Gentle readers, hear my cri de coeur. Less than a day after publishing my last episode, I became a victim of vice shaming.  A lady reader fastened on my linking the words “fat,” “army,” and “wife” together in a way that implied that many, perhaps too many, Army wives are fat.  

Now I don’t know how to defend myself because relying on the truth is an unavailable defence.  And I had perhaps shown my malice toward the hefty when I engaged in the backward thinking that implies people can get fat from drinking too much, overeating, and lack of exercise.  If that isn’t a Medieval doctrine, what is?

So what is my excuse?  I shall take the high road.  If we start allowing vice shaming, where does it all end?  Vice shaming is misanthropy. To vice shame is to refuse to take people as the grubby beasts they are rather than as the angels they ought to be.  For example, on Christmas eve or Easter when we have the energy to attend a Mass, don’t we say things like “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa“?  In fact, there is a whole sacrament of confession, called by modernists the Sacrament of Penance, that requires the sins of Christians to make any sense.  Did not Christ die for our sins, rather than our excellences?  To vice shame, I say, is to shame the human race.  Vice shaming is malignant misanthropy costumed as virtue signalling.

Now I want all my readers to know I know what a few of my grievous faults are.  The vice shamer should also know that when I get scared enough to disguise myself and sneak into confession–there is no need for the priest to know who you are–one of my favourite sins to confess is uncharitableness to others.  Sometimes it occurs to me to review my lies or other assorted mortal sins for the priest.  If I’m feeling like a pest, I sometimes pile up so many venial sins and imaginary indiscretions that Fr Jerome accuses me of scrupulosity.  By that point, I know I’m getting to him.

Unlike the Saint that translated the Bible into Vulgate, this Fr Jerome is a nice guy.  The genius Saint had little to recommend him as a human being.  For one thing, he had a vicious temper.  My beloved Fr Jerome came to my attention when I learnt the teen boys in his parish, as well as the notorious adulterers, referred to Fr Jerome as Fr Easy.  He favours gentle penance.  You need have no fear of having to say an infinite string of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to appease the angry God.  With Fr Jerome, you are likely to hear, “Go and sin no more.”  As a saved but irredeemable sinner, you have to love that.  Alas, it never seems to take long before even a good Catholic’s bad intentions get the better of him.  

And don’t imagine I omit to confess my sporadic attendance of Mass on days of Holy Obligation.  I’m a busy cat. A journalist never knows when a scoop will call him.  Because I work so hard, I sleep in and I often need naps during the hours of evening Masses.  And I reject the abominable modern custom of Saturday Masses.  Can it be that the almighty wishes honest Catholics to share the sabbath with Jews, 7th Day Adventists, and such?  I think not.

Whilst I’m at it, the custom of saying the Mass in the vernacular is another abomination.  The Mass should be in a language that nobody, or at least very few, understands.  Nothing destroys the faith of the faithful more than if they understand what the Priest is saying or is asking them to say.  Irish Catholics know what I’m talking about: all that humbug about forgiving trespasses, to take just one example.  Probably “forgiveness” is a mistranslation of the Latin or perhaps is intended as divine irony.

All this vice shaming has kept me from telling you, gentle readers, about Wolverine’s wending through cities in Europe to a secret meeting with Putin in Moscow.  Once Wolverine verified that Team Putin had the Congo bomb, he and Comrade P discussed where to blow it up and on whom to blame the explosion.  

Putin’s Soviet background showed.  He pitched blowing the bomb up in Monaco to rid the world of a nest of rich capitalists.  Against him, Wolverine pitched practical concerns.  Why, given the facts, should either of them be opposed to rich anything?  Besides, an explosion in Monaco on a wrong night could kill half or more of the world’s Russian oligarchs.  Worse still, if you start killing a lot of rich people, the coppers and foreign governments will actually try to catch you.  Would Putin make himself friendless? Stick to killing the poor.  People snivel, wail, virtue signal, and do nothing of substance when you stick to killing the poor.  Also, you don’t want to kill people only to make it hard to buy and sell bombs.  

Also, the rationale for killing the original bomb thieves was to prevent a high publicity explosion.  Blowing up Goma would turn into a media circus.  Then Wolverine made his modest proposal: China.  Blow up a remote portion of China.  Be careful to confine the casualties to Chinese nationals.  Foreign crybabies must not emerge once they suspect their loved ones have disappeared.  If any country is ready to hide ugly truths, the Chinese are.  You kill a few Americans or Swedes and you’d swear the world is ending.  And the Masters of China are masters of the Hide the Truth game.  

“But,” chimed Putin, “the Chinese will be enraged. They’ll want to know who did it.”  Now Wolverine had checkmate,”Let’s set up the Uighurs.  They’re a race of troublemakers. The Chinese know Uighurs are ungrateful, say, for the money the Chinese spend on their policing and political education.  Above all, the Chinese will be delighted to blame them.”  

Putin fell into his own hands.  He was laughing so hard that little tears leaked from the sides of his pale blue eyes.  “Krasivaya, Wolverine, Krasivaya.  Mne eta nravitsya.”  I thought I had the gist of it.  Wolverine confirmed it.  “Beautiful, Wolverine, beautiful.  I love it.”

When I had a chance, I also asked Wolverine why Putin just didn’t ask Lord Caligula to gift him a stealth bomb.  According to Wolverine, Putin had put so much money into Munitions Galore that he felt as if the thieves had swiped what he owed.  He wasn’t going to stand by whilst a thieving gang made foreign policy problems for him in Africa with loot they stole from Putin.  Russia preferred to start trouble on its own.