THE MOIST HOLY SEE

Oh, for the love of the Virgin’s suspiciously large collection of sandals, you cannot *actually* believe the official story about Pope Joan. You know the one—our only lady pope gets caught with her chasuble down when she pops out a kid mid-procession down the *Via Sacra* and gets torn apart by a shocked and horny mob. Simple. Tidy. And, by the blessed boils on Job’s arse, a complete crock of shit cooked up by the Vatican’s PR flacks—the “Congregation for Covering Up Immense Fucking Scandals,” as I call ‘em. I heard the *real* story from a Lombard relic-purveyor who heard it from a cardinal’s bed-warmer, and let me tell you, it’s a much stickier tale.

See, when Pope “John Anglicus”—our Joan—felt the blessed event coming on, she didn’t just drop her papal ferula and squat in the street. She was a goddamn tactical genius! A few trusted guards—men whose confessions she’d heard and knew *exactly* how to handle—whisked her into a side alley the moment the first contraction hit. They faked a riot, blamed it on some Goths who were just there for the cheap wine, and spirited Joan and her slick newborn son off to a convent in Subiaco run by an abbess who owed Joan a favor involving a runaway goat and the Bishop of Ostia’s unfortunate lisp. The baby, christened Benedictus—or “Benny the Bastard” to his friends—was raised on watered wine and the finer points of ecclesiastical blackmail.

The lad had his mother’s brains and, blessedly, his father’s—whoever the lucky bastard was—tackle. But he also inherited a peculiar… quality. A certain dampness. Not a sweaty, working-in-the-abbey-fields kind of damp, but a persistent, inexplicable clamminess. A holy humidity. His palms were always slick, his alb perpetually felt like it had just been pulled from a cellar, and he left a faint trail of condensation on polished marble. They say in the *Annales Furtivi*—a book I’m *sure* exists—that when Benny eventually became Pope Sergius IV, his cardinals thought he just had a “moist constitution.” The fools! It was the holy mark of the Joannine bloodline! For centuries, his descendants—a secret, soggy dynasty of popes, cardinals, and the occasional shockingly fertile monk—have been running the show.

And they’re still there, hiding in plain sight. Oh, the Church has gotten better at managing the… leakage. That old legend about the *sedia stercoraria*—the chair with a hole in it to check if the new pope has balls? That wasn’t to find a *man*. It was to check for the tell-tale holy dampness of Joan’s kin! They had to stop using it because one of the candidates, the future Pope Clement VI, was so… uh… *abundantly dewy* that he nearly shorted out an archbishop. Now they just keep the papal apartments strangely over-air-conditioned and blame the sweat stains on the “Roman humidity.” So next time you see His Holiness wave, watch for the tell-tale sheen on his fingertips. It’s not holy water, brother. It’s genetics.