Readers may recall that last year, Wolverine #177-178 featured the title character locked in battle against evil Catholics who planned to use mind-control to convert New York.  It is undoubtedly the stupidest religion-themed story in the history of the X-books.

Or at least, it was undoubted until this week, when Uncanny X-Men #424 made a brave bid for the title.  While Wolverine secured its position with a mixture of awful art, inept plotting and total failure to include any thematic elements pertaining to Catholicism, Chuck Austen goes for the high ground.  His story at least makes a certain degree of sense, and has competent enough illustration from Ron Garney.  Never one to run from an issue, Austen grapples head-on with the issues of Catholicism.

The result is predictably terrible.

The last couple of issues have already shown that Austen has a certain antipathy towards the Catholic Church, including his desperate attempt to retcon Nightcrawler out of being a priest - always a slightly odd plot but hardly one which needed a massive retcon to remove it.  Austen, however, seemed to feel the need to explain the whole thing away as a mind-control storyline involving the Church of Humanity.

Now, true enough, there was a storyline dangling from the Joe Casey run about Nightcrawler being mentally manipulated by the Church of Humanity.  But let's be honest, in this day and age Austen could quite easily have ignored that.  The days when writers bothered resolving dangling storylines are long in the past (and in fairness to Casey, he did wrap up most of his loose ends in his final issue - there's a limit to how much he could do in the space).

Here's where it gets bad.

Austen jettisons Casey's origin story for the Church of Humanity's Supreme Pontiff - which was about the only interesting thing in the original story - and replaces him with a disillusioned Catholic nun who's been, you guessed it, the victim of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.  So she sets out to bring down the Church by - brace yourself, this is the good bit - creating an evil plan to instal Nightcrawler as the Pope under an image inducer, and then revealing him as the supposed Antichrist at the same time that she simulates the Rapture.  Then Catholics the world over will turn on the Church and the Church of Humanity will step in to take over!

Now, I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, "Wow.  That's an incredibly stupid storyline."  And do you know what?  It's even worse on the page.

You may also be wondering how the Church of Humanity plans to simulate the Rapture.  After all, that involves good Catholics being taken up to Heaven.  Well, they're going to disintegrate people using evil doctored communion wafers.

I'll just repeat that.  The villains are going to usurp command of Catholicism by installing Nightcrawler as the Pope and using murderous disintegrating communion wafers.  No, this is not meant to be a comedy story.

This story is so bad that it deserves to be immortalised in derision for years to come.  Even as a hardcore atheist, I have little sympathy for Austen's bizarrely twisted idea of the Catholic Church, which seems to revolve exclusively around the twin concepts of sexual abuse and bigotry.  Granted that those may be the Church's most prominent flaws, in Austen's stories they seem to be the Church's only features.

The idea of a plan to instal Nightcrawler as Pope - never previously mentioned prior to this issue - is comically over the top.  The idea that the world's Catholics are going to react to a simulated Rapture in anything like the manner described is little short of ludicrous and suggests that Austen still thinks ordinary Catholics are little more than dogmatic slaves of their church.  I rather suspect the average Catholic in the street would continue their existing policy of generally acting much like everyone else.

Oh, and let's not forget the disrespect shown to previous writers of the Church of Humanity and Nightcrawler's priest (also a pre-existing character).  The original stories may not have been great, but they were better than this.

Why the hell would anyone want to wrest control of the Catholic Church, anyway?  It's not like it's a significant political power any more.  I suppose it's all very well if you have an evil scheme which entails interfering with the distribution of condoms in Angola, but otherwise they might as well be fighting for control of the West Godalming Yoga Centre.

Competent art from Ron Garney can't raise this issue significantly - for the most part, these days Garney sticks to telling the story as efficiently as possible.  He's not the sort of artist who can make a bad story readable solely through the power of visual aesthetics.

The fact that this storyline was selected for a 25c issue is utterly baffling.  Can we have Joe Casey back, please?

UPDATE:  Thanks to the many readers who have now written to inform me that the Rapture, as depicted in this issue, is actually Protestant theology, and not Catholic at all.  I'm not sure how you do sarcastic slow applause in print, but imagine it here.

Rating: D-

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