Benny The Rat

It would be very audacious of this humble writer to suggest that Benny the Rat had anything to do with the untimely demise of Pope John Paul I after a meager twenty-eight days in office and pledges to clean up a very stinky Vatican Bank that was laundering Mafia money, dealing in counterfeit bonds, and investing in weaponry, although not weapons of Holy Mass destruction. After all if Catholics can’t be presumed innocent, who can? And this meekest of observers has no certain knowledge that anyone slipped Digitalis into the doomed Pontiff’s tea along with one guilty pleasure lump or two.

Still, although he is the successor to St. Peter and has the magic Testament decoder ring to prove it, there’s something unmistakably dubious about the guy in his trademark red Guccis (he claims they come from the Vatican cobbler—Jesus’ guy has cobblers? What next, a hat person?) No, watch him enter a room—he’s all shifty eyed, as if he’s afraid that Luigi ‘The Knife’ Moscone is going to jump out and kiss him on both cheeks and ask where the @#%& the money is. Or the gold. Or maybe it’s a teary guy with a swastika he’s afraid of. ‘Herr Fuehrer was so grateful.’ Wait, let’s be fair…

How sinisterly appropriate that this pretender to St. Peter’s throne would enter into cahoots with his counterfeit counterpart in the secular world, the nifty, shifty 43’rd President of the United States whose elevation to high office entailed not only white smoke, but lots of mirrors. There are a million parallels.

While campaigning for his second coronation, Mr.