Get your Catholicism on

Okay, so we watched the pope's funeral last night. And, yeah, it's pretty much what I'd expect from the Catholics. Unnecessarily drawn out nonsense. Towards the end of the ceremony, there was some involvement by a bunch of guys with long beards who were wearing colorful outfits. The "announcer" from Vatican TV was of no use whatsoever in telling us who they were, and we were pretty sure ZZ Top wouldn't get to be involved with the pope's funeral. Our curiosity led to a couple of things.

First, we had to go find out who the fuck those guys were. Even though all of the ceremonial robes and whatnot are goofy to differing levels, those old dudes kinda had it going on. We ended up having to do over an hour of searching online to finally find out that they were from the Eastern Rite Churches. From the sounds of it, that group of Churches has their own set of rules and whatnot and basically picks and chooses what they want to follow coming from the Vatican, but they're still somehow associated with the Roman Catholic Church.

In our search for pictures and a description of who the hell those guys were, we came across Catholic Online. This site definitely gets "humor site of the week" honors. First off is the Catholic Singles section. I'm sorry, that's just funny. Next up is the Hitler Catholic Youth section, which yielded another veritable treasure trove of material, most notably the Saints Fun Facts page. Now, to imply that there could be anything fun in learning about Saints is comic gold on its own, but just look at some of that stuff. Cartoon depictions of saints coupled with short blurbs talking about Jesus and miracles and other fictional stuff? That's funny.

Now we come to the pièce de résistance: Catholic Shopping. You have not been shopping until you've gone out perusing boring, hackneyed trinkets that profess your faith in Him. Runner up for best product goes to this company making partial resin dolls of saints. The best product, however, was this company, which makes hilarious stuffed toys of saints and other figures. And only a hundred bucks each! Oh, and those pictures of the little girls playing with their stuffed saints are priceless.

You know, this reminds me of something I've been meaning to buy for years: a set of biblical action figures from Train Up A Child, Inc. Could there be a worse name than that for a company, or is it just me? Apparently it's taken from a line in the Bible, but that only makes it stupider. Anyway, the thing about their action figures, is that they used to have them segregated into two classes: Caucasian Heritage Series and African Heritage Series. The African Heritage Series had, as you might imagine, black versions of all the figures. That's right, back in the day you could buy yourself a Black Jesus. We always wanted to buy both a black and a white Jesus so we could pit them against one another in a diorama with one of them saying "This time we finish it... There can be only one!" The fucked up thing is, when I first went to that page today, it was showing the black series, but now it's just showing the goddamn white ones. I don't know if there's something screwed up with my browser or their site, but whatever. You get the idea.

Okay, so after a foray into way too many Christian web pages, let's get back on with some other trivial nonsense. As we were trying to figure out who ZZ Top was, we got to thinking: you know, we could turn this into a great competition. Yea, who wouldn't be down with Catholic cosplay? You could have guys running around in cardinal outfits and pope hats, and the girls running around in schoolgirl outfits and nun outfits. Now, I know what you're saying. Sure, the guys' costumes are colorful and shit, and the schoolgirl thing is obvious, but nuns? Where's the appeal there? C'mon, dude. Have you forgotten that all nuns are strippers?

So, with an idea for a religious dress-up extravaganza in mind, we could probably turn it into a full-blown event. And what should we call our event? What else? CathliCon.