Well, the Catholic Church continues to wash its dirty laundry in public but they just can't seem to get those semen stains out, can they? Now the Pope is in the spotlight for his own role as architect of the cover-up and therefore as facilitator of countless additional child rapes that could have been prevented if he and his church hadn't been solely concerned about their own reputation - a reputation that now couldn't be any lower if Satan himself were to step on to the balcony in St Peter's Square to conduct Easter Mass with a choirboy on the end of his penis. I've often thought that if Satan were a Christian he would be a Catholic, so it came as no surprise to be told last week that Satan is, in fact, ensconced in the Catholic Church, and is working directly out of the Vatican, controlling operations from a big old captain's chair. OK, I made that last bit up, but only because it's the image that always comes to mind whenever I think of the Catholic Church. And the Church's chief exorcist - yes, such a post really does exist... I don't know if it's higher or lower than, say, a wizard, but it's pretty high up in the mumbo-jumbo department - and he says that Satan is living in the Vatican. Well, I don't think much of his choice of company, but if Satan really is a Catholic it might help to explain some of the events of the last two thousand years. Before the Reformation about five hundred years ago all Christians in Europe were Catholics until the Church became too corrupt and debauched even for Christianity to stomach. But it is the original church of Christ, who said: "Upon this rock I will build my church" referring to St Peter, the first pope, whose nickname, apparently, was Rock. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the moment the Church was established it became a political organisation, which meant that the consolidation of power and influence quickly became much more important than the message. Message? What message? Oh, that message. Of course, yes. And inevitably this led to bickering about status and who got to wear the big ring and the fancy hat - you know, the really important stuff - until before long rival popes were facing each other with massed armies on the battlefield - in the name of Christ, naturally. Even at this point if Jesus had come back he would have said: "What are you people doing?" "I haven't been gone for five minutes and already you're hacking each other to pieces like a bunch of savages." "You've missed the point so completely" he'd say, wouldn't he? "You're so far wide of the mark it's way beyond embarrassing" he'd say, "I feel as if I'm talking to chimpanzees" he'd say. No offence, by the way, to any chimps who may be watching. And this is early days, don't forget. Jesus wouldn't yet know anything about all the other horrors that were about to be enacted in his name in the coming years. The Crusades, the Inquisition. He wouldn't know about the systematic suppression of knowledge and free thought that would characterise his church for the next two thousand years. He wouldn't know about the conquest of the New World, where the sacred cross of Jesus slashed and burned its way through entire populations in a way that modern jihadis can only dream about, imposing itself with unparalleled cruelty on civilisations half a world away that even today still don't quite know what hit them. This is a church that claims credit for keeping civilisation alive during the Dark Ages, but the truth is that clergy were the only people who knew how to read and write, and they made damn sure it stayed that way for hundreds of years. When the printing press was finally invented in Europe, seven hundred years after the Chinese invented it, the Church condemned it as a work of the devil. Takes one to know one, I guess. The first man to translate the Bible into English was burned at the stake for his trouble, along with any astronomers and freethinkers they could round up when they weren't too busy making money from selling places in heaven, or rolling boulders of dogma into the path of science at every opportunity from Galileo all the way through the Enlightenment, which might just as well not have happened, up to the present day. This is a church that condemned the smallpox vaccine, for Christ's sake, as a violation of God's will. It opposed anaesthesia in childbirth because a woman is supposed to suffer pain as punishment for Eve's sin. Not Adam's, Eve's sin. The sin of being a woman. It's one of the two main sins in the entire Christian faith, the other one being, anybody? Yes, of course - the Jews killing Jesus. Which might explain why the minds of the righteous are so often filled with wicked women and evil Jews. If the Jews really did kill Jesus they didn't do a very good job because apparently he's still alive. Where's Mossad when you need them? If Jesus ever comes back Mossad might as well bump him off because the Jews have already taken the blame for killing him. They might as well get the value. About seventy years ago they took the blame six million times as a direct result of the Catholic Church's rabid anti-Semitic teachings. Europe is often referred to as a Judeo-Christian culture but historically it has always been more of a Jew-hating Christian culture thanks entirely to the Catholic Church. For centuries the Church in Europe preached open hatred against Jews, assiduously embedding Jew hatred into the very fabric of society, just as it is in many Muslim countries today. They made it virtuous to despise Jews, and it became, as it's becoming again in modern Europe, politically correct to be anti-Semitic. And this was no lapse of judgment or a flash of insanity by some crazy pope. This was centuries of institutionalised and deliberately focussed hatred. When popes still had executive power, one after another, they passed laws to victimise and humiliate Jews and steal their property. Jews weren't allowed to hold public office or to mix on equal terms with Christians. They were obliged to wear yellow hats and scarves in some cases to identify themselves - ring any bells? They were restricted to certain occupations and certain locations, and thanks to the blood libel, recently resurrected so tastefully by the Swedish press, they were massacred on a regular basis by the faithful, pious and righteous Christians with the Church's approval. So when Hitler came along it was easy for him to pick on Jews because the Catholic Church had already made them such an easy target by consistently fingering them as hated Christ killers. Hitler knew he'd have a lot of support, because he knew that generations of Catholic children had been taught by their religion to hate Jews, just as many Muslim children are today. How could they not be influenced? How could society not be poisoned? And Hitler, by the way, was a Catholic, not an atheist, as people often claim. He was baptised a Catholic, and he was never excommunicated for his crimes. No Nazis were ever excommunicated by the Catholic Church, although every Communist on the planet was. Indeed, the Catholic Church actually provided documentation to help many Nazis escape to South America or to certain Arab countries who wanted to exploit their expertise in exterminating Jews. If you believe in Satan, and if you believe that Satan is responsible for all the evil in this world, then the Catholic Church is surely his most fiendishly brilliant creation, because when you look at its record it's hard to imagine how the Catholic Church could have had a more negative influence on human history than it has, and even harder not to conclude that any other organisation with its track record would be legislated out of existence as an enemy of humanity. If the Catholic Church hadn't so consistently and virulently condemned the Jews for killing Jesus there would have been no Holocaust. There would have been no reason for anyone to think about picking on Jews. And that means today there might be no Jewish state and no Middle East conflict. That's quite a lot to have on your conscience, isn't it? How fortunate for the Catholic Church that it doesn't possess a conscience, but at least it gives ordinary Catholics an opportunity to feel guilty about something real for a change, if they feel so inclined, and to reflect on the reality that the Jews didn't kill Jesus at all. The Catholic Church killed Jesus, and has spent the last two thousand years dragging his entrails through the dirt. And if he came back tomorrow he'd be the first to say so. You know it's true. We all do. Pax vobiscum, and all the jazz.