Your Papers, Please God

Despite its continuing idolatry of a fundamentalist Iron Age wizard who claimed kinship with a malignant Bronze Age djinn, let it not be thought that the Church of Rome is against modernisation, at least where women aren't involved. Like any well-functioning police state, the Church has always placed great importance on documentation, whether in burning books or in authorising the burning of people. Nowadays, rather than letters of commendation in Latin, Catholic priests moving between parishes are to be issued with identity cards as a means of proving that any sins which they may have committed are not beyond the tolerance of the local bishop. Such precautions are necessary in order to foil the nefarious doings of impostor priests, at least one of whom recently "heard confessions, officiated at weddings, took prayer meetings, and defrauded churchgoers out of thousands of dollars" - all well-established and sacred practices, but practised in his case, alas, without the blessing of the Pope.