The Pope is allegedly landing right now—if God is on his side, at least, and if they are not lying to us. (Or maybe God wants to kill him on American soil! God is A CRAZY, DANGEROUS BASTARD. Sort of like a Vietnam Vet with Asperger's on the glue.) The President is welcoming the Pope at Andrews Air Force Base. Pope Ratzi will be sleeping tonight at 3339 Massachusetts Ave. NW, so maybe don't go trolling for gay sex up by Cheney's house tonight. D.C. will now be a mess until Friday, when the Popester goes on up to further clog New York. Just in case you should meet him, in his funny little costume, maybe you'd like to know about his religion?

• In the time before people, someone named God made things called "angels," which can be seen now on YouTube all the time.

• In 380, Emperor Theodosius made Catholicism the Official Religion™ of his Roman Empire. That worked out really well, as he was the last one to rule over the whole shebang. (Then there were Ostrogoths, which preceded our current goths but weren't as clean and presentable.)

• For several hundred years after that, the Catholics mostly just went around burning people, including people in their religion who thought that only things in the Bible should be considered part of the church's teaching, like Jan Hus. Sometimes, to really get the point across, they dug up dead bodies and burned them, as Pope Martin V did in the case of Hus's mentor, John Wycliffe, in the late 1420s.

• In the 1500s the Catholics tried to take over Japan which went okay for a while but the Japanese got confused and they crucified all the Catholics, figuring they liked it very much.

• There have been 265 popes probably but they don't keep very good records, so no one is sure. Very few of the popes were given the job by their parents. Most of them didn't try to exterminate the Jews.

• Catholics have their very own country! (No, not Brazil.) But they can't fit everyone into it, like a city-state clown car. Only 800 people live there, and it is about 43 acres smaller than Martha Stewart's farmhouse in New York. That is why the new pope is coming here, to look for a bigger country.