Is the Pope Really Catholic? And What Does He Do Out in the Woods?

Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

Papa Stronsay is an island of 183 acres of treeless grass in the northern Orkneys of Scotland. The local industry used to be herring curing until the island was abandoned in the 1970s. In 1999, a traditionalist Catholic order called The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer bought the island and built a monastery on it, which they named Golgotha. As of 2023, there were 9 people living on the island. Several have left since.

The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer did actually receive formal canonical recognition as a religious institute. At least they were up until they pulled this cunning stunt. Father Michael Mary Sim announced the community would extend “no juridical recognition” to Pope Leo XIV or to any pope since the Second Vatican Council in 1958. They believe Popes since then have been guilty of numerous heresies and therefore the Pope is not actually the Pope. These “heresies” include:

• The Bishop of Christchurch received his ashes on Ash Wednesday from an Anglican bishop. Clearly that kind of thing invalidates an entire religion. 
• New Zealand bishops closed churches during COVID. Not many people could manage to do the mental gymnastics to get from “churches closed to stop people from dying in a pandemic” to “the Pope is not real,” but apparently these guys can. Maybe they just hate Zoom meetings. 
• They have a photo of a witch doctor touching Pope Francis. Apparently this makes you not Pope somehow, like a game of pagan freeze tag but with greater stakes. Or this is all bullshit. One of those.
• They claim that in the 1930s the Catholic Church was co-opted by over 1,000 communists who all went to seminary at the same time with a goal of taking over the church’s power structure over many decades. There’s a much longer, stupider backstory to it all, but it’s about as exciting as listening to two boomers arguing over baseball’s infield fly rule or what color the living room couch really was back in 1975. The main reason they claim communists are secretly running the Catholic Church is actually somewhat clever. It allows them to treat every development they dislike as communist sabotage rather than as an argument they have to respond to.

Claiming the Pope wasn’t actually the Pope, Father Michael Mary Sim’s only conclusion was that he should be the Pope instead. As luck would have it, he knew a few other morons who were willing to go along with this. Monseigneur Pierre Roy of Our Lady of Joy Mission in eastern Canada performed the “consecration”, assisted by two more unauthorized bishops from South America. Roy’s thirteen-minute homily called the modern Church “the habitation of devils” and compared it to Babylon, which is odd since most people have forgotten it was ever a TV show in the first place. Also, Unauthorized Bishop is the name of my George Michael cover band.

Sim pronounced the consecration valid “beyond all doubt” and noted it was the first pre-1968 episcopal consecration in Orkney in 976 years, the last being Bishop Thorolf at Birsay in 1050. “Heaven and history will smile upon Papa Stronsay,” he said, referring to a remote island in the North Sea that literally no one gives a rat’s ass about.  

This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.