The Lepanto Institute
#63 of poetry
For context: a trad cath think tank calling itself "The Lepanto Institute" was shocked, shocked! to find that the pope had fired a trad cath bishop for questioning papal authority on the grounds that the pope wasn't being bigoted enough. And even in the face of community notes explaining the doctrine of papal supremacy, which trad caths ought to be fans of or at least AWARE of, they kept doubling down: https://bsky.app/profile/kennedytcooper.bsky.social/post/3ke5xnxluqc2m
And I know, because these were the people I grew up around, what poem they must've been thinking of when they decided to call themselves "The Lepanto Institute."
Ordinarily their shame would be forgotten, as is only natural. But I wrote a poem about it. That makes it eternal. Mwa Ha Ha.
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Thin thoughts thrashing in the think tank's fears
(Don John of Austria's been dead hundreds of years.)
You type your twitter messages of heresy and hate,
But Notes of the Community shall set the record straight.
The pope is not a president. His patience isn't law,
And you, you are not Samson (though you wield an ass's jaw.)
I think we'd all be happier if you got a real job.
You're in suburbia,
Not Aetolia.
Don John of Austria
Has seen you get corn-cobbed.
St Gilbert, in his heaven, would not best impressed.
(Don John of Austria was not as you have guessed.)
And he would not approve of me, nor of the things I do,
But nowhere near as much as he would disapprove of you.
We'd laugh, as poets ever laugh, at this your waste of wit...
(But Don John of Austria would say you ain't worth shit.)