Rome - (ReUterus & Associated Mess): Pope Joseph Ratzinger has won this year's prestigious literary award for the worst example of erotica in his seminal autobiographical oeuvre 'Sixty-nine Something'.
The annual prize is awarded for the publication of the ultimate bad taste offering and stringent rules apply to the selection of the overall winner.
The judges' mandate is to find the most "crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description" and high marks traditionally go to texts displaying perverted, cliched or unusually gut-wrenching examples of homophobia, other gender/race bias and related prejudices.
Ratzinger is the first Pontiff to win the anal award although a predecessor's encyclical on birth control in the 1960s was nominated and came close to bagging the top prize form its interpretation of heterosexual human coupling assumptions.
It is not known whether the winner will pick up his trophy in person at a ceremony in London next week, but a spokesperson for his office confirmed that 'no publicity is bad publicity' after the book rocketed to the number one Xmas sales slot after the prize announcement.
