Pope Benedict XVI Receives Rapturous Reception from Astronauts

Well, they certainly seemed to get along well at any rate. It must be weird up there.

Sorry, though. No rapture today, folks, so we can all sleep easy...unless, that is, the Lord was just a-testin' and He's a-gonna be a-comin' back tonight to a-whisk believers up into the Heavens 'n leave the unbelievers down here on Earth until He comes again for the rather more sobering, er, Last Judgment of the Living and the Dead.

We're real Bible-believing Christians, Catholics. We believe Our Lord when He says nobody, not even the Angels, knows when the End of Time shall be. We also believe Our Lord when He says, "This is My Body...This is My Blood."

I don't know what this born again Christian obsession is with the rapture, because every time we go to Mass and receive the Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord, He unites His very Self, Body, Soul, Humanity and Divinity to us, making us one, totally absorbed with His very being. Stop me if I'm uttering a heresy, but I guess if you don't believe in the Real Presence, you have to have something really, absolutely, jaw-droppingly mind blowing to look forward to, like a mass air balloon expedition in the imminent future. Personally, when I think of the Last Judgment, I crap myself, but there we go.

The Lord Jesus is always present in His Church, in the Tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament. While Heaven is His Throne and Earth is His footstool (or something like that), He also dwells in the Tabernacle in every Church throughout the World even until the End of Time. If we can't see or can't believe that then that is our blindness. The Lord has made Him home on Earth in His Tabernacle in His Church. In Holy Communion, He does 'take us up' with Him to the Eternal Father. He Who for us became flesh and blood gives us His flesh and blood so that flesh and blood may one day go where He now is in Glory. Sorry, Baptists, but we are the real 'rapture people' every time Mass is offered!

I feel like I'm digressing a little, but, for some reason, a practical joker (quite practically, a joker) arranged clothes outside St Mary Magdalen's Church today in a quite humourous way to suggest that bodies had filled those clothes but that they had been taken up to Heaven in the Rapture. By the clothes, arranged as if the bodies of believers had been taken up following a good old lay down on the steps, was a sign saying 'Rapture 2011'. Very funny.

Of course, it would have been funny had St Mary Magdalen Church been a born-again fruitcake church for born again fruitcakes, but this gets back to my point yesterday about the Reformation. Nowadays, people hear something nutty about some nutty US sect and manage to associate that with the Catholic Church, which has always disassociated itself from millennial prophecies and crackpot end times theories. It's not fair! Atheists! If you're going to take the p*ss out of born again Christians, do it at the appropriate venues!

Like I say, quite a humourous arty Brighton stunt really, but I can't understand why, with a perfectly acceptable Baptist Church just down the road, they couldn't have pulled it off outside an 'ecclesial community' building which actually believed in the 'rapture'. Ignorance of the True Faith is rife! Yes, even in Brighton!

Anyway, while we haven't been taken up (or indeed left behind, because Catholics aren't real Christians, apparently), our beloved Holy Father has been ascending the very Heavens themselves, by telephone, to the astronauts on the International Space Station. God bless Pope Benedict XVI, now gloriously, and very humbly, compassionately and delightfully, reigning!