From the earliest days of Pope Francis’ reign, saint watchers pegged the wildly popular pontiff as a strong candidate for eventual canonization. Las Vegas bookmakers agree: the current money line odds on Francis’ eventual sainthood are holding steady at a staggering -1000.
It thus came as no surprise when, early Tuesday morning, the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals took the initial step of publishing a preliminary list of Pope Francis’ alleged miracles.
Conspicuously absent from the list, however, is doing anything at all to stop priests from molesting little kids.
The first miracle purported by the church occurred on a papal visit to the Philippines in May of 2015. A local man who had just kissed the sleeve of Pope Franics’ robe suddenly began speaking in ancient Aramaic. The event was witnessed by Cardinal Joseph Karam, a theologian fluent in the now dead language, who stated: “as God as my witness, the language coming from the man’s mouth was our Savior’s own.” Karam went on to report that “the man dropped to his knees, looked deeply into His Eminence’s eyes and said: ‘Please help me! Father Bautista from my village parish won’t stop raping my son!’ in absolutely perfect Aramaic. It was the most remarkable thing I’ve ever witnessed and definitive proof that God has chosen the Holy Father as a vessel for His intercession in earthly matters.”
The second potential miracle occurred in Tanzania in February of 2017. A 15-year old boy reported that Pope Francis appeared to him in a dream and told him not to go to work that day. That very afternoon, an explosion in the gold mine where the boy worked killed three people. The young man gave all credit to Pope Francis, reporting to the church that the miraculous vision had restored his faith in God after it was shaken by years of rampant sexual abuse by the three priests that ran the Catholic boarding school he attended from the ages of 5 to 15.
The last of the three miracles took place in 2010, when the Pope was still simply known as Cardinal Bergoglio. Nineteen separate eyewitnesses all reported seeing the Cardinal levitating over a brier patch outside Santiago, Chile. When the bystanders asked Bergoglio what he was doing, the future Pope reportedly replied: “I’m looking out to check on our Parish down in Orsono. We keep getting reports that Father Karadima is blowing the altar boys. But I don’t see anything, so it must not be true.”
Some of the faithful are holding out hope that Francis is saving stopping the sexual abuse of minors within the church as a sort of grand finale miracle. Local churchgoer Roger Capstone asserts “Francis is a consummate showman. He’s clearly saving the best for last. As he gets close to end, you just watch, bam! He’ll take out those sick fuck priests.”
Others are not so optimistic. Long-time Catholic Jenny Forester reviewed the list of miracles, and she believes that “the Pope hasn’t shown much of an interest in doing anything about this molestation thing – which seems like a bigger problem than ensuring that some African kid who was repeatedly molested didn’t get killed by an explosion that the Pope apparently allowed to kill three other people.”
So, while some might think it would take a miracle to stop priests from molesting children, apparently even that is not enough.
