A Little Catholic Humor on this Friday Evening

One of the great things about having adult children is the fact that you are no longer responsible for their care and feeding. However there’s another great thing about having adult children. Every now and then one of them will send you a random text out of the blue which will give birth to much hilarity. When this happens you realize that your career as a parent wasn’t entirely a hot mess of mistakes and poor judgment…that somewhere along the line you must have done something right. Take this past Wednesday night for example. There I was watching the National’s bullpen blow yet another lead when my son Patrick sent me this…

Before I could respond he says: “This will be the first time in history we’ll be able to ask: ‘Is he a Sox Pope or a Cubs Pope?’”

To which I snapped back with: “It appears he’s been a lifelong White Sox fan. One would have thought that this fact alone would have been considered disqualifying.”

Patrick then dropped the mic on me with: “Well, we are called on by Christ to love the poor and the downtrodden.”

No comeback seemed adequate to the moment. My son had bested me in a quip-fest. This is when you can bask in pride at your parenting skills, when you realize that all those thousands of dad jokes served the noble purpose of instilling a first class sarcasm instinct in your boy.

Of course, I couldn’t just leave the conversation hanging there in that condition, mocking me. Eventually I found this…

Me: “I’m thinking we should give this new Pope a break. As a lifelong White Sox fan, hasn’t the man suffered enough?”