(For those who don’t know, clerihews are named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a school-boy friend of Gilbert Chesterton. Sitting next to Chesterton one day in a dull Chemistry class, he picked up his pen and in an inspired moment wrote these lines: ‘Sir Humphrey Davy/ detested gravy./ He lived in the odium/ of having discovered sodium’. Thus was born a new literary genre.)
JP II
We (with hindsight) love you.
You knew that a wedding ring
Wasn’t a bit of bling.
Papa Ratzinger
Was fond of cats; linger
He didn’t, but made himself ex
In a way that was bound to perplex.
Pope Jorge Bergoglio
Caused quite the imbroglio.
Did he enter the Church to destroy ‘er?
And who exactly was his employer?
Laodicea 
December 12, 2017 at 6:33 pm
His Holiness the Pope
Leaps like an antelope
From one part to another of the doctrinal savannah
Closing down every possibility of a traditionalist Hosannah.
When Bishop of Buenos Aires
Pope Francis must have suffered dreadfully from caries,
How else to explain away
The occasional resemblance to an overfull ashtray.
December 13, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Though I’m no Nostradamus or Malachy,
Here’s my papal quatrain smart-alecky:
To the pious and the meticulous
Pope Francis’s words are ridiculous.
You’ll be tempted to sin all you want if
You’re misled by this “merciful” Pontiff.
June 5, 2020 at 9:30 am
[…] {for more about this admirable literary genre, see here.} […]