'Our father, who art downstairs ... '

BBC Radio 4 announced today that fringe religions are to be given a voice on the religious comment slot on the Today news programme.  ‘Humanists have long wanted to put their views across,’ said producer Quentin Farquarson, ‘but religious groups have insisted we retain a faith-based approach to the daily three-minute slot.  This ought to keep everyone happy – apart from the atheists, of course.  They’re never happy.’

Albert Moloch, a Satanist of 30 years, will be the first to make his debut on the programme.  He has promised to deliver a message ‘underlining the importance of charity, tolerance and slaughtering all firstborns to ensure the sun rises each day’.  It is the break Mr Moloch has been waiting for since gigs on the school assembly circuit dried up after he closed one appearance with an acoustic cover of Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’.

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It has emerged that for at least five hundred years successive popes have all been working behind the veil of holiness to further the purposes of Satan on Earth. When this began is uncertain, though historians agree that it must have been before the time of Alexander II Borgia, whose pathological feasting, gambling and whoring are now seen as classic examples of displacement activity by a man who could not come to terms with his dual role.

Protestants from Cromwell to Ian Paisley have consistently asserted that the Bishop of Rome was the human personification of Satan, but now the present incumbent has finally put his hands up and declared ‘Yup, fair cop, you’ve got me banged to rights.’

Benedict apologised ‘whole-heartedly’ to Catholics across the world for having pretended to be the Vicar of Christ when in fact he consorted nightly with the hell-born spawn of Beelzebub. However, he insisted he had not known the truth until shortly after his election as Pope in April 2005. ‘I was stunned when the Keeper of the Keys told me this in a private briefing – it certainly isn’t what I came into the priesthood to do. I thought I was one of the good guys’ said the German-born pontiff and former Hitler Youth member. ‘But there’s no way to resign from the post and, well, I assumed if it was OK for the great John Paul II, it must be OK for a humble tiller in the fields of the Lord like me.’

In his early days, Benedict said, he was amused to see even non-Catholic MEPs rise up in anger when the Reverend Ian Paisley denounced him as Antichrist in Strasbourg. ‘I stood there thinking, if only you knew,’ he said. ‘But really I was a complete fraud and I’m glad that it’s all out in the open at last. Life-long celibacy is bad enough, but kissing the anuses of demons every night … eeeww…’

One couple who found out the hard way are Sally and David Henderson, who began witnessing strange events shortly after moving into their three-bed semi-detached house in Crawley, Sussex. ‘I’d walked into my daughter Louise’s bedroom to read her a bedtime story’ said Mr Henderson, ‘when she spat green vomit onto my face and rotated her head three hundred and sixty degrees. Now call me over-protective if you like, but that’s not normal’, he insisted.

The next day when his wife Sally went to ask her daughter whether she wanted a game of Connect 4, she discovered her masturbating with a crucifix and speaking some strange language which ‘sounded like Latin but , you know, like, backwards’.

The Home Information Pack didn’t warn us about any of this’ the couple complained. ‘Only that next door had planning permission for a conservatory, which I don’t think is really connected to our house being possessed by the Anti-Christ. We got the man from the council round to show him the problem’ continued Mr Henderson, ‘and my daughter informed him that his mother sucks cocks in hell. Apparently his mother is, in fact, alive and well and spends part of her retirement doing voluntary nursing work for the Macmillan cancer charity.’

Finally the couple called the estate agent to show him their Home Information Pack and how it compared with the reality of life in their new home. The couple reported that the forces of darkness lifted him off the ground, span him around, turning his eyes yellow, before he was impaled to the wall with a set of kitchen knives that flew across the room from the cutlery draw. Then the satanic screaming suddenly stopped and the estate agent just stayed up there bleeding a slow and painful death. ‘So it’s not all been bad’ said an upbeat Mr Henderson.

Gary Stanton