Like most other Catholics, I’ve been glued to my phone waiting for updates about the papal succession ever since His Holiness—the Bishop of Rome, Successor to Saint Peter, the Holy Father of the Church but Holy Daddy of my heart—Pope Francis was commanded into the sweet, sweet embrace of the world to come. But outside of Pope Francis’ daddyness, this time of sede vacante reminds me of another thing, seeing all these cardinals and bishops on the news is making me feel like a pawn again…

Bishop Lombardo caught me behind the chapel again after mass got out when I was dipping into the stock of communion wine, disappointingly discovering it was just grape Powerade. His gaze penetrated through me like an arrow through water, the smile he normally wore on his face seemed to depress itself behind his thick bushy beard. No words he said could have expressed what we were both thinking, thrashes of shame and disappointment mixed in with something else…

No… I can’t go back to that place… Those thoughts were, were wrong…

I confessed my sins, of course, but the same way confession doesn’t fully clean a hesitant confessor’s soul, my heart and mind will never be cleaned from that moment. It’s been a long time since then, almost a whole year. He probably found another young man at the parish like they always seem to do, he probably forgot me by now.

And that’s why it pains me so to see these other bishops and princes of the church milling about at the Vatican during this time, pretending that they’re deep in prayer while in reality we know that the “conclave” is really just a great fuck fantasy, acting so holier-than-thou like Bishop Lombardo once did. Conclave? More like, more like cum-cave. Haha, get it, like cum, like, like sex.