Vatican buys enormous gay sauna

The Independent reports that the Vatican has purchased Europe's largest gay sauna. Best conclave ever.

More at Boing Boing

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http://twitter.com/missshenna Lithi

The jokes just write themselves, don’t they?
- http://twitter.com/EleOcho L8
  
  And the automatic jokes get better when you read the whole article:
  
  “There was further embarrassment for the Holy See when the press observed that thanks to generous tax breaks it received from the last Berlusconi government, the church will have avoided hefty payments to the Italian state. The properties are recognised as part of the Holy City.“
That_Anonymous_Coward

And here I had been thinking how cool it would be if someone had hacked the chimney to put out rainbow colored smoke….
- mikei
  
  That’s not smoke, it’s steam.
steve heath

I think I would have been happier not knowing this. So is it gonna stay as a gay sauna…a rest home for priests??? whats up with this?
- http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
  
  can’t it be both?
  - Brainspore
    
    If you can’t get an audience with the old man in a hat at least you can find something that looks like one.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Maybe Benedict retired into seclusion in order to keep his boyfriend private secretary from going to the Vatican bathhouse every night.
  
  Edit: Here’s the website for the fleshpot den of iniquity sauna. The front page, at least is SFW. The name is much more fun if you pretend to be Milla Jovovich while saying it.
  - franko
    
    seriously, just look at him – wouldn’t YOU?
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Yeah, I’d show him a new meaning for extreme unction.
      - Origami_Isopod
        
        I’d pull up his cassock and play with his aspergillum. (But I don’t think he’d be interested in me, somehow…)
    - Jonathan Roberts
      
      He’d be defrocked the moment he walked in.
      - chgoliz
        
        Took me a moment, but it was worth it.
- Brainspore
  
  …a rest home for priests?
  
  Rectories A through D were full to capacity. They had to expand by adding an “E” Rectory.
Frank W

Best conclave ever… Dammit Rob, you won the thread before it even started.
TacoChuck

While this is funny, more worrying is that the catholic church is buying up hospitals around the country and imposing their doctrine on people who have no other options for health care:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/faith-healers/Content?oid=16050396
Brainspore

“Hey, cut it out! You’re un-holying the holy water!”
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That would be ‘blaspheming’.
  - http://www.facebook.com/tyler.firth Tyler Firth
    
    *splashpheming
    
    “Hey, I don’t like it in the eyes like that HHTPE!”
oasisob1

From the article:

It is not known, however, if the former archbishop of Bombay has popped downstairs to give spitiual guidances to the clients of the Europa Multiclub, given his belief that gays and lesbians can be cured of their “unnatural tendencies” through the “sacrement of penance”.

“Spitiual guidances”
Antinous / Moderator

“A papal audience? For me?”
toyg

One of the mentioned jokes is clearly lost in translation: “Oops, I took the wrong door, I thought it was the chapel” — the Italian for “chapel” (cappella) is a common slang word for glans (the shape is quite similar after all, wouldn’t you agree?)

EDIT: and now that I think of it, the first half of that sentence could also have been something more like “I took the wrong side”, completing a very dirty line.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Wouldn’t that be a misspelling of the diminutive for caput, ie. little head?
  - toyg
    
    Caput is Latin but not Italian (of course, Rome will forever be caput mundi, but again that’s quoted Latin), whereas cappella is definitely correct Italian, both in religious and architectural (and dirty) terms. I honestly don’t know the etymology but it’s likely the same.
    
    Or maybe you were thinking of “capo” (head) or “capetto” (minor head, but used exclusively in “managerial” terms to indicate a minor boss, often with derogative undertones), which are correct Italian words that clearly come from the Latin “caput”. In the same family, “capoccia” o “capoccione” is a big head (both in real or managerial terms), but they are vulgar words and outside of Rome tend to have specific metaphorical connotations (“capoccia” being the head of a criminal conspiracy, and “capoccione” a very intelligent person who might be a bit of a nerd).
    - http://cobramcgiantballs.tumblr.com/ Xploder
      
      Dammit! Every time I read your response, I keep reading cappuccino…
      - toyg
        
        Funny enough, “cappuccino” is a small “cappuccio”, i.e. a monk’s hood (there’s even a monastic order called “Cappuccini”, believe it or not) and again likely shares the “caput” root. I have no idea how this became a type of coffee, but we Italians are crazy like that (I’ve recently found that there’s something called a “smile coffee” — I can only imagine what sort of ingredient is supposed to give you a “smile”, but I guess it’s about alcohol — although that’s usually just a “corrected coffee”, caffè corretto, because anything without alcohol is obviously “wrong”!
      - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
        
        You put the foam on the coffee and it looks like a bald head?
        
        And gets kinda creepy when you think about this place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_Crypt
mikei

When I shared this on FB, the thumbnail was a whale. A sperm whale I presume?
Halloween_Jack

Cue up “It’s Raining Men.”