Was Jesus a nonce? Already rocked by allegations of decades of widespread child abuse by its priests, the Catholic church is now facing claims that its messiah, Jesus Christ, was himself a kiddie fiddler. Although rejected by the Vatican, the new claims have been seized upon catholic clergymen accused of child abuse as justification for their misdeeds. “For decades now they’ve been saying we were misinterpreting the Lord when he said ‘Suffer the little children unto me’ – at last we’ve been vindicated,” declared Father Padraig MacGimp, of the Deviant Priests Protection League. “If the likes of Blair and Bush can justify a bloody war in which thousands of innocent people died by saying that Jesus told them to do it, then the same defence should be open to us when we’re accused of looking at some altar boy’s pert backside!” The allegations against Christ have been sparked by a series of bizarre manifestations in which, it is claimed, the messiah indecently assaulted several young people. “I was in the kiddies playground in the local park, vandalising the swings, when I saw him,” says sixteen year old Reading resident Tim Cashass, recalling his recent encounter with the divine sex offender. “He was staggering around behind some bushes. When he saw me he stepped out from behind them, approached the swings and exposed himself. I’m sure it was Jesus, he had long hair, a beard, blood on his hands and was wearing some kind of dirty loincloth, like he does on the cross outside the church.” According to the teenager, the now naked messiah proceeded to stumble towards him, arms outstretched as if he was on the cross, shouting in a slurred voice that he ‘loved him’, before tripping over and vomiting violently, enabling Cashass to escape and alert the police. However, by the time the police arrived at the park, there was no trace of the holy flasher, although a discarded surgical gown and an empty two litre white cider bottle were found in bushes near the swings. “There was a further report of a naked man causing chaos at the children’s paddling pool, but after that, he seems to have vanished into thin air,” a perplexed police spokesperson told a press conference, dismissing speculation that the perverted messiah was actually nothing more than an inebriated tramp who had wandered off from a nearby Accident and Emergency department whilst receiving treatment following a fall. “This offender was no tramp, her performed several verified miracles whilst exposing himself: even though it was a cold day, his manhood was in no way shrivelled, and witnesses are adamant that he walked on the four inch deep water of that paddling pool!”

Whilst a question mark might still hang over the authenticity of Jesus’ appearance in the Reading playground, teenager Kelly Flipper has no doubt as to the identity of the assailant who traumatised her in a Catholic church in Bracknell. “I was bending over a pew after choir practice, trying to pick up a hymn book I’d dropped, when I felt someone smack me across the backside,” explains the fifteen year old chorister. “When I turned around, there was nobody there! Then I noticed the figure of Christ on the cross above the altar – he raised his eyebrows suggestively and winked at me!” This wasn’t the first time that this same Christ had been accused of sexual misconduct. A week before Flipper’s disturbing experience, another young girl had run shrieking from the church, claiming that whilst praying at the altar, she had looked up to see Jesus attempting to peer down her cleavage. Whilst church authorities have tried to dismiss the incidents as hysteria on the part of young girls with hormonally-driven overactive imaginations, a group of local boys reported another inappropriate sexual encounter with the messiah outside the same church. “We were hanging around outside, amongst the graves one night, when this geezer up on the cross above the church door gets down and strolls over,” claims fourteen year old Jimmy Capon. “He said that he’d show us his if we showed him ours. Next thing, he’s turned round and is flashing his arse at us!” After the boys declined the saviour’s invitation to go behind the cloisters with him, the disappointed Jesus returned to his cross. Although the youths admit that they had been drinking strong cider and sniffing glue, Capon is adamant that what they experienced wasn’t an hallucination. “The glue and the White Lightning have never had that effect,” he told a local newspaper. “Usually everything just spins around and we throw up. Besides, we all saw him!” It isn’t just renegade paedophile priests who have seized upon these incidents for their own ends. “It all makes sense,” opines top scientist and leading militant atheist Professor Stephen Donger. “Abusers are often, themselves, the victims of abuse, and these priests look to this Jesus character as a living embodiment of their god, whom they habitually refer to as ‘our father’.”

Indeed, bearing in mind that the church’s saviour, Jesus, is often referred to by his acolytes as the ‘Son of God’, Donger has even speculated that Christ himself might have been a victim of abuse at the hands of his father. “It’s significant that his mother didn’t live with his biological father,” he muses. “Preferring to have her son brought up by his step-father.” Not surprisingly, the Catholic church has reacted angrily to these allegations. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, this is all based on tittle-tattle and idle gossip – there isn’t one shred of hard evidence to suggest that Jesus has been kiddie fiddlin’,” blusters Brendan O’Fugh, Bishop of Skibbereen. “I challenge anyone to find anything in the Bible – no matter how much you juggle the words around – which supports these ludicrous lies!” O’Fugh also has little time for those critics of the church who have jumped on the bandwagon in order to further their own agendas, accusing them of hypocrisy. “I thought that these atheists didn’t believe in the supernatural – yet they’re willin’ to accept that statues can come to life and grope women if it discredits the church,” he rages. “As for this Professor Donger, accordin’ to him, God didn’t exist in the first place, so how could he have abused his own, also non-existent, son?” O’Fugh believes this recent controversy is simply another example of the lack of respect currently being shown to Christians. “Why is always us, eh?” he asks. “You don’t see anybody accusin’ Jehovah of bein’ a wife beater, or Buddha indulgin’ in bestiality, now do you?” However, a top Church of England theologian has little sympathy with this point of view. “Well, it’s their own fault if they insist upon worshipping a messiah who is a nonce,” opines Dr Julius Score. “I blame it on his upbringing – if their Jesus had been brought up a protestant, like ours was, then they wouldn’t be having any of these problems. Believe me, it’s no coincidence that all these incidents seem to have involved Catholic churches.”