Rome - His Holiness has blamed a lurid Catacombs sex club called St Sebastian's Passageway for an outbreak of homosexuality in the Vatican.
"At its core is a gay lobby," Pope Frankie the Argie said today, "swathed in peach-colored ruched silk drapes and hung with, er, signed Liberace photos.
"Think of it as a Bilderberg Group kinda innner sanctum of Opus Dei."
The $500,000 bespoke designer curtains are not the only thing that is getting up Frankie's nose as an audit of off-balance sheet items in Vatican household accounts reveals a secret credit card spending pattern of gargantuan proportions.
Millions of dollars of ecumenical splurging appears to have started circa 2001 when someone signed up the entire College of Cardinals to the Holy Roman Emperor VIP Escort Club, a seedy shagging agency formerly run from a New York orifice before being shut down by the Feds.
Its sister agency the Bleedin Virgin Merry operates from an offshore site within Vatican City satisfying the consumption needs of the Church's princes.
Mostly online viagra, recreational cocaine and other seedy stuff.
Tonight its website was shut down by the Pope's cyber enforcers whose six months' surveillance of its chat room first uncovered the 'gay lobby' plot.
Friday's Feast of the Immaculate Deception commences at 8 o'clock sharp.
