CHRISTIANITY touches, rightly or wrongly, millions of people around the world.
It’s early orders left a lot to be desired, but as Europe entered the Middle Ages the church provided hope, education and the promise of a life much better than the poverty and injustice of secular existence.
As civilisation marched on organised religion became bloated, corrupt and outmoded. The Enlightenment revealed much of the accepted history taught by the church to be inaccurate.
For example, the Eighteenth Century scholar Edward Gibbon was made to finish his six volume history of Europe – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – in free-thinking Switzerland for daring to use primary sources to write about the calamity that was the early Christian church.
Two hundred years later the founding of the Jeff Kenna League rendered Christianity all but obsolete.
Still men of the cloth – and sometimes women too, but certainly not gay men, or at least openly gay ones – catered to congregations who needed assurance of the basic difference between right and wrong. That was fine while the more pressing affairs of Kenna HQ could, like a happy choirboy, carry on unmolested.
This week the ambiguous relationship between the Kenna and church is in danger of being, like an unhappy choirboy, irreversibly broken.
The chairman is marrying a Catholic, and that Catholic, despite largely enjoying the Kenna’s practical views of religion, wants to get married in a Roman Catholic Church. In Poland.
Turn up and say the vows? Sadly, with this mob – the word is used carefully, meeting the chief priest in the Polish interior was like a scene from The Sopranos – it’s not just a case of chatting about your family values over a pot of tea and getting the bride-to-be to wear a T-shirt to advertise a lack of mystery bruising.
The Roman Catholics Church requires you to attend a structured course of lessons over a number of weeks. And you don’t even get tea.
They also want you to sign a piece of paper declaring you will never stop your children from becoming Catholic.
The icing on the cake, not that you get any of that either, is the reluctance of the priest to impart when the lessons start. The chairman’s better half has been attending mass every week waiting for the Good News.
In the Bernard Samson Cold War spy novel series by Len Deighton, the lead character describes the operations of the KGB as ‘very slow and very cunning’. He could have been talking about the Catholic Church.
The Kenna transfer window was scheduled for next Friday. Friday evening to be precise, a time when the western world finishes work for the week and unwinds ahead of their weekend chores, but not religion.
In His almighty wisdom, channeled through the dog collar of his local henchman, He has hinted, but not confirmed, that this lesson may well take place next Friday.
The transfer window hangs in the balance. This would not have happened if instead of choosing Jim Bowen, the Vatican had considered a more progressive application.
League table
Weekly scores
| Manager | Points | Goals | ||
| 1 | Headless Chickens | John N | 49 | 4 |
| 2 | Judean Peoples Front | Sholto | 35 | 1 |
| 3 | Rapids De Cullons CF | Jorge | 33 | 0 |
| 4 | St. Reatham FC | Mike | 31 | 3 |
| 5 | Piedmonte | Phil | 30 | 2 |
| 6 | Newington Reds | Dudley | 29 | 2 |
| 7 | Bala Rinas | Lewis | 29 | 1 |
| 8 | Northern Monkeys | Hugo | 26 | 1 |
| 9 | KS West Green | Stix | 25 | 2 |
| 10 | Still Don’t Know Yet | Pete | 23 | 0 |
| 11 | FC Testiculadew | James N | 22 | 0 |
| 12 | Hairy Fadjeetas | Aiden | 21 | 0 |
| 13 | Lokomotiv Leeds | Ben S | 17 | 1 |
| 14 | Team Panda Rules OK | George | 15 | 1 |
| 15 | Lurliners | Luke | 14 | 1 |
| 16 | Dynamo Charlton | Alex | 14 | 0 |
| 17 | Just put Carles | Carles | 13 | 0 |
| 18 | Spartak Mogadishu | Abdi | 13 | 0 |
| 19 | Young Boys | Denney | 13 | 0 |
| 20 | Pikey Scum | Jack | 10 | 0 |
| 21 | PSV Mornington | El Pons | 7 | 0 |
| 22 | This is Sparta…Prague | Rich | 7 | 0 |
| 23 | Sporting Lesbian | Ben M | 4 | 0 |
| Points | Player | |||
| Player of the week | 16 | Nasri, S – MCY – MID | ||
| Club | Piedmonte |
