The pond must do a double take rather than take a break, thanks be unto the Terrorists ...

The pond was going to take a break, and then the Daily Terrorists served up this front page.

Any time someone manages to work 'baffling' and 'Catholic' into a front page splash, the pond has to step back, and offer admiration and awe.

So a belief in talking snakes isn't baffling?

So an acceptance of walking on water, and water into wine, and sourdough loaves just right for Paul Sheehan, and virgin births, and multiplication of fishes, and saints and statues in abundance isn't baffling?

Forget about limbo, the Catholics did, and go searching through the bible for purgatory and let the pond know the result of your research. No, Maccabees isn't allowed. Just get baffled with the bull ...

Then there's the mystical nonsense of three in one, with the Holy Ghost allowed to go around spreading his seed like a randy old camel-herding goat or spirit.

And then there's the angels you couldn't fit on a pin head.

But the capper for the pond, always, is transubstantiation.

So eating the actual blood of Christ and swallowing the actual flesh of Christ, in whatever order and style you like, but in a determinedly cannibalistic way, isn't baffling?

What's baffling is that the Terrorists saw the need to put "Catholic" on the front page of its rag, as if Catholic was the exemplar of normalcy, as opposed to the exemplar of gay bashing, the Inquisition, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the crusades, the denial of women's rights, warped sexuality and denial, the Holy Roman Empire, and the cultivation and protection of perverts fiddling with children ... 

Let's not even get back into the cilice and its blood-drawing powers just yet ... let's save that for whipping and thorns day ...

We know where this fundamentalism leads - to the rantings of the likes of Miranda the Devine ...

That's enough to radicalise anyone. The pond has been radicalised for twenty lifetimes thanks to the Terrorists.

Would it have been possible for them to have constructed a better headline? 

How about?

The baffling conversion of a schoolgirl switching from one brand of snake oil to another...

But then what's so baffling about it? 

Barking mad fundamentalism of one kind is a precursor to baffling mad fundamentalists of another kind ... which is why the best fascists make the best communists, and vice versa ... and the likes of Chrisopher Pearson and Akker Dakker danced to one tune, then another ... and the deluded fundamentalists who flock to one god on one day are just as likely to flock to another brand of the same god, or a different god altogether on the next day ...

Meanwhile, we're all supposed to swoon at a bunch of barking mad folk getting together and electing a man as best minister of the world in a way that could only be described as baffling ...

Ah well, never mind, at least that leads the pond to one papist it is happy to follow, and there's more David Pope here where you can find a link to his new website ...

And tish to you baffling walri of the southern icelands ...