Let's hear it for the boys.

In today's modern world it's so hard to stay au courant. Just ask Tom Ridge. When there was all that chatter about a terrorist group planning to interfere with the election--and they would not specify if it was the same group that had interfered with the election the last time--the reds quarantined several blocks and buildings in New York and New Jersey. Some doubted Tom and his timing, so he reluctantly revealed that the four-year-old information was discovered on floppies from an old Kaypro computer found on the border of Pakistan. A pastel is going to be added to the color wheel of terror indicating "Never mind."

Apparently some new old chatter has also sent the Vatican into lockdown. The bishop of Boston has been selling off the holy real estate because the church needs money to finance the pedophilia buyouts.

And in one of the buildings slated for redevelopment--right next door to a parish house--workers discovered a 30-year-old copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was immediately translated into Latin and carrier-pigeoned to the Vatican.

Omnium hellium brokium loosum.

The pope had a tantrum, ergo, he got his steno, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--the Cardinal aptly named Ratzinger--to draft a 37-page paper called "On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World." Or in the Latin, "Bee-otchium Slapium."

In this latest papal Post-it, His Against StemCelledness lays the blame for many modern ills--bloggers, those multipocketed pants with the zip-off lower leg, Kelly Ripa's speaking voice--squarely where it belongs: radical feminism.

Talk about old information. Has someone at the Vatican been watching too many reruns of That '60s Show?

Let's do the time warp again! A 2,000-year-old Christian identity movement still bedeviled by radical feminism? Say it is so! And where do I sign up?

The pape-istle claims that the radical feminist (and I just like saying that) view of equality has inspired ideologies that call into question the family--the two-parent structure of mother and father--and seek to make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent. In short, ix-nay on the women priests and the gay marriage.

It also declares that radical feminism (schwing!) seeks to eliminate the biological differences between man and woman. Before they start firing up the black smokestacks, I hope the pope gets around to commissioning the paper blaming the elimination of men and women in general on radical masculinism.

Actually he may have something in the papal pipeline. When Hellboy George visited the pope at the Vatican, the pope did chastise him for the war in Iraq. George smiled and leaned into him and whispered, "Tell someone who cares, old man." I think he did anyway.

Then George asked His Celibacy to get the U.S. archbishops behind him against gay marriage, or, as JPII likes to call it, "legalization of evil." Lo, the papal rift was healed. From then on, their communion was divine.

And don't tell me W. wasn't paying attention at the old seat of the Inquisition. Under Bush II's reign, the wall between church and state has pretty well been taken down. Think of it as a productivity thing: At the rate the church-state merger is going, soon there will be a dual use confessional/ballot box. Think of the time-saving:

"Bless me father, for I have sinned: I support stem cell research, I keyed a Lexus SUV in the parking lot, and I am going to vote for John Kerry."

"My child, for your penance you are going to have to watch The Passion of the Christ 15 times, and for keying my Lexus, you are going to have to blow me right now."