VATICAN CITY — A puff of white smoke over
Vatican City today raised hopes among the faithful who jammed St. Peter’s
Square until an official spokesman explained that the Vatican was “just burning
some documents.”
“Wednesday is the day we traditionally burn documents and other
legal evidence, and we totally forgot about the white smoke thing,” the Vatican
spokesman said. “We apologize for any misunderstanding this might have caused.”
After
cheers went up from the thousands gathered outside the Sistine Chapel, the
spokesman said, “We were like, ‘Uh-oh.’ We stopped shovelling papers into the
blast furnace immediately.”
“We
still have thousands of documents to destroy this week, but we don’t want a
replay of what happened today,” he said. “One of the cardinals is going to run
out to Staples and get a shredder.”
As
the conclave drags on to a third day with still no Pope, the spokesman
acknowledged that the cardinals were having a harder time agreeing on a
candidate than at the last conclave, in 2005: “This time around, we just don’t
have a slam dunk with Hitler Youth experience.”
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