You know that piece of toast you have with the face of Mary on it? You might have to get it authenticated before you put it on eBay.
The Pope is declaring a ‘holy war’ against people who claim falsely that the Virgin Mary is appearing to them.
He will attempt to snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions with new guidelines to help bishops root out frauds.
Benedict XVI plans to publish criteria to help them distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata – the appearances of the five wounds of Christ – and weeping or bleeding statues.
In some cases exorcists will be used to determine if a credible apparition is ‘divine’ origin or ‘demonic’.
I’m so happy to live in the 21st Century.
I have been waiting for years for an image of Samuel Beckett to appear on my toast. I must admit though, that I would not know what he looks like if he ever did appear.
I have a premonition that in a few minutes I’m going to take a shit that looks just like Pope Benedict, minus the Prada slippers of course.
great, wait until the pope gets wind of the cookies and bath towels and commemorative coins with the face of our new messiah.
holy war and race baiting?
that would be unheard of for the likes of the Catholic church…
I would like the demonic toast with a side of bacon.
Irony: “The visionaries will next be visited by psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health and to verify whether they are suffering from conditions of a hysterical or hallucinatory character…”
Divine or demonic, but never just plain coincidence or human ingenuity.
I want to find Divine on my toast.
I hope the church decides to abandon all other projects and pursue this with 100% of their time, effort, and money.
That’s not the face of Mary! It looks like the face of Jeff Daniels to me.
Looks like Han Solo to me.
@7 That’s exactly what I thought!
“I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!”
Wouldn’t it be easier to assume that they’re all false? I mean, if God is real and wants attention, he can just show up – he needn’t keep phoning it in by randomly decorating food and making people bleed.
It actually reminds me of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs (the guy with the pipe from Church of the SubGenius), only viewed at a funny angle in bad lighting so you can’t see the smile or pipe clearly.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I once saw a cloud that looked like a rabbit. Was it of “divine” origin or “demonic”?
I have a wart on my ass that looks suspiciously like George Bush. But my Dr. said it would be gone in a few days.
Wow. As if the world needed another reason to hate the pope.
@7: You beat me to it! I was going to say it looked like Jeff Daniels to me, too.
Maybe Jeff Daniels is the Second Coming. Three of us so far have seen him in this piece of toast.