Yawn, who cares what they think. about Lennon,he's dead.
vickif
· 1 year ago
Even if John Lennon wasn't dead, who cares what the vatican has to say.
Indigo
· 1 year ago
Lennon lives on, Paul is dead.
CPL
· 1 year ago
They get around to forgiving John Lennon for something he said over 40 years ago, and he's been dead for almost 30 years?
Way to be expeditious, VATICAN. <<<snark>>>
PattyP
· 1 year ago
Hey, 40 years is actually pretty quick for the CC to catch up to what the rest of the world has known about for eons. In another hundred years, maybe they'll only be 17 years behind.
Judas Peckerwood
· 1 year ago
Yeah, well I'M bigger than John Lennon, so there.
Professor_Farnsworth
· 1 year ago
"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a 'boast' by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said. ----------------------------
they just figured this out now? lol.
oh, christians.
Ben Dover
· 1 year ago
I think it's wonderful that the Catholic Cult has found a new hobby since they were exposed and forced to stop molesting children.
John
· 1 year ago
Who said they stopped? Who knows if they stopped? There haven't been any reports so there is no way of knowing whether the problem was fixed or not.
Freddie
· 1 year ago
Ignorance is boundless and glorified by such religions.
Bush Bites
· 1 year ago
Lennon got off way sooner than Copernicus.
tangodaddy
· 1 year ago
But Lennon was way more famous than Copernicus..
TampaZeke
· 1 year ago
John was just an entertainer who made a slip of the tongue. Copernicus was a SCIENTIST and astronomer. EVERYONE knows that science is the ULTIMATE heresy and the ultimate threat to religion so it's clear why Copernicus had to be punished wayy longer and way more harshly than John. Copernicus proved that, contrary to Catholic teaching, the earth was NOT at the center of the universe. In fact it was just another insignificant planet in the grand scheme of things; hell it wasn't even at the center of its own tiny solar system. THAT was a double heresy because it 1) Proved the Catholic Church was ignorant at best or liars at worst and 2) it proved that one of the foundational teachings of the church was completely bogus.
He should be happy that he wasn't burned at the stake.
Bush Bites
· 1 year ago
Hey.
Think they're trying to get the boomers to start going to church again?
tangodaddy
· 1 year ago
Oh good the Catholic church has forgiven John Lennon I'm sure going to sleep better tonight...
Nylund
· 1 year ago
But did they also admit that God is a concept by which we can measure our pain?
You mean Catholics can listen to the Beatles again?
lol
tacitus
· 1 year ago
The Vatican missed the point entirely. John Lennon was right, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus at that time.
DeppFan
· 1 year ago
Agree. I was a kid when that comment was made, and even I understood that it wasn't a "boast" at all. It was a comment, just a statement of fact.
Cpeterka
· 1 year ago
They should not "Forgive John"... They should AKNOWLEDGE that John Was Right !!!
Bush Bites
· 1 year ago
I wonder if the Mormons have posthumously converted John Lennon?
Nick_the_Dog
· 1 year ago
"Just for the record"..... I can't, yet, forgive the Vatican for all the horrors they have committed for the last 1000 years.
ProgressiveTroll
· 1 year ago
Me neither.
LeftCoastOracle
· 1 year ago
Big of them.
Well isn't that special
I'm on a roll here...
PattyP
· 1 year ago
You betcha!
LeftCoastOracle
· 1 year ago
Who cares?
MC_Haiku
· 1 year ago
you youngsters don't remember the "Beatle Burnings" that were happening in the south back then. It was front page news. For no rational reason whatsoever, I am glad the Vatican has forgiven John Lennon. I sure wish he was still around.
So they've finally worked out where he was coming from after 40 something years. At least the Beatles actually existed.
KeithNovo
· 1 year ago
Now, the papacy had nothing to do with burning Jeanne D"Arc at the stake! If anything, Charles VII could have ransomed her from the English in 1431. The English made the excuse she was bewitched, another old Christian prejudice when one does not agree with them! John Lennon was right, and the fact was that they were more popular than Jesus Christ! However, Christ did not have the modern means of communication they had in 1966. Besides, Lennon was no Catholic.
Indigo
· 1 year ago
Any word yet from the Vatican about that Elvis is king?
EquityRoy
· 1 year ago
Wow. And I thought I was behind on my "To Do" list!!!
Emily68
· 1 year ago
I'm not Christian, so maybe I've got this wrong, but aren't Christians required to forgive? 40 years seems like kind of a long time to complete the requirement. But I suppose a loving god would say "better late than never."
jeffg166
· 1 year ago
The Vatican? Is that another rock group?
SCLiberal
· 1 year ago
Who cares what the Vatican thinks?
Cpeterka
· 1 year ago
F T V !!
That's Altar Boy Latin for "Tell Them To Go Pound Sand!"
king kevin
· 1 year ago
"Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure? Will she still believe it when she's dead?" - Lennon actively ripping on the Catholic Church in the lyrics to "Girl" from Rubber Soul.
TampaZeke
· 1 year ago
I'm sure John can rest in peace now. You just know that he's been unable to "sleep" at night worrying about if the Vatican was going to "forgive" him or not.
Somehow I think the amazing John is giving the Pope the American one fingered salute with one hand and the British two finger salute with the other with a loud "FUCK YOU!" just in case anyone missed the sign language.
Rat-slinger is such an evil, prada wearing, closeted douchebag.
ProgressiveTroll
· 1 year ago
My thoughts precisely.
anarchy
· 1 year ago
Pope Hitler Youth can rot in Hell - the Beatles ARE more popular than Jebus.
furthermore, they most likely always will be.
Gridlock
· 1 year ago
John Lennon, a man who preached peace and love, is forgiven by an institution of hate and ignorance, run basically by the Liberace's of the religious community?
Well then.
TampaZeke
· 1 year ago
Right on!
MNPundit
· 1 year ago
Jeannie d'Arc was smart and hot but a bit of a militant fundamentalist who killed in the name of God.
So.... maybe the stake was a bit more appropriate.
RitornaVincitor
· 1 year ago
How sweet! The Vatican forgives John Lennon. But John wasn't a Catholic, was he? I was... as a kid. And how well I remember being taught that non-Catholics could not go to heaven. It greatly pained my Catholic mother because dad was a Protestant - a very good man - but nevertheless incapable of entering heaven unless he converted. In fact, the Church wouldn't let them get married in the church proper. They had to get married next door in the rectory because mixed-marriages were frowned upon. And dad had to promise to raise the kids Catholic, which he did, unfortunately. But what a shame I turned out so bad. I mean, I was gay, and what's worse? Of course I knew I was going to hell, and not just because I was gay. I lied about it in confession. That's a sacrilege! That's even worse than being gay! Of course they didn't have a word for gay in those days. It was just a facial expression the nuns made. You knew it was something unspeakably bad... far worse than bleaching your hair or smoking.
The nuns told us all about hell. The suffering was too hideous to describe, they said, even worse than what Saint Bernadette endured, and she had tuberculosis of the bone, plus everyone thought she was just a tad mental because she claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary standing in a dirty cave near a dump outside a town in the French Pyrenees. But nevertheless the good Sisters tried describing what it was like to be engulfed in fire.... brains boiling and all that. Apparently it was even worse than going through menopause wearing a constrictive medieval habit in a hot classroom overcrowded with Catholic baby boomers. I remember Sister Margaret Mary saying that in hell each time you screamed you would inhale more fire. Oddly they said that fire wasn't the worst of it. They said that knowing that you would never see God was far worse. They described a large grandfather clock that stood in the center of hell (and somehow managed not to burn up.) But instead of going "tick - tock - tick - tock...." the clock went "never - forever - never - forever....." to remind you constantly that you would never be released from the flames because God had washed His hands of you. So of course a lot of the kids spent a lot of time praying not to be sent to hell. But what was the use? I mean, just skipping Mass on Sunday or eating meat on Friday was enough to send you to hell. Eventually the Church dropped those rules after Vatican II, but I always wondered what happened to all those poor souls that were sent to hell for eating meat on Friday, because as we all knew, once you get sent to hell you're there for all eternity until the end of time. Even longer!
Anyway, I'm glad John Lennon escaped all that by not being Catholic. Of course, if he wasn't Catholic, then he couldn't go to Heaven.... so where else could he go? Limbo? No, that's for the innocent souls of all the unbaptized and the unborn, such as embryos and zygotes and the like. You couldn't be considered "innocent" just because you were raised as a Protestant. It wasn't your fault that you were a Protestant. That was your parents' fault. But by the time you reached the "age of reason", which is 7 years old unless you're retarded, you should have been able to see that Protestantism was heretical, that their Sacraments are invalid unless they happen to be Greek or Russian Orthodox, and that their Ministers have no power to transform bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. Therefore they should have converted to the True Church when they were seven. So it was your own fault if you didn't. (Note: Greek and Russian Orthodox are not Protestant. They are schismatics, not heretics. They don't recognize the Pope or the Holy See in Rome, and they teach the heresy that the Holy Spirit is only equal to the Father and the Son, when we all know that the Holy Spirit PROCEEDS FROM the Father and the Son. Plus they don't shave, cross themselves backwards, and let their priests get married. Ewwwwww!! Those disgusting, stringy beards! But they can still get to heaven if they pray very hard. The Eastern and Western Churches have only been split for about a thousand years, and there have been talks in Rome about getting back together again as soon as they admit they were wrong.)
Back to Limbo. Limbo was just for the innocent. Limbo was just like heaven, except you never get to experience the supreme joy of the Beatific Vision. The souls in Limbo were not suffering. They were perfectly happy because they knew God exists. They just wouldn't ever get to see him. (Funny. Sister said not seeing God is the worst part of hell. Hmmm....) I used the past tense because as we all know Limbo was officially closed by Vatican II in 1965. It doesn't exist any more. Who knows what happened to all those unbaptized souls? Must have been billions and billions of them because every time a sperm meets an egg in your mommy's tummy it is imbued with an immortal soul. That's why abortion is murder. Well those souls are "immortal", that is, until they grow up and commit a Mortal Sin, in which case they are dead until they go to confession and are brought back to life by Sanctifying Grace. But we'll cover that later. Venial Sins are bad too, but they don't kill the soul. Now where were we? Oh, yes. Innocent souls that were not baptized go to Limbo That includes all the souls of the righteous who lived before Jesus. God loved them, of course, because He's all loving (except when you cross Him) and because they were good people he didn't send them to hell, but they couldn't go to heaven either because they weren't Catholic because Jesus hadn't been born yet to found the Catholic Church upon the rock of Peter. (Peter means rock, which explains why Catholics may take Rock as their Christian name.) So all the good people before Christ were sent to Limbo. I don't think it was Purgatory. But Purgatory still exists, I think. You get sent there to be punished for the sins that God has forgiven you for. So if you ate meat on a Friday, but confessed it on Saturday, you were forgiven. But you still had to pay for it in purgatory. I mean you don't just get to go to heaven simply because you went to confession. You still have to pay. Purgatory is just like hell.... fire and the whole bit..... but no clock because you eventually get released from purgatory and get to go to heaven. The nuns used to describe the typical stay in purgatory in the millions of years. Imagine how happy you must be to see God after burning in purgatory for a few million years! But I guess you're not allowed to be even a little pissed at Him for sending you there for something as trivial as eating meat on Friday. Being angry at God would certainly put a dent in your purgatory parole hearing. Even all the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary couldn't spring you out of that one, and she's Queen of Heaven! That's right. The BVM is Queen of Heaven. She's the only other human being besides Jesus who is in heaven and actually still alive. The Immaculate Conception was declared part of infallible Church doctrine by Pope Pius IX or X, I can't remember which. I think he's the same one who declared that the Popes are infallible, so he can't be wrong about Mary. He can't be wrong about being infallible either. He said so himself. It definitely wasn't the one who collaborated with the Nazis. That was Pius XII. He's the one who had a girlfriend who was a nun who was said to have secretly run the Church behind the scenes. She was known as "La Popessa", not to be mistaken for the female Pope. That was Pope Joan, and she may have actually had a penis. And no, the Immaculate Conception was not Jesus. Protestants always get that wrong. The Immaculate Conception was Mary. She was conceived without stain of Original Sin. Original Sin came from Eve who ate the apple. Of course "eating the apple" was just a metaphor for being a slut. Mary, on the other hand, never had sex, and only got pregnant with Jesus when an angel came upon her. Or was it the Holy Spirit? Wait. I think it was a bird. Well, whatever. It had wings. Now, Mary was the opposite of Eve, you see. In fact, she came to reverse what Eve had done. That's why Catholics say "Ave Maria". "Ave" spelled backwards is "Eva", which is Latin for "Eve". Get it? And as her reward for what must have been a very difficult virgin birth, Mary got to go directly to heaven via the Assumption. No, that doesn't mean we assume she is in heaven. It means she was "assumed" physically into heaven, like being sucked up into heaven. Just like Jesus, she had to die first. In her case it was from old age. But when they went to her grave she wasn't there. Instead it was full of roses, which is proof that she was physically lifted into heaven and restored to life. It just took the Church 1,900 years to finally make it official. The Church rightly recognized that the Assumption was a Church tradition dating back nearly two thousand years, and therefore it had to be true because God preserves His Church from error. So we know that she's up there wearing a crown at the right hand of Jesus, pleading and interceeding with Him on our behalf, holding back his arm from striking us for our woeful transgressions, and occasionally she appears in grottoes, on walls and windows, or even on french toast. And she looks great, too, like she had a spiritual face lift. Heaven does that for you.
Back to purgatory. There is a shortcut to avoiding purgatory. It's called the Plenary Indulgence. Remember Indulgences? Martin Luther got all worked up over those because Holy Mother Church in her wisdom was selling them to raise cash. Luther was of course a nut job. He was an Augustinian monk who used to do stuff like casting demons out of lakes. I mean, what a kook! Even in those days everyone knew that demons only live in people or swine. He was probably just one of those selfish priests who got mixed up with a bad woman like Father Faunce did. What a scandal THAT was! The whole parish was buzzing about it for months. Mom wouldn't talk about it. She just told me he got transferred to a parish in Mannayunk. That was the local equivalent of being sent to Utah. I was so happy when he left because he was such a bastard. He used to yell and scream at me in confession even though I lied and only told him stuff that wasn't all that bad, like disobeying my parents three times and saying the name Jesus once without bowing my head. I don't think he'd ever gotten over my repeatedly trying to burn the church down. Big deal. What other way was there for a repressed fourth grader to express himself in parochial school? Those sadistic nuns wouldn't let you make so much as a peep. And I know I wasn't to blame for Sister Benedict Mary winding up in Emeryville State Mental Hospital. The bitch was a walking nervous breakdown long before the fires. Good riddance to both of them! And besides, Faunce was replaced by the most gorgeous priest ever who was so nice, and just loved hearing my confessions! I was really sorry when he got caught doing things he shouldn't at a naughty magazine shop near King of Prussia.
Anyway, back to Indulgences. They're like a Get Out Of Purgatory Free card - they wipe out all the time you've previously earned in purgatory - but you have to be in the state of Sanctifying Grace in order for an Indulgence to work. You can get Plenary Indulgences for doing various things like, say, if the Pope declares a Plenary Indulgence for all Catholics in the state of Sanctifying Grace who attend a certain pilgrimage, or kiss a certain relic, or attend a certain novena, or wash themselves in a certain miraculous spring, or join the Knights of Columbus but stay sober, or whatever. But I mean, how long can a person stay in the state of Sanctifying Grace? It's really hard. I mean, say you make a good confession, and you step out of the confessional in the state of Sanctifying Grace, and while you're doing your penance of three Hail Marys and one Our Father, you notice that cute kid that turns you on kneeling in the pew in front of you, and you get aroused right there in church. Bingo! Mortal Sin!! It's now back to hell or purgatory for you, depending on whether or not you live until your next confession where the whole thing starts all over again!
Poor John. He missed out on so much by not being Catholic! What was he, anyway? C of E? Now there's a nice church. King Henry dumped the Pope so he could get divorced a few times. Nothing wrong with that. Even the Catholics are doing it these days, though they call it annulment. There are all kinds of ways. Something called the Pauline Privilege lets you dump your wife if she cheats, or something like that. I know an ex-priest who married an ex-nun and then when she realized he was gay she got an annulment on the grounds that there had been no witnesses present at their wedding. The Church agreed they were never married in the eyes of God, even though technically God sees everything, so He must have been there when they got married. But no, even God has to obey Church rules. He gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and said, "What you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven." So the Pope can make God do whatever he wants. It's that simple. That's what I like about the Catholic Church. It's so sensible and consistent. John Lennon could have done worse than being a Catholic. At least he didn't belong to one of those weird cult religions like the Mormons! You wouldn't believe some of the ridiculous nonsense the Mormons believe!
SteamingPile
· 1 year ago
Except that at the time, it was arguably, if not demonstratively true. I believe Lennon was making a comment about the then-overblown hoopla over something as relatively insignificant as a rock band.
Petra_Glyph
· 1 year ago
i still don't forgive the Vatican for sending Jews to the gas chambers, ritualizing the sexual abuse of children and monopolizing the works of gay masters (da Vinci and Michelangelo) feh!
All Comments
who cares what they think. about Lennon,he's dead.
Way to be expeditious, VATICAN. <<<snark>>>
----------------------------
they just figured this out now? lol.
oh, christians.
He should be happy that he wasn't burned at the stake.
Think they're trying to get the boomers to start going to church again?
I'll say it again...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3ic6OOXns
lol
Well isn't that special
I'm on a roll here...
http://www.tangerine-sky.com/workingclasshero.mp3
Love that 60's stuff? 45's from 45 years ago today: 11/22/63
.
John Lennon was right, and the fact was that they were more popular than Jesus Christ! However, Christ did not have the modern means of communication they had in 1966. Besides, Lennon was no Catholic.
That's Altar Boy Latin for "Tell Them To Go Pound Sand!"
Somehow I think the amazing John is giving the Pope the American one fingered salute with one hand and the British two finger salute with the other with a loud "FUCK YOU!" just in case anyone missed the sign language.
Rat-slinger is such an evil, prada wearing, closeted douchebag.
more popular than Jebus.
furthermore, they most likely always will be.
Well then.
So.... maybe the stake was a bit more appropriate.
The nuns told us all about hell. The suffering was too hideous to describe, they said, even worse than what Saint Bernadette endured, and she had tuberculosis of the bone, plus everyone thought she was just a tad mental because she claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary standing in a dirty cave near a dump outside a town in the French Pyrenees. But nevertheless the good Sisters tried describing what it was like to be engulfed in fire.... brains boiling and all that. Apparently it was even worse than going through menopause wearing a constrictive medieval habit in a hot classroom overcrowded with Catholic baby boomers. I remember Sister Margaret Mary saying that in hell each time you screamed you would inhale more fire. Oddly they said that fire wasn't the worst of it. They said that knowing that you would never see God was far worse. They described a large grandfather clock that stood in the center of hell (and somehow managed not to burn up.) But instead of going "tick - tock - tick - tock...." the clock went "never - forever - never - forever....." to remind you constantly that you would never be released from the flames because God had washed His hands of you. So of course a lot of the kids spent a lot of time praying not to be sent to hell. But what was the use? I mean, just skipping Mass on Sunday or eating meat on Friday was enough to send you to hell. Eventually the Church dropped those rules after Vatican II, but I always wondered what happened to all those poor souls that were sent to hell for eating meat on Friday, because as we all knew, once you get sent to hell you're there for all eternity until the end of time. Even longer!
Anyway, I'm glad John Lennon escaped all that by not being Catholic. Of course, if he wasn't Catholic, then he couldn't go to Heaven.... so where else could he go? Limbo? No, that's for the innocent souls of all the unbaptized and the unborn, such as embryos and zygotes and the like. You couldn't be considered "innocent" just because you were raised as a Protestant. It wasn't your fault that you were a Protestant. That was your parents' fault. But by the time you reached the "age of reason", which is 7 years old unless you're retarded, you should have been able to see that Protestantism was heretical, that their Sacraments are invalid unless they happen to be Greek or Russian Orthodox, and that their Ministers have no power to transform bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. Therefore they should have converted to the True Church when they were seven. So it was your own fault if you didn't. (Note: Greek and Russian Orthodox are not Protestant. They are schismatics, not heretics. They don't recognize the Pope or the Holy See in Rome, and they teach the heresy that the Holy Spirit is only equal to the Father and the Son, when we all know that the Holy Spirit PROCEEDS FROM the Father and the Son. Plus they don't shave, cross themselves backwards, and let their priests get married. Ewwwwww!! Those disgusting, stringy beards! But they can still get to heaven if they pray very hard. The Eastern and Western Churches have only been split for about a thousand years, and there have been talks in Rome about getting back together again as soon as they admit they were wrong.)
Back to Limbo. Limbo was just for the innocent. Limbo was just like heaven, except you never get to experience the supreme joy of the Beatific Vision. The souls in Limbo were not suffering. They were perfectly happy because they knew God exists. They just wouldn't ever get to see him. (Funny. Sister said not seeing God is the worst part of hell. Hmmm....) I used the past tense because as we all know Limbo was officially closed by Vatican II in 1965. It doesn't exist any more. Who knows what happened to all those unbaptized souls? Must have been billions and billions of them because every time a sperm meets an egg in your mommy's tummy it is imbued with an immortal soul. That's why abortion is murder. Well those souls are "immortal", that is, until they grow up and commit a Mortal Sin, in which case they are dead until they go to confession and are brought back to life by Sanctifying Grace. But we'll cover that later. Venial Sins are bad too, but they don't kill the soul. Now where were we? Oh, yes. Innocent souls that were not baptized go to Limbo That includes all the souls of the righteous who lived before Jesus. God loved them, of course, because He's all loving (except when you cross Him) and because they were good people he didn't send them to hell, but they couldn't go to heaven either because they weren't Catholic because Jesus hadn't been born yet to found the Catholic Church upon the rock of Peter. (Peter means rock, which explains why Catholics may take Rock as their Christian name.) So all the good people before Christ were sent to Limbo. I don't think it was Purgatory. But Purgatory still exists, I think. You get sent there to be punished for the sins that God has forgiven you for. So if you ate meat on a Friday, but confessed it on Saturday, you were forgiven. But you still had to pay for it in purgatory. I mean you don't just get to go to heaven simply because you went to confession. You still have to pay. Purgatory is just like hell.... fire and the whole bit..... but no clock because you eventually get released from purgatory and get to go to heaven. The nuns used to describe the typical stay in purgatory in the millions of years. Imagine how happy you must be to see God after burning in purgatory for a few million years! But I guess you're not allowed to be even a little pissed at Him for sending you there for something as trivial as eating meat on Friday. Being angry at God would certainly put a dent in your purgatory parole hearing. Even all the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary couldn't spring you out of that one, and she's Queen of Heaven! That's right. The BVM is Queen of Heaven. She's the only other human being besides Jesus who is in heaven and actually still alive. The Immaculate Conception was declared part of infallible Church doctrine by Pope Pius IX or X, I can't remember which. I think he's the same one who declared that the Popes are infallible, so he can't be wrong about Mary. He can't be wrong about being infallible either. He said so himself. It definitely wasn't the one who collaborated with the Nazis. That was Pius XII. He's the one who had a girlfriend who was a nun who was said to have secretly run the Church behind the scenes. She was known as "La Popessa", not to be mistaken for the female Pope. That was Pope Joan, and she may have actually had a penis. And no, the Immaculate Conception was not Jesus. Protestants always get that wrong. The Immaculate Conception was Mary. She was conceived without stain of Original Sin. Original Sin came from Eve who ate the apple. Of course "eating the apple" was just a metaphor for being a slut. Mary, on the other hand, never had sex, and only got pregnant with Jesus when an angel came upon her. Or was it the Holy Spirit? Wait. I think it was a bird. Well, whatever. It had wings. Now, Mary was the opposite of Eve, you see. In fact, she came to reverse what Eve had done. That's why Catholics say "Ave Maria". "Ave" spelled backwards is "Eva", which is Latin for "Eve". Get it? And as her reward for what must have been a very difficult virgin birth, Mary got to go directly to heaven via the Assumption. No, that doesn't mean we assume she is in heaven. It means she was "assumed" physically into heaven, like being sucked up into heaven. Just like Jesus, she had to die first. In her case it was from old age. But when they went to her grave she wasn't there. Instead it was full of roses, which is proof that she was physically lifted into heaven and restored to life. It just took the Church 1,900 years to finally make it official. The Church rightly recognized that the Assumption was a Church tradition dating back nearly two thousand years, and therefore it had to be true because God preserves His Church from error. So we know that she's up there wearing a crown at the right hand of Jesus, pleading and interceeding with Him on our behalf, holding back his arm from striking us for our woeful transgressions, and occasionally she appears in grottoes, on walls and windows, or even on french toast. And she looks great, too, like she had a spiritual face lift. Heaven does that for you.
Back to purgatory. There is a shortcut to avoiding purgatory. It's called the Plenary Indulgence. Remember Indulgences? Martin Luther got all worked up over those because Holy Mother Church in her wisdom was selling them to raise cash. Luther was of course a nut job. He was an Augustinian monk who used to do stuff like casting demons out of lakes. I mean, what a kook! Even in those days everyone knew that demons only live in people or swine. He was probably just one of those selfish priests who got mixed up with a bad woman like Father Faunce did. What a scandal THAT was! The whole parish was buzzing about it for months. Mom wouldn't talk about it. She just told me he got transferred to a parish in Mannayunk. That was the local equivalent of being sent to Utah. I was so happy when he left because he was such a bastard. He used to yell and scream at me in confession even though I lied and only told him stuff that wasn't all that bad, like disobeying my parents three times and saying the name Jesus once without bowing my head. I don't think he'd ever gotten over my repeatedly trying to burn the church down. Big deal. What other way was there for a repressed fourth grader to express himself in parochial school? Those sadistic nuns wouldn't let you make so much as a peep. And I know I wasn't to blame for Sister Benedict Mary winding up in Emeryville State Mental Hospital. The bitch was a walking nervous breakdown long before the fires. Good riddance to both of them! And besides, Faunce was replaced by the most gorgeous priest ever who was so nice, and just loved hearing my confessions! I was really sorry when he got caught doing things he shouldn't at a naughty magazine shop near King of Prussia.
Anyway, back to Indulgences. They're like a Get Out Of Purgatory Free card - they wipe out all the time you've previously earned in purgatory - but you have to be in the state of Sanctifying Grace in order for an Indulgence to work. You can get Plenary Indulgences for doing various things like, say, if the Pope declares a Plenary Indulgence for all Catholics in the state of Sanctifying Grace who attend a certain pilgrimage, or kiss a certain relic, or attend a certain novena, or wash themselves in a certain miraculous spring, or join the Knights of Columbus but stay sober, or whatever. But I mean, how long can a person stay in the state of Sanctifying Grace? It's really hard. I mean, say you make a good confession, and you step out of the confessional in the state of Sanctifying Grace, and while you're doing your penance of three Hail Marys and one Our Father, you notice that cute kid that turns you on kneeling in the pew in front of you, and you get aroused right there in church. Bingo! Mortal Sin!! It's now back to hell or purgatory for you, depending on whether or not you live until your next confession where the whole thing starts all over again!
Poor John. He missed out on so much by not being Catholic! What was he, anyway? C of E? Now there's a nice church. King Henry dumped the Pope so he could get divorced a few times. Nothing wrong with that. Even the Catholics are doing it these days, though they call it annulment. There are all kinds of ways. Something called the Pauline Privilege lets you dump your wife if she cheats, or something like that. I know an ex-priest who married an ex-nun and then when she realized he was gay she got an annulment on the grounds that there had been no witnesses present at their wedding. The Church agreed they were never married in the eyes of God, even though technically God sees everything, so He must have been there when they got married. But no, even God has to obey Church rules. He gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven and said, "What you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven." So the Pope can make God do whatever he wants. It's that simple. That's what I like about the Catholic Church. It's so sensible and consistent. John Lennon could have done worse than being a Catholic. At least he didn't belong to one of those weird cult religions like the Mormons! You wouldn't believe some of the ridiculous nonsense the Mormons believe!