A WING AND A PRAYER

Reuters news service reports that the Vatican now has its own airline. Its purpose is to fly Catholics on pilgrimages. (Pause here for Flying Nun jokes.)

The planes have Vatican logos. I didn’t know the Vatican had a logo. Everyone else does, though, so you need one to be successful in the world. I looked it up and it is above.

Vatican Air also has a slogan: "I'm Searching for Your Face, Lord". I guess they didn’t hear about all those appearances of the Lord on office building windows and cheese sandwiches.

You know, that might be a great marketing tool, though. Instead of being a tornado chaser, you could be a vision chaser. You could fly around on Vatican Air to all the latest sightings of Jesus or Mary on various objects around the globe.

I also thought it was interesting that one of the destinations was Mount Sinai, since there is great debate about where it is. I wonder if they picked one, or if they just fly over the Middle East and say it’s down there somewhere.

I guess the in-flight movie is an episode of Mother Angelica Live.

The Pope’s competitors in the airline business appear ready to compete. Ryanair is one of them, and it claims it “already performs miracles that even the Pope's boss can't rival, by delivering pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela for the heavenly price of 10 euros,"

Since there will evidently be competition, I thought I would offer a few suggestions to the Vatican.

1. Instead of a points program, you could have dispensations. For example, for a round trip ticket from Rome to Lourdes, you receive five years off your purgatory stay, ten if you pay cash.

2. You could offer bodily assumption into heaven in the event of a crash.

3. Sally Field could be the t.v. spokesperson, wearing her old Flying Nun costume.

4. You could advertise: “Now, your earthly journeys can be spiritual journeys.”

5. The flight attendants could say “In the event we lose air pressure in the cabin, an oxygen mask will drop from the overhead and the Lord’s Prayer will be played over the intercom.”

6. You could curtain off an area in the back for Protestants, and call it the Separated Brethren Cabin. No dispensations would be offered to this group, of course.

Then, of course, my mind went to “what if Southern Baptists got their own airline”? (No, it doesn’t count that they chartered a private plane and went to see Chronicles of Narnia in England.) I think it could be a division of Lifeway called either Kingdom Air or Purpose Driven Air.

All pilots and flight attendants would have to sign the Baptist Faith and Message for whatever year it was last amended.

All pilots and flight attendants would have to prove they were baptized by immersion in a Southern Baptist Church.

The schedules would have to use a different word for “destination”, because it sounds too Calvinistic.

At the top of the flight schedule, it would say “God has a wonderful flight plan for your life”.

They could serve Testamints from Lifeway.

The inflight movie would be the Purpose Driven Life dvd.

If you missed your flight, you would have to go to the “Left Behind” booth.