Hot off the discovery of yet another ho-hum homosexual scandal in its midst, the Catholic Church was rocked today by news that its institution and messengers had gone an entire 72 hours without an unprincipled or hypocritical dive into hedonism or carnal depravity.
Vatican spokesman Cardinal Giuseppe DaNardi called the three day quiet an "unexpected and truly shocking" turn of events. So flummoxed and incredulous was DaNardi by the lack of degeneracy within the Papal realm that he finally burst out laughing in front of reporters and chastised them for "pulling his leg".
"You guys, I tell you", DaNardi chuckled, wagging his finger, "Sometimes, you are just the most. You'll have me believing all sorts of nonsense if I'm not careful. Don't you guys have a Mormon kidnapping or polygamous sex-slave ring to cover?"
Others Papists were equally stunned by the recent, albeit temporary, dearth of debauchery.
"Really?!", queried Monsignor Dash Liberato, "Nothing at all?! No financial improprieties? No threatening the peasants with excommunication if they don't pay up? No hush money to American media outlets for their silence? No diversionary stories of child abductions to allay focus from our predation of youth? No huge out of court settlements for calamitous health care screw-ups in our many hospitals? No pregnant nuns being disappeared or getting secretive abortions? No lawsuits for ill-conceived reproductive advice in our government sponsored, faith-based counseling centers? No relocations for our numerous pedophiles to continually skirt the law? No drunken brawls over the similarity of someone's mother to the Virgin Mary? No father beating his daughter within an inch of her life for being seen with a colored guy in the neighborhood? No secular or non-Catholic applicants suing for unfair hiring practices or mistreatment in the workplace? No burnings of heretics in our controlled third world hellholes? No gay prostitution rings running out of the Pope's summer home? No Priests found with their hands down a little boy's pants? No..."
He was stopped there by three large gentlemen in suits who swiftly whisked the Monsignor away to an awaiting limousine.
"I'm still quite surprised", he shouted as they pushed him by his head into the vehicle.
But just as mysteriously as the quiet had come, reports began surfacing about a cannibal priest at a Gambian mission who has been boiling alive his converted flock of natives and using their flesh as a blood sacrifice to Jesus, whom he claims has an insatiable hunger for dark meat and possesses a sexy, sinewy, swimmer's body with which he would really like to transubstantiate.
The Church itself has made no comment on these allegations or the lack of wantonness and lascivious behavior from their employees in the last few days.
His Holiness, The Pope, could not be reached as he was attending a Nazi memorabilia convention in Salzburg.