persecute them for centuries and segregate them in ghettos, where those who stuck their noses out after curfew were virtually committing suicide! You are so hypocritical that nowadays you join in accusing a bloodthirsty devil like Hitler."

"Ah, the Church has always disapproved of him," His Holiness observed sententiously.

"Really? Your silence in the past I feel rather justified such actions. Perhaps this is because basically you approved of the fact that he was trying to take revenge for the death of my Son. You did of course acknowledge his intentions of doing to my people in one fell swoop what you did to them for two thousand years.

"As for charity, which you also refer to, what you preach is selfishness. I wanted my Son to be born in a stable to be a model of poverty. I wanted Him to be underprivileged, so that He would not even have a tunic to his name. It was not even His garment that He was wearing which the Romans soldiers tore from Him and drew lots for when they hung Him on the cross. I wanted Him to die on the cross, as naked as the meanest of slaves..."

"If this was Your wish, why reprove me for Your decision? The legionnaires drew lots for it, whether it was His or not, because it belonged to them under a specific Roman law called the lex pannicularia," His Holiness elucidated punctiliously.

The Eternal Father's glance swept over His Holiness disapprovingly, from his head cushioned by a pillow with a fancy border, to the edge of the blanket covering his feet. Then He continued, without deigning to comment.

"The thrust of my Son's message was humility. This, of all His teachings, was the one which has most often been ignored by your church, even spurned, from its foundation to the present day..."

"Eternal," hazarded His Holiness, embarrassed by His pause, "You know to what extent a pope has his hands tied, how much he is a victim of history and tradition, a prisoner of the Curia and the system. Every gesture is carefully observed. His behaviour is ordered by strict rules. It's not easy to be as slippery as an eel when a thousand traps are set for you. I cannot say what I think. Before opening my mouth I have to consider what those who have preceded me have said, be it a year or fifteen hundred years ago. I must weigh my words with care, so that the Church and religion are not harmed."

"You are victims of your own machinations," He rebuked.

"Only so that the Church does not make mistakes," blustered His Holiness. "Serious mistakes, I mean," he added, noticing that He was frowning. Then he continued:

"You know how difficult it is to defend the dignity of Your name. It is hard indeed for poor shoulders like mine to carry such a burden," he said, peering into the darkness at the Shape. "The Church has always preached humility," he risked.

"You have made the church an exemplary monument to human pride and on your lips the word humility smacks of blasphemy!" He thundered. "You preach humility in abstract terms - in appearance - not in substance. With brass-faced presumption you have expected people to kiss your feet, placed upon a velvet cushion bordered in gold and you have had yourself paraded around in your sedia gestatoria, dressed up to the nines like some emperor, glistening with rare jewels and ermine, flattered and fanned by a flabellus like the Pharaohs. You don't even find it absurd, because you want everyone to know how powerful and important you are. I pale into insignificance beside you! My poor Son would have refused any earthly title. His kingdom - He always used to say - was not of this world. Who has ever followed His example, except for that seraphic, poor devil St Francis of Assisi?"

"If we had followed closely in the footsteps of Your Son, by being poor, humble and charitable, if the Church had continued to aspire to the kingdom of heaven, the Church would not have got very far and perhaps today Your name and Christ's would both be forgotten. As for the pomp and ceremony, You know such customs have been abolished. As for me, I humbly anoint the feet of my cardinals every Easter."

"An empty gesture!" He retorted "Humility means restraint. How restrained is your gesture if it is given the maximum publicity, becoming a soap-opera on the television, photographed by the tabloid press and commented on only so as to tell everyone that His Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ -because for centuries now you have been calling yourselves Vicars of Christ not of Peter..."

"But Eternal," His Holiness interrupted, "if the pope is the Vicar of St Peter and St Peter is the Vicar of Christ, then the pope must be the Vicar of Christ, mustn't he?"

"And my vicar too! Without any respect for me. With such representation I have lost face in my own eyes. I denounce the logic of transitive property, the logic of deduction - the logic of pontiffs like Innocent III, who in 1203 dared to say: We are not the Vicar of Peter; not of any other apostle. We are the Vicar of Christ, before whom every knee shall bend This is the height of arrogance!"

"But some years later Innocent promoted the crusade against the Albigensians and canonised Peter of Castelnau who had been murdered by them..."

"He exterminated the Albigensians, you mean. In their thousands showing no mercy... and taking no account of my clemency. As for your Castelnau, he has never been up to see me, because he knew too well that I never approved of Innocent's rascally decision."

"But St Peter of Castelnau excommunicated Raymond of Toulouse because he supported the Albigensians and they were heretics, Eternal; they preached that the body is despicable, they refused the sacraments..."

"Above all, they hated the corruption of the church of Rome, which had become a den of vice, and of its leader, whom they considered the incarnation of the devil himself."

"They preached that You were a malevolent God, the origin of materialism, the source of all evil. They taught that sex was evil, marriage was wicked, a pregnant woman was possessed by Satan and even that suicide was virtuous... it was not to be tolerated! Would you have been indifferent to the insults levelled at You?"

"And what solution did your lot choose?" He raged giving His Holiness one of his dire looks. "Destruction and death! In the year 1209 the leader of a punitive expedition - Arnold of Citeaux, paid by Innocent's indulgences - this Arnold and his band of bloodthirsty rebels broke into the churches of Béziers and even into the cathedral. They cut the throats of defenceless people, then hacked them to pieces when they took refuge behind the altar. The town was reduced to a heap of rubble and that brave leader boasted of the fact that twenty thousand citizens had been slaughtered, regardless of age or sex. The quick and the dead, indeed. All that was quick by the end of the day was the lime poured over the bodies.

"No less wicked was Montfort who finished the job off. At Lavaur four hundred people were burnt at the stake on one huge bonfire. All together. Innocent thanked both these gentlemen and myself, of course, for the clemency shown in the purification of these two heroes. The extermination went on for almost twenty years. Hundreds of thousands of people were burnt alive, and their only crime was not to pay tribute to the pope."

"There are always rogue elements in military operations, and there's no doubt, awful things were done at that time. However, heresy has always been punished with fire, since time immemorial, according to Your laws. It was necessary to make an example so that such a dreadful cult would not harm the true faith. A forceful example, granted, and there were many of them."

"Yes, because those heretics were so hardened in their sins and so blind that they refused the clemency of the sword offered by the church. In fact they threw themselves into the flames of their own free will, so as not to be touched by the hands of their persecutors. Just think, they thought their hands were soiled!" He commented sarcastically.

Then God became serious again.

"Persecutions by the Romans caused so much martyrdom that your church had a calendar full. And yet, in one fell swoop, Innocent succeeded in making more martyrs than the whole of the Roman persecutions put together. But let's proceed," He said, changing tack indignantly. "What humility is there, I was asking, in a grandiose gesture like that of a pope kneeling down and symbolically washing his inferiors' feet? This is no humility, it's a farce. You carry out this rite solely for it to be seen and talked about. My Son preached that humility and charity should not be ostentatious. But what did your church do? Your church was about as inconspicuous as a scarecrow and threatened interdiction, anathema and excommunication to all those who would not bow down to it."

God's anger was clearly mounting because His words were burning with indignation, his expression was fierce and even the triangular halo was white hot.

"Who would have ever thought," He remarked "that the words of an ignorant fisherman from Bethsaida called Peter and that dreamer of my Son would have generated such temporal power, which terrorised the world for centuries! My Son was born in a stable and had nowhere to lay His head. You, His vicar, live in a palace of ten thousand rooms (not counting your summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, which even has a swimming-pool! My Son had nothing but the water he washed Himself in, and just once running water - when he was baptised in the River Jordan. My Son told people to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, but for centuries you have done nothing but accumulate secular riches."

"Eternal, that image serves to honour Your name and make You even more glorious..." His Holiness said eagerly.

"My glory has no need of such images. My creation testifies to my glory. Why not admit that pomp and ceremony serve to hoodwink the faithful, to confuse them, and arouse their admiration and awe. But awe of your pride is not the same as respect for my name. You are just like your predecessors: a disdainful king wallowing in pagan riches. You can't even perceive the irony of it: dressed in glittering costumes you dare to preach charity and humility to the underprivileged. As someone once said: One can bow his head to the ground before you, but for fear of your power not respect for your probity, and I say, if the cap fits, wear it!

"My Son was mockingly called King of the Jews, and for hundreds of years you have been kings of the earth. In fact, you still call yourself Your Grace, Holy Father, Your Excellency, Beatitude, Your Holiness, Most Reverend, Most Holy, Your Eminence, and so on."

"Those are merely forms of ceremonial address. Does Your representative and your Son's not deserve them? Are you not proud of them?"

The apparition ignored the pope, and carried on regardless.

"Your cardinals, gleaming and solemn like herons, once favoured a hedonistic and licentious court life; they dressed up like ancient satraps, trailing the fringes of their purple cloaks behind them (they're a bit shorter today) and puffed out their cheeks under that red hat. Are these gentlemen, and you too, my servants, the representatives of my poor Son who died on the Cross? Some wonder by what arcane means and tortuous machinations Golgotha and the Vatican have been brought together. I wonder how, too... And to add insult to injury you declare you are infallible."

"The pontiff is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra," pointed out His Holiness.

"Of course, as if the pontiff was working to a schedule. what he does outside working hours is no business of the boss... and that's me! A limited liability appointment!"

"But Eternal, this dogma has ancient origins..."

"Infallibility to popes means the sins, vices and crimes you have continually soiled the earth with. Infallible is used to describe atheist popes like yourself, simoniacs, sadists, libertines, priests married with children, murderers, poisoners, sodomites, heretics, followers of Satan, fornicators and mass murderers. And what about all those popes who were poisoned, stabbed, who drowned, died of VD or were strangled in their beds with their lovers," He went on heatedly, counting them off on the fingers of both hands, which did not suffice. "And those whose blood, or the blood that they shed and poured into the Tiber, which for centuries was an open cess-pit, as bad as the Ganges!"

"Well, some popes were not really up to it, I suppose..."

"Some popes? Just some of them?"

"No doubt You are going to accuse me of the awful things Boniface VIII and Alexander VI did... Crimes of arrogance and simony... But You have to take the times in which these men lived into consideration..."

"Boniface VIII had a lot of faults," He replied after a brief pause, "but the worst of all was to have lived. As for arrogance, he not only gave form to it but face as well. It shone through his words, which are the banner of the church: We declare, announce and decree that it is necessary that every living creature be subject to the pontiff of Rome if he is to be saved. That's what he said. He meant that they could be saved from him, and only by blind obedience. He could not have been referring to any kind of salvation, because he knew nothing of it. He devoted his entire existence to this theme.

"It was said that he was all eyes and ears, since the rest was rotten. And how right they were! Sad to say his foul face and even fouler mind were involuntarily the expression of the exact opposite of my omnipotence. Boniface was furiously opposed to the hateful Colonna family, the heirs of the Counts of Tusculum, who considered the papacy their family heirloom. Boniface merrily razed their fortress at Palestrina to the ground, killing over five thousand people in the process. However, Sciarra Colonna inadvertently did me a favour when he took his revenge. After beating Boniface up, he threw him into prison. There he died, biting himself to death, like some rabid dog. In fact it was just as that weakling Celestine V, who had been pushed out of office by Boniface, had predicted."

"Granted Boniface was no saint, but it was really Dante who was responsible for his reputation as a reprobate: he branded him a simoniac while he was still alive, relegating him to the Eighth Circle of hell."

"I couldn't have done better myself. I left him there just where the poet put him - stuck upside down in the rock, so that no-one should ever see his foul face again.

"As for Alexander VI, or should I say Rodrigo Borgia," He went on punctiliously, "he was, in a way, a man of faith in that once he showed it without any hypocrisy. It was when his son Juan Duke of Gandía, was assassinated out of blind rage; the body, as was usual, was thrown in the Tiber. Alexander wept for days on end and begged me to pardon the murderer, as he quite clearly could not."

"Yet he resolved to restore the church, and he was a devout worshipper of the Virgin Mary..." His Holiness chipped in.

"Yes, but he was weak. He forgot his pious resolution as soon as he'd made it. As for the Virgin, he had her painted to look like Giulia Farnese, the girl he had cradle-snatched, who became his lover. That's all I know about him that's good; all the rest is despicable.

"He made an early start: at twelve he committed his first murder. As an adolescent he was depraved. He was graciously made cardinal at twenty-four by his uncle, Pope Callixtus III. He became pope after rigging the votes. It cost him three hundred thousand gold ducats to bribe Giuliano della Rovere, who tried everything under the sun to get him deposed and waited in trepidation for Alexander to die, so that he could take over, shortly after as Julius II. Cardinal Savelli was given Civita Castellana and the bishopric of Majorca. Cardinal Orsini received the see and ecclesiastic revenues of Cartagena, in addition to the government of the Marches. Cardinal Sforza didn't do too badly either, seeing as he cast the decisive vote: four mules loaded with silver, the Castle of Nepi and Palazzo Borgia in Rome. Not to mention the abbeys and monasteries, and other high privileges which Alexander had promised to all the cardinals with nephews to provide for. But this was small beer, because soon after he began to hand out entire continents to the kings of Spain and Portugal.

"So it's not surprising that in Rome they used to say at the time that I was no longer Father Almighty, but Father Christmas!"

"Eternal, I beg You: one must judge events from a historical perspective. Alexander should be seen in the context of the habits (or rather bad habits) of the period." His Holiness ventured, trying to get him off the hook. "He was very orthodox, but was completely absorbed by the lascivious habits of the times. How can one expect holiness from a man who no doubt aspired to it, but certainly had not the time or inclination to indulge such an aspiration?

"He was a very determined ruler and wanted to make his state the most powerful on earth, though some said that pater nosters are not the stuff of powerful states, which Alexander VI knew only too well. In order to achieve such aims Christian charity had no place in Alexander's methods, thus he was seen more as a temporal prince. He was not the worst on record, though he did employ the cunning, skulduggery and ruthlessness of the basest of them."

Grimacing, He shook His head disapprovingly and carried on regardless:

"Once elected pope, Alexander wished to thank me for having so kindly inspired the cardinals in their choice. The investiture ceremony was spoiled by looting and pillaging and hundreds of murders, which was nothing unusual at the time. It was celebrated with saturnalia and parties of such worldly splendour that the following remark was voiced (which was sheer adulation and sacrilege) - if Rome was as great under Caesar, under Alexander it was even greater because if Caesar was a man, Alexander was a god.

"It is not clear how many children were fathered by this pope - he probably didn't even know himself. However, among them was the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, whom he considered daughter, wife and daughter-in-law, as she granted her favours (as they say euphemistically) to Alexander, and also her brothers Juan and Cesare. He also fathered poor old Goffredo, who had to marry the capricious Sancha of Aragon for state reasons. She was the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples and was the object of Alexander's morbid lust, frequently ending up in the bed of her brothers-in-law."

But God hadn't done with Alexander yet.

"He had a marked propensity for nepotism. There was room for everyone on board his ship of state, and because of his passion for the blond Giulia Farnese, he saw no reason not to bestow a galero (a cardinal's hat) on her brother, who was subsequently known as Cardinal Petticoat and became pope with the name of Paul III. Orsino Orsini, Giulia Farnese's squinting husband, was handsomely rewarded with church money, and happily turned his sound eye to his wife's relationship with the pope.

"Alexander had boundless ambition, a trait which his son Cesare inherited, in addition to a passion for poison of the cantarella type, the cicada. He dished it out generously, like holy water and in massive doses, so the outcome would be quite certain."

"Many historians say that there is no real evidence that Alexander poisoned anyone," His Holiness interjected.

"Alexander may have tricked historians by concealing his murders, but he certainly didn't pull the wool over my eyes!" He retorted, and without pausing continued:

"He used poison mainly to get rid of those cardinals whose positions had been bought from him. In this way he put the post up for grabs several times over. Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum, it was said, meaning he sold the lot: altars, Peter's keys and Christ himself. So it was easy for him to have large reserves of money to finance Cesare's wars. He did not do anything more... but only because he didn't have time.

"It has been written that he was the most sinister incarnation of paganism ever to have been a pope. But this is an exaggeration, because - incredible though it may seem - some were even more despicable. No, Boniface and Alexander and many others from that period were as good as gold in comparison to their predecessors."

"In the darkest of Middle Ages..." volunteered His Holiness, who had a gut feeling about what was coming next, but got no further.

"How many crimes, how many atrocities have been committed and ordered in my name or my Son's! How many deaths in the name of a hypocritical peace!" He continued, following the same leitmotif, practically ticking off one by one the darkest episodes of ecclesiastical history.

"How much wickedness has been committed against humanity for the vainglory of the bishops of Rome! The story of humanity is soaked in innocent blood shed by the victims of Peter's vicars. The papacy itself was baptised with blood at the massacre of the followers of Ursino, who was hacked to pieces by the supporters of Damascus in 366. It was then that the famous quotation from Matthew became the theological justification for the power of the Roman pontiff. There followed bloody battles to set up this or that bishop, or to establish one group's authority over another's. Two, three or even four popes were elected at the same time by different factions, each driven exclusively by the thirst for power and resolute hatred. One against the other, one more determined than the next, a fight to the death, family against family..."

"Your Son had foreseen this when He said that He had not come to bring peace, but a sword, and to turn a man against his father and a daughter against her mother..."

"Unfortunately what Jesus said has been distorted," He explained patiently. Then He added:

"...brother against brother... battles in which I and my Son always came off worst, barring those who were killed, of course. This was the history of the church for the first eight hundred years of its existence. There was even a female prostitute who was bishop of Rome - the notorious Pope Joan, also known by the name of John Anglicus, who died in childbirth while she was being carried on her gestatorial chair to the church of St Clement..."

"But Eternal... there has always been prostitution..."

"I suppose I should have turned a blind eye, should I? When it was going on in my house? I should have smothered all my pride, no doubt!"

"I mean prostitution in general. There were many religions where sex (it was called ierodulia) was considered a holy act and even lucrative. What I meant was that concerning Pope Joan, it is well known that this is nothing but a mediaeval wives' tale!" His Holiness blustered.

"What others do in their religions is no interest of mine. You say it was a mediaeval wives' tale? You forget then that to stop that kind of thing it was deemed necessary to build a chair with a hole in the middle of the seat, so that newly elected popes could be examined! There was one such throne in red marble kept at St John Lateran until recently."

"Nobody examined me," His Holiness pointed out, "but if You say they used to do it, then I suppose I'll have to believe it!" He added, rather disgruntled.

"And then," He went on, "for over a century each new pope was worse then his predecessor. Quite how dreadful Lucifer could be was only discovered when Stephen VII, son of a priest, was made pope in 896. He had the effrontery to exhume the body of Pope Formosus and set up what became known as the cadaver synod. Formosus was guilty, according to Stephen, of having usurped the throne of Peter because he was bishop of another city and therefore could not be bishop of Rome too. Stephen forgot that he himself was bishop of Anagni and thus guilty of the same crime.

"Formosus had been dead about eight months, but that did not stop Stephen from acting out the farce of having the rotting corpse dressed in full pontifical regalia, carried into court, tried and sentenced. Stephen then had him thrown into the Tiber after amputating the three fingers from his right hand used to give the blessing. Some honest fishermen found the body and gave it a decent burial. Stephen committed so many atrocities that he was eventually strangled in prison."

"It was Your... divine punishment," His Holiness remarked to himself, but out loud he said only: "dark times!" as he lacked inspiration.

Without deigning to even look at him, He proceeded.

"Dreadful times indeed. However, the times of Alberic of the Counts of Tusculum were the worst of all. The Alberic family was evil through and through, and I never managed to wipe them out: the devils who were not in hell at the time were all born into their family. There were a dozen or so popes, three anti-popes and forty odd cardinals among them. In the tenth century, which has been nicknamed papal pornocracy, there was unbridled lust. Power was wielded by courtesans like Theodora and her daughters, though the most depraved of all was a woman called Marozia.

"The pope at that time was John X, Theodora's lover, who ended up suffocated by Marozia. From 904 to 911, Pope Sergius III had been the lover of Marozia, who was not yet sixteen. Sergius had had Christopher, his predecessor and son of Pope Leo V, murdered in prison. Moreover, he also had what was left of Formosus' corpse exhumed again for another trial! Poor old Formosus was sentenced for the second time to be thrown into the Tiber. This time though, they cut off his head and the few remaining fingers."

"Ah, but the chronicler got muddled between Stephen and Sergius - it only happened once. That's the long and short of it," His Holiness amended.

"So according to you, Sergius should be a saint?" He asked sarcastically. Then he continued: "There was John XI, son of that ghastly Sergius III and Marozia. He became pope at twenty in 935 AD, but fortunately for all concerned, his papacy did not last long, because he was imprisoned by his half-brother Alberic. This Alberic saw fit to get rid of that monster of a mother of his - Marozia the prostitute, by incarcerating her alive in Castel Sant'Angelo and leaving her there to rot for fifty years.

"After that came Alberic's son, Pope John XII, who in 955 AD, became pope at just sixteen! To list all his evil deeds and unmentionable sins would tire me out. Unmentionable sins indeed... in fact it seemed not even hell could contain him."

"Sergius III and John XII were nothing but lads. You have to understand this - high-spirited, you know... boys will be boys and all that. Too tight a rein only causes problems later on. But what did this John do that was so unmentionable?" Asked His Holiness, who pretended he had forgotten.

"You reckon the church should be run by lads, then? The church founded by my Son? Holiness, this is no joking matter. Me, the laughing stock of young lads? Maybe my Son would, who is so used to sacrifices, but to make a mockery of me - that's going too far. Have some respect for this grey-beard! What can you be thinking of?

"John soiled his hands with all the crimes you could possibly think of - he was the epitome of crime!" He sighed, and then listed them:

"He had incestuous relations with his mother. He kept what can only be described as a harem at the Lateran Palace. He rewarded his courtesans with silver caskets and chalices from the Vatican treasure-house. He owned thousands of the best thoroughbreds, which he fed on almonds and figs soaked in expensive wine. He gambled with the alms taken from pilgrims. His blasphemy was proverbial, his greatest amusement being to toast Satan and Venus at the altar. He usually consecrated deacons in the stables. He was killed with a blow to the neck, clubbed to death by a jealous husband, while in bed with the man's wife..."

"Clubbed to death?" Asked His Holiness, intrigued.

"One blow was enough," He assured him, and went on. "He was twenty-four and so dissolute that the women of Rome avoided going to St John's in order not to ruin their reputation. It appears he was one of the few popes that died in his bed, or rather another man's bed...

"No doubt this was just juvenile horseplay! Should I forgive a man who courted the devil and yet was supposed to represent my Son! What notion could he have had of my holy family? In what hands had my reputation been placed?"

"Eternal, there can be no doubt as to the despicable deeds carried out by John XII, but often when records are few and far between it is easy for rumours to get exaggerated and become established as historical fact. How many biased chroniclers have slung mud at people who were in fact quite respectable!" His Holiness ventured, accusing and condoning at the same time.

"Rumours? That devil respectable?" He growled angrily. "For your information, the chronicles of the time do provide evidence, even though Liutprand had his own axe to grind. Some said that John XII was so evil that the people begged me with tears in their eyes to get rid of him. And out of pity for them, I agreed to in the end."

"Where there's a will..." thought His Holiness.

But He pretended not to notice and kept on.

"Those who said he was evil had no way of knowing what would come next, though."

"This John though - he took the Word to the Magyars, to glorify Your name. He also made Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a saint."

This insignificant detail made Him raise his eyebrows and give His Holiness a very dirty look.

"Your Dunstan is small beer, and as such he doesn't deserve a place in paradise serenaded by my angels!" He muttered, before continuing his sermon.

"Things were just as bad under John XIII, son of a bishop. He had half the population of Rome murdered, but before he could finish the job he was chained up in Castel Sant'Angelo. He only managed to survive thanks to the good offices of Otto, the emperor of Saxony. He certainly didn't get any help from me, I can tell you."

"That biased old Liutprand expressed himself in very forceful terms about him," His Holiness objected. "Just think - John XIII lived in one of the most turbulent periods of the 10th century. His good works included aiding the development of monastic life. And it was he who started to convert the Poles..."

"Heaven waves no flags. I judge once and my word goes." He sentenced, His words as weighty as grave-stones.

"Yes, and I can imagine what the result was!" His Holiness surmised, while He continued to blast away.

"There was a pope called Boniface VII who had Benedict VI strangled in prison, in 974, and himself proclaimed pope. After deflowering a young girl he fled to Constantinople with the Vatican treasures. He only came back to Rome when he had squandered it all, but he ended up with multiple stab wounds in a sewer. And guess what? He had been found in bed with his lover. Boniface VII alone did so much harm to Christianity that Satan sat there scratching his horns and feeling useless. That holy man of the church Gerbert called him the most evil of monsters, but unfortunately not even he could foresee what was going to happen next."

After a pause He went on.

"Another admirable defender of the faith was Gregory V, son of Otto of Carinthia and cousin of Emperor Otto III. He was twenty-three when he was proclaimed pope in 996 and Otto became emperor at just fifteen. They consecrated each other, as often happened at the time, and each justified the other's evil deeds. Then the pope had to flee from Rome because the whole population was up in arms about his crimes. He was poisoned at the age of twenty-seven and his cousin, the emperor was twenty-two when he died. The only good thing Gregory ever did was to have the abominable Marozia killed off, who had managed to survive in prison to the ripe old age of ninety-four."

"Gregory did have one redeeming quality," suggested His Holiness.

"And what might that be?" He asked sarcastically, irritated that some minute detail might have slipped his memory.

"He made Erluin Archbishop of Cambray and suspended many bishops who were neglecting their duties."

"Are you suggesting that I should have suspended Gregory? Well, maybe you're right, because he always confused duty and free will. He should have been suspended, of course... and from a very high gallows too! As for your obscure Erluin, I put him at the back of the class. I suppose you think I should have pardoned Gregory because he made Erluin archbishop?"

"Good Lord..."

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!" He interrupted crossly.

"It's just an exclamation, Eternal," explained His Holiness. "I was saying Good Lord, pardon is a bit of an exaggeration... Erluin was a poor dev..." he stopped himself just in time. "Lord, you aren't actually asking my opinion?"

"Of course not! I decreed hell fire and hell fire it is to be!" Was His fiery response.

But the story had to go on.

"...all ecclesiastical preferments were obtained through money and treachery. This system was frequently used by Benedict VIII and his brother John XIX, both popes from the Alberic family of Tusculum."

His expression was forbidding, and when He started to speak it was in hollow tones.

"Of the same family was that fiend Benedict IX. When he was proclaimed pope in 1032 he was just nine years old. Right from the beginning of his pontificate that evil being behaved in the most abominable way, as that devout man Peter Damian recalls. After only a few years as pope Benedict had already blotted his copybook, even outdoing his predecessors. He was Old Nick himself, the Prince of Darkness, arrayed in pontifical robes. He lived the most abjectly dissolute life one can possibly imagine, indulging in the most despicable of vices. Lots of people tried to get rid of him because of the murders and crimes he committed, but he always managed to cheat death and find shelter in the castles of his native Tusculum. During one such absence Silvester III was proclaimed pope in his stead, but Benedict fought his way back to the throne.

"Then he decided to abdicate. He had become infatuated with a cousin of his, and her father Gerhard of Saxo gave his consent to their wedding on condition Benedict abdicated. His cousin persuaded him, so he did. Still more convincing was a certain John Graziano who bought the papacy from him. Graziano, simony made man, became pope with the name Gregory VI."

"He was a devout Christian, though," His Holiness piped up.

"The sign of the cross with which he signed ecclesiastical documents does not prove he was a good Christian, merely that he was illiterate. The only thing he had in common with the humble origins of Christianity was the fact that he was totally uneducated, like the Galilean fishermen who befriended my Son. But I haven't finished with Benedict yet. His absence from Rome was protracted. Having killed off a couple of popes, who had been set up by opposing factions, he reclaimed his apostleship. However, he was eventually kicked out by the emperor's soldiers and disappeared from the scene."

"In fact, after his alienatio mentis phase he turned over a new leaf and canonised Simon, a monk from Syracuse," interrupted His Holiness in an attempt to redress the balance. "By the end of his life he was attending every possible mass, had become a follower of St Nilus and retired to the monastery of Grottaferrata to devote his life to prayer..."

"This is about as credible as Pilate reciting the Creed. As far as I'm concerned he never addressed those prayers to me. Maybe they were meant for Satan, his companion in gluttony. Simply because of his retreat, do you think I should seat him alongside the VIPs in heaven? Would you let someone like that in your house?"

"Well... er... maybe not, but You are merciful and forgive seventy times seven over..."

"The only good thing that disgusting individual did was to die and descend into hell, but as usual it fell to me to sort him out, and I left it a bit late. Anyway, he's down there now, and there he stays. I don't think eternity will last long enough to punish him seventy multiplied by seventy thousand times!"

He decreed, merciless rather than merciful.

"I have no intention of trying to change Your mind, Eternal, but I have to say they were terrible times. Times of great uncertainty for the Church. It was thrown off the straight and narrow by the thirst for temporal power, and was victim of human greed and the evil influence of great families, who were only interested in wealth and power. St Paul says that money is the root of all evil in his First Epistle to Timothy, but as the saying goes - any port in a storm... And that's always been true."

"Authority and the thirst for power were always the aims of the church until 1870. It took the cannon shots of Porta Pia and Cadorna's bersaglieri to stop Pius IX pursuing his libido dominandi, the thirst for power he inherited from his predecessors; having lost this, he decided to become infallible instead."

"But the Church has never lost its sense of mission, even amidst such trials and tribulations..."

"Naturally. This it achieved by forging alliances with the most powerful rulers of the earth and requesting military aid to defeat their enemies, who would become allies sooner or later. This was the mission supported by popes who were ready to declare war, to lead armies, fight armed to the teeth, seek out treachery and set rulers one against another. The destinies of whole races were in the hands of power-crazy individuals who didn't give a fig for the suffering they caused..."

"The aim of war was to restore peace," remarked His Holiness cautiously.

Two tell-tale lines, synonymous with grief, appeared on His face and He sighed bitterly.

"The abuse of quite absolute power was the most enduring crime committed by the church. And it is all the more serious because that power originated from He who had no power at all in His lifetime," He murmured sorrowfully.

"In Your name," His Holiness threw in, trying to divert Him towards less painful topics, "the Church laid down strict rules which brought earthly princes to their knees - those proud sovereigns who would otherwise have dealt with You as they wished. The first to champion Your cause was Hildebrand of Soana, Pope Gregory VII, who fought to prohibit lay investiture. He proclaimed the principle of Libertas Ecclesiae and endeavoured to make ecclesiastical appointments dependent on anulum et baculum and not on the sceptrum..."

Oh what had he said? His face took on an ugly look again, while He persevered with His tireless tirade.

"That sickly individual Gregory VII, a fan of Gregory VI who signed his name with a cross instead of a signature, and passed off his illiteracy as a sign of faith, distinguished himself, during his pontificate, from 1073 to 1085, for no other good reason than an even greater inflexibility, though he accepted compromises with the lay authorities, like all the other bishops of Rome. The only difference was the ruler: instead of the Saxon and Frankish kings he entertained relations with the lords of Tuscany and Southern Italy.

"His objective was the supremacy of the pope and he fought with all possible means for it to be recognised. So he was an envoy for himself, not for me. He handed out excommunications like lashings. He humiliated Henry IV at Canossa and excommunicated him on three further occasions. He twice excommunicated Robert Guiscard and once Boleslaus of Poland. But it would take far too long to list all the princes and bishops he excommunicated. He financed punitive expeditions against temporal rulers, stirred up subjects against their masters, cursed whole peoples and cities, fulminating everyone who didn't agree with him, until his supremacy was recognised by all."

He stopped for a moment and shut His eyes while He drew a deep breath. His Holiness took advantage of this pause to try and patch things up.

"Gregory had to tackle treacherous enemies in a fight to the death for the victory of the Church, so that it did not become an instrument in the hands of the empire, cunning princes, ferocious feudal lords and a corrupt schismatic clergy. Rome was twice conquered by Henry IV and the Temple of Peter was desecrated. Gregory was deposed several times but owing to his strong allegiance to his faith, his steadfast hatred of flattery and subterfuge, the Church was saved, and with it the name of Christ.

"He loved justice and hated guilt, as he said on his death bed. He came to a sad end and left the world with a message of faith in the spiritual values which had informed his existence."

"Hah! You do not say that his struggles were marked by the most terrible violence, fires, devastation, interminable sieges followed by rapes, bloody massacres and epidemics! So this is how you see Gregory defending the name of Christ, is it? It was not against Christ that the Christian Henry IV fought, but against a dictatorial pope. By excommunicating the emperor, the bishop of Rome automatically released the people from their oath of allegiance and triggered a civil war. The lives of common people were clearly of great value to the pope! The Norman hordes, called in by Gregory, came rushing to his aid and saved him - nobody else mark you - from the fury of the emperor.

"After sacking Rome and reducing it to a heap of rubble, slaughtering the defenceless inhabitants who did not support the pope, and desecrating the altars, these same hordes then turned on each when deciding how the booty should be shared out, and more fighting was necessary to separate them."

His voice growled like a thunderstorm as He piled on the agony.

"After all that death and destruction Gregory is the saviour of Christ, is he? Try to remember - and I see you need to - that Christ died on the Cross, and Gregory in his bed of old age. Christ was crucified to redeem the sins of the world, while Gregory fought for his own glory and he sacrificed nothing but poor victims, unaware of his plots, on the altar of his pride. Thus Gregory's service to Christ is nothing more than lip-service. And you dare to claim he had an extremely pious nature, when it was nothing but presumption and ruthlessness!

"The twenty-seven articles of Gregory's Dictatus Papae are the culmination of his stubborn pride: Only the pope in Rome is universal..., only he can use the imperial insignia..., only he can depose emperors..., nobody has authority to judge the pope..., the Church has never erred and shall never err to the end of time..., only the Church can release subjects from their oath of allegiance to a sovereign..., the pope is undoubtedly a saint...

"Evil has always been alien to my nature, even if Gregory said that I inspired these atrocities. No doubt he did decree that the appointment of bishops and their deposition should be ratified by the Fisherman's Ring and Peter's Crozier and no more by a king's sceptre, as you say. But this was only so he could surround himself with his favourites, people he could use to control the temporal kingdoms he coveted everywhere, sometimes by legal means but never legitimate ones, from Corsica to Hungary, from Dalmatia to Spain.

"Gregory pursued his aims fiercely, imposing obedience with an arrogance that was totally un-Christian. He bent kings to his tyrannical will by forcing them on their knees at his feet to plead for mercy and pity, and then and only then - with cunning diplomacy and hypocritical generosity - did he deign to withdraw his excommunication and grant a Christian pardon.

"Gregory's legacy is nothing but irremediable material and spiritual destruction. And after so much infamy you made him a saint, thinking I might not notice. But he had me to reckon with, and I assure you his reckoning was way out. For ten centuries I have kept an eye on him - a man of such ambition and arrogance is dangerous on earth, in heaven or wherever."

He finally drew a deep breath after this long tirade.

Now it was His Holiness' turn:

"Under Gregory though the Church became strong again. The authoritarian principles which he is accused of were the widespread principles of the time. Gregory was successful in defending a spiritual concept and the Christian cause, against a vision of lay supremacy in a world opposed to his beliefs."

"I don't perceive anything spiritual in that!" He retorted. "Were these the laws of charity and humility that the Church had embraced? Not a bit of it. It was his sheer pride triumphing over others' sheer pride. May I remind you that the only kingdom my Son ever preached was the kingdom of heaven - my kingdom. The principles that Gregory vaunted were the ones which inspired the Church ever after, without any internal reform taking place. This was in order to strengthen his ambitions, subject man to his arrogance, brand with infamy and mercilessly persecute all those who did not perceive my hand in all this blood-thirsty alienation. Simony continued to run riot like all the other forms of vice, even though they were officially condemned."

He stopped for a moment to straighten His triangular halo with both His hands before ploughing on regardless.

"Sixtus IV had fifteen male relatives to help along the way, which he did by handing out left, right and centre preferments and cardinalships, which was a despicable way of trafficking in sacred things. He had no idea how to save money, but he had an ingenious one about how to make a lot of it. He was in grave need of funds because of the disgusting prodigality and orgies practised by all his kinsmen. He thought that the notion of purgatory would be an excellent way of making a pile of money. You know perfectly well that I never created it..."

"Maybe not, but purgatory is necessary, I assure You. It is a transitional state of atonement for sins committed. Venial sins, of course, from which one can gain remission with temporary punishments. What sense would Your justice have if crime were not followed by punishment? St Thomas teaches that while petty crime is atoned for after death, one must come to terms with punishment in purgatory. The usefulness of intercession on behalf of the deceased was underlined by the Councils of Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439. They acknowledged that charitable works by the living atoned for the dead. Through such works souls were able to get their sentences reduced..." His Holiness dutifully explained.

"I never set up any sort of purgatory and I did not inspire any of the doctrines which you speak of," He complained. "I spoke only of grace. Salvation through my grace, granted to those who believe in me. Today shalt thou be with me in paradise! Were my Son's words to Dysmas, one of the two men crucified alongside Him. I have never felt like breaking that promise, I can assure you."

He continued:

"Sixtus decided that the souls of the damned should be freed through money, and they could shorten their stay in purgatory if they handed it over. Shortening their stay doesn't mean much though, when the length of the sentence is not known. It means a specific reduction in time subtracted from an unknown quantity. This ignorance of the duration of the sentence obliged the living to pay up continually. Such was Sixtus' diabolical brainwave.

"There were people who pointed out at the time that he was a ruthless and infamous individual because he could free a soul from the fires of purgatory, but would not do so unless he received his pound of flesh. Moreover, Sixtus decided that I should become his faithful guardian in purgatory, ready to jump to attention and release or assist those who had paid their due for freedom."

"Well, notwithstanding all that," parried His Holiness, "he was a real defender of the faith, because in 1482 he ratified the condemnation of heresy."

"Yes, thank you for reminding me about that vile institution that was the Inquisition," was His cutting riposte.

"However, the Inquisition was not evil in itself: in fact it was set up to fight evil. It was born of the need to defend the purity of faith through pre-empting and supposedly suppressing the actions of heretics."

"However, the history of the church and the Inquisition are inextricably linked. The inspiration was the anti-Christian behaviour of some of the Roman emperors. Soon after the catacombs were shut the church lost no time in behaving aggressively like the Romans in the name of truths that were nothing more than hot air. The church gradually perfected the methods it used to carry out its policy of repression, and during the Third Lateran Council in 1179 it was ruled that fighting heresy was just, as it preserved faith.

"This was little more than a smokescreen to conceal the fact that it was left to countless zealots - usually Dominicans assisted by laymen - to safeguard the interests of the pope. In 1483 alone, the year he took office, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Thomas of Torquemada, condemned seventeen thousand people to death, two thousand of whom were burnt at the stake. This atrocity caused so many victims that I still haven't managed to count them all, starting from the first few thousand in Andalusia, where innocent and guilty alike were tortured and slaughtered..."

"Jesus had predicted that tares would be sown among the wheat."

"He was certainly not referring to that horrific atrocity. My Son died for all mankind and it pleased Sixtus to return the favour by killing off a few people on the way. He wallowed in crime up to his mitre, it was said of this pope by a man who had enough nous to know what was what. An extraordinary concentrate of human wickedness, I had Sixtus in my little black book long before that - though I must admit I was a bit lax about him" He candidly confessed.

"How I would like to erase from the history of time the excesses which led to the aberrations of the Inquisition!" He exclaimed, torn between pity and impartiality. Clearly, the countless atrocities were taking their toll on Him and forcing Him to remember.

"It's all set in stone up here!" He exclaimed, slapping His vast forehead with His palm, making the room vibrate. His halo shook while a furious stare pierced His Holiness' very soul. "Those who caused these massacres shall be called to account on the Day of Judgement, and I'll burn them to ashes for eternity!" He solemnly promised.

His Holiness had a go at balancing the books: "The fight against heresy was perceived by the Church as its most important duty - one which all good Catholics should carry out. The inquisitors invoked Your name and Your Son's name during their actions and thanked Him by chanting the Te Deum! Though they were incredibly bigoted they believed they were showing Him their devotion by getting rid of those devil-worshipping heretics."

"You mean by making sacrifices to propitiate Jesus! Blasphemy!" He raged. "The custom of human sacrifices has been abandoned as a practice in my family. My Son had nothing to do with this abomination practised by Christians, which was passed off as fighting heresy! No! That was no fair fight - it was persecution, repression, extinction..." the crime escalated as He grew more heated.

"Your church's action was the most heinous of crimes against humanity a crime that began in 1231, the year when Gregory IX gave his seal of approve to the Inquisition, and gradually grew and spread like a festering sore. But worse was to come when Innocent IV issued his bull Ad Extirpanda in 1252, which advocated torture to extract confessions from their victims. Never before had people used my name for such deviant behaviour. How can I forget - even at my most indulgent - the frenzied fanaticism of the Spanish Dominican friars against Elvira del Campo, eh?"

Sadly His Holiness had to admit it: "I seem to remember that unfortunate episode."

"In 1568 in Toledo," He went on, His voice little more than a sigh, so moved was He by those unhappy recollections, "she was put on trial for heresy. That poor girl was accused of sympathising with the Jews."

"She was of Jewish stock..." His Holiness countered, then tried to put things right by adding, "I know that's no excuse but..."

"She was Jewish only because she didn't eat pork and used to change her linen on Saturdays! My Son was a Jew too, and He preferred fish to meat. Your church, which tortured Him in a thousand different ways, did not do it because of the food He ate. Just think - that girl was subjected to torture by water: she had to swallow gallons of the stuff, drop by drop, through a plug of fabric rammed down her throat until she almost died of suffocation..."

"And yet the court acknowledged that the poor girl was innocent after all..."

"Yes, after humiliating her and treating her like some wild beast, and stripping her down until she was barely decent; after destroying her personality and robbing her of her dignity; after continuing to torture her when she cried for mercy for her crimes.

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