RoboPope: Dead and Alive, You’re Coming With Me

'Yes, I use Daz.'

‘Yes, I use Daz.’

Pope Francis has franchised out his brand to help him meet the demands of the Papacy in our busy, modern times. The new fleet of state-of-the-art RoboPopes was unveiled at a ceremony in Rome last month. Speaking at the ceremony, the Pope said that ‘a robot in my likeness will be sent to every country in which there is a Catholic presence’, each one personally blessed by the pontiff, and programmed to dispense Papal wisdom, and kiss the ground and shit like that.

‘Unlike God, I can’t be everywhere at once,’ said the Pope, ‘but now, with these surrogates, I can come close.’

Too beautiful to be bothering with any Popery, so he stays in his boxers.

Too beautiful to be bothering with any Popery, so he stays in his boxers.

The Pope was praised by senior clergy for ‘embracing change’ and ‘adapting to the technological age’, but Vatican sources insist that the Pope had these robots made because ‘he’s a lazy old cunt.’

‘Most days it’s a battle to get the Holy Father out of his underpants,’ confessed our insider, ‘He’ll just sit there eating ice-cream with a giant ladel, and watching South American Soap Operas. Los Tittos el Bitchos is his favourite. One time, he couldn’t be arsed going out on the balcony to address the crowds in St Peter’s Square, so he just pointed to one of the elder bishops and said, “Stick some glasses on that guy and shove him out there. No cunt’ll know the difference.”’

roboThere have been some teething problems with the robotic pontiffs. One model, trialled in La Paz, Bolivia, was addressing a congregation when it began flailing its arms and shouting, ‘DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!’ The priest who tried to subdue the robot was decapitated, and the organist lost an eye, an ear and one-and-three-quarter testicles. In Dublin, one of the robots began fingering a choir boy. The priest sent an angry memo to the Pope saying: ‘I have nothing against the fingering of a choir boy in principle, Your Holiness, but I had first dibs.’ In Paris, one of the PopeBots converted to Islam, and then whizzed down the Champs Elysees yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’, and loudly denouncing the Pope as a ‘heathen dog.’

The Vatican has ushered in a new era of electronic innovation, upon which other faiths and nations have been quick to capitalise. Iran, Israel and Brazil are all developing, or have developed, a range of religiously-inspired robots, in preparation for what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls ‘the coming robopocalypse.’

‘The streets will run with the Castrol GTX of the infidels,’ Ahmadinejad told viewers on Iranian state television, ‘just as soon as we sort out our Windows Vista compatibility issues.’ The Iranian prototype, NOT MOHAMMED, is set to be unveiled this Autumn.

Israel’s line of JewBots, or RabbiPods, will serve as one-day-a-week cleaners rather than metal holy men.

‘This will be a great way for us to get around the no-working-on-the-Sabbath rule,’ said an old Israeli man, who looked uncannily like ZZ Top, ‘I don’t much care if these robots can recite Leviticus, as long as they know their way around a vacuum cleaner. And it would be a bonus if I could hire one to fuck my wife for me.’

'You won't like Jesus when he's angry...'

‘You won’t like Jesus when he’s angry…’

Brazil has completed work on a giant, 300-foot-tall animatronic Jesus, which has already laid waste to nine cities. The cry of ‘JESUS, SMASH!’ has struck fear into the hearts of those on Brazil’s east coast. India is busy working on a 400-foot-tall … whatever that big guy with the trunk and the lots of arms is called, to combat the problem. Robot engineer Samjat Duwallawallawallah said: ‘Hinduism is a religion of peace, yes, but when our guy gets over to Brazil with his multiple pairs of arms I guarantee you he’s going to fuck Jesus’s shit right up.’

Despite some setbacks to his RoboPope plan, it’s clear that Pope Francis remains optimistic, and, more importantly, doesn’t really give that much of a shit.

‘It’s like McDonalds,’ said the Pope, ‘When kids have their birthday parties there, they don’t care whether or not the guy prancing about is actually Ronald McDonald. They see the wig and that nightmarishly fixed smile, and, to them, it’s Ronald McDonald. They’re happy. Same with my robots. People don’t think it’ll be real? Fuck real. Jesus isn’t real, and it’s never put me off. Anyway, these new PopeBots will give me more time off to enjoy my favourite soaps, which reminds me… interview over, got to go… Alejandro’s about to find out that his twin brother Alfonso’s been pumping his wife behind his back. Wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself, actually. Smashing tits on that girl.’

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