All I Know About the Pope

Dan Akroyd, Papa Conehead

I grew up in a kosher home, yet I know very little about religion, even the Jewish kind. My parents must have thought it was a lot of hooey themselves, since they never taught me anything about it besides the whole bacon/milk/meat thing.

Shocking though it may be to my husband, I have never read the Bible, although I have read all of Shakespeare. And starting in my teens, my mother fed me a steady diet of Camus, Sartre, Kafka and all those other ones who think life is meaningless, so I'm guessing she did too. Bottom line: The Pope resigned--who knew he could?-- and they need a new one, and I am in the dark about the whole situation. In fact, what I know about Catholicism could fit on the head of a proverbial pin. Here's what I've got:

1. Many unattractive women who cannot get dates become nuns. They marry God or Jesus -- or both -- and live cloistered together, covering their bodies from head to toe in black robes similar to the hateful burqas worn in countries we abhor for suppressing women. They do good works and pray.

2. The Pope is the leader of the Catholic church. They find him somehow, and when the other, lesser priests agree that he is the one, they send out smoke signals to tell the world he has been located, which seems odd considering he has a Twitter account.

3. The Pope rides around in a car called the Popemobile. He wears ornate ballet slippers, tons of bling and huge, pointed hats reminiscent of Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin's heads when they played the Coneheads on SNL years ago. (I always hated that bit. In fact, I never found Jane all that funny; certainly not like Gilda or even Laraine Newman.)

4. Whatever their real names are, the Popes are called John or Leo or Paul or Benedict, with Roman numerals after the name indicating how many have preceded him. This one is like the XXIst or XXVth.

5. Pope means "papa" in Italian, which is ironic since he is not supposed to have sex. (Who would have sex with a man dressed like that anyway?)

That's all I got. There are probably a lot of errors here, so don't quote me.