Ted burst through my back door on Sunday evening brandishing a copy of the pope's mouthpiece, L'Osservatore Romano.
"Listen to this!" he shouted, opening the fridge and helping himself to a six-pack. "The Vatican is condemning it as a bloody, irresponsible, violent and cynical attempt to impose questionable Western tastes on the developing world!"
I tossed aside the latest edition of Soldier of Fortune and leapt to my feet. "Just what I was thinking!" I shouted back, wrestling a beer from his hands.
"How dare America come over here and bomb a herd of Somalian nomads and not even apologise?"
Ted gave me a flustered look and continued reading. "The trail of blood which grows longer from year to year ... blah, blah, blah ... underscores the undeniable component of violence that lies behind every attempt to export Western models to human environments and ecosystems that have little to do with the West." By the time he had finished, there was beer on the walls, floor, ceiling and all down his shirtfront. It's not often that Ted gets this excited.
"Absolutely," I said, warily. "But it can't be easy telling a goat-herder from an Islamic fundamentalist when you're sitting in an AC-130 gunship at 10 000 feet in the middle of the night. Maybe it was just a simple ..."
Ted guzzled on his empty can and waved the newspaper angrily at me. The headline read, "The Bloody Race of Irresponsibility".
"I agree," I said, quickly changing tack. "The Somalians are a bloody irresponsible race. Just look at their ..."
Ted smacked me across the head with the paper. "That's not very Catholic of you," I said, forcibly relieving him of what was left of the six-pack.
"They are talking about the big race, you moron. The Dakar Rally. Not some inconsequential collateral flesh wounds inflicted in the holy war on terror."
Of course. I couldn't understand why I never saw it sooner. The scathing editorial was written a day after South African motorcycle rider Elmer Symons died during the fourth stage in the Morocco desert. I had never heard of Elmer Symons, but I could see how the church might be upset.
Symons had clearly gone over to Rome to be ordained as a bishop and was simply trying to get back home on his bike when he was unwittingly sucked into this perfidious riptide of motorised evil.
"This satanic race has claimed 49 lives in 29 years," read Ted, spraying beer on the cat.
"Five thousand died during the Inquisition," I said. "Another nine million in the Crusades. And they only had horses."
"It's not about the bikes," said Ted, nervously adjusting his crotch.
"It's about 500 depraved idol-worshipping foreign reprobates tearing up the desert and scaring the chickens. It's about exposing the natives to a perverted lifestyle that on the surface might seem a lot more fun than celibacy and Mass."
'Frustrated racing driver'
I reminded Ted that the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger was once a member of the Hitler Youth, a high-spirited little group whose members cheered with boyish zeal when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel went off with the 15th Panzer Division to have some fun of his own in North Africa.
"That was different," muttered Ted.
"Here's what I think," I said. "I think the pope is a frustrated racing driver. All he ever owned was a VW Golf. Now he has a jet black Phaeton with a 450-horsepower six-litre W12 engine that he gets to drive to the supermercato and back once a week. I think he sits in front of his 108-inch plasma screen at the Castel Gandolfo nursing a limoncello and watching the Dakar Rally knowing, just knowing, that given half a chance he could take those arrogant French bastards."
Ted couldn't say anything because his whole face was bulging with beer. It looked like he was drowning.
"I bet you didn't know that Ferrari gave the Pope a $1.2 million donation in 2005. And that Michael Schumacher gave him a steering wheel mounted on a plaque that read: 'The Formula 1 World Champion's steering wheel to His Holiness Benedict XVI, Christianity's driver.'" Ted turned red and began hyperventilating violently so I went off to the kitchen to whip up a couple of Bloody Marys.
"Best you make those Hail Marys, you heathen pig," he shouted after me.
'Don't make me laugh'
When I returned, he grabbed his glass and began quoting from the newspaper again.
"The race and its sponsors betray a cynicism that ignores local realities. The wrecks of cars, trucks and motorcycles abandoned in the desert are rusty monuments to irresponsibility."
"Don't make me laugh," I said, opening up my throat valve and pouring the rest of the Bloody Mary directly into my stomach.
"Africa is littered with monuments to irresponsibility. They are called gravestones. There are 144 million Catholics on this doomed continent and they are dying like flies because an old German man in a dress says condoms are the devil's work. Don't talk to me about local realities!" We were both drenched in beer and our chins ran red with vodka-laced tomato juice. It wasn't a pretty sight.
"It's those infidel dogs over at Durex who are encouraging promiscuity ..."
I stopped Ted in his tracks with a mawashi geri to the testicles and he went down like a sack of hammers.
"The Americans have started bombing the nomads, for God's sake! What difference does it make? What do you think is going to happen when they find out we have a Muslim for premier? None of us are safe, anymore."
Ted clutched himself and went pensive for a while. Then he threw up and said, "I planned on going go-kart racing at Killarney this weekend, but not if it means going to hell."
"You'll be fine," I said.
"Just don't forget your Saint Christopher."