Chicago has been oppressing the people! They’ve installed some mechanical deviltry called parking meters on the street, forcing people who want to drive their multiton iron chariots (an offense unto god right there) into the city and then park them somewhere to pay for the privilege. Everyone is annoyed by parking meters, but guess who is whining the loudest? The churches, of course.

“I think it’s interfering with my religious activity,” said the Rev. Webb Evans, 96, who keeps an office at Israel Methodist Community Church. “We should have the freedom to go to church without having to pay a meter five or six feet in front of the door.”

Yes? And others should be free to go into a bar without paying a meter. Or into a restaurant. Or into a store. Those at least bring some economic gain into a community. But churches? They already get to squat on valuable property without paying taxes, and now they want the city to subsidize the parking of their flocks? What they’re really complaining about is that the city is fleecing the flock a little bit before the priests can get their hands in their pockets.

And this is hilarious:

“We’re not asking for special privileges,” said the Rev. Philip Blackwell, pastor of First United Methodist Church at Chicago Temple. “We just happen to be religious institutions.”

No, special privileges is precisely what they are asking for: they are insisting that the activity of their precious institution is more valuable or more worthy than that of other businesses and residences in the area, and want a special dispensation so their clientele can use a public resource for free.

I say, charge ’em extra.

I have a special antipathy to this kind of demand from churches. I grew up in a neighborhood where our house was sandwiched between two churches, the Catholic and the Lutheran. We were afflicted constantly by the Lutheran church’s insistence on playing hymns on one of those ghastly electronic carillons every hour and half hour…and since we were right across the street and they played them LOUD, all conversation, music, and TV in our house got regularly drowned out. And then on Sundays, the neighborhood would be choked with cars parked everywhere.

(Which we turned into a bonus, actually: it was amazing how many people would come out of a church service with bills stuffed into their pockets, which would spill unnoticed onto the ground when they pulled out their car keys. We kids would head out right after services to cruise the empty parking spaces, looking for loot.)

Another gripe is that the churches turned our town into a wasteland. Parking was such an issue that they bought up whole blocks, razed everything on them, and paved them over…including my childhood home. If you’re ever in Kent, Washington, go to the corner of 2nd and Titus streets where I lived, and behold what was once a lively neighborhood, now a desert of asphalt — my house was on the northeast corner of what is now the Catholic church’s parking lot. Don’t go on the hour, unless you’re really fond of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Finally, the church is beginning to clean up its act. The Vatican has announced that it is investigating three orders of nuns in Washington state — what perverted and revolting acts have these nuns committed to draw the ire of the Catholic church? I’m sure your imagination is working hard right now.

The Vatican says it’s following up on complaints of feminism and activism.

Oh, my god … heads will roll. They’ll be ostracized, exorcized, and excommunicatized. No mere buggery of children here, but feminism? Jesus is weeping in heaven above, and the angels are grounded with grief.

When an old thread is suddenly resurrected, it’s interesting to try to guess why. Every time Kent Hovind gets a little bit of press, his weird fans start googling his name, and presto, they stumble onto one of my old threads and start waxing indignant. The latest zombie thread is about the Shroud of Turin, and I can guess what has prompted people to start digging on the web for info: that goofy ol’ Pope Ratzi is genuflecting before the Shroud.

He said that keeping up that hope is the message of the Shroud of Turin, in which disciples see their sufferings “mirrored” in the suffering of Christ, CNA reported.

No, no, no. That’s not the message of the Shroud. It’s a much more reassuring one for the papacy: the moral is that even the cheesiest, most absurd con game can be kept going for centuries if it involves religion. That’s the message of hope the Catholic hierarchy can take from a fake relic.

Speaking of hope…look at this other entrepreneurial opportunity: for a mere 57€, there is an organization that will light a candle for you at Lourdes, that other long-running, lucrative fraud.

PBS has a crew in the Vatican, looking to see some signs of light from a secretive organization. Here’s an account of one audience — it sounds hopeless. First some flunky came out to make this declaration:

The last couple of months have been very difficult, he went on, with so many questions being raised about things that happened long ago. But he said, “This is the time for truth, transparency and credibility. Secrecy and discretion are not values that are in fashion at the moment. We must be in a condition of having nothing to hide.”

Ah, now it’s all in the distant past. Once again, they are not going to take responsibility, but push it off. That is not promising.

When the Pope himself spoke, it was no better. No mention of the sex abuse scandals, just another slow swivel to another target in the blame game: the internet.

“The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication,” he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more “egalitarian and pluralistic” forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the “digital divide” between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the “dangers of … intellectual and moral relativism,” which can lead to “multiple forms of degradation and humiliation” of the essence of a person, and to the “pollution of the spirit.” All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age.

The rejection of modernity is not just the provenance of yokel creationists, I guess.

This is really hard to watch: it’s a young woman giving the benediction at the graduation ceremony at Midwestern State University, in Texas, and she’s so sucked up into her religious fervor that she starts shaking, I catch a hint of speaking in tongues, and finally ends up fainting on the stage.

If it were anything other than religion she was trying to push up there, we’d be getting that poor woman in for psychiatric help.