Pope: 'Gender blurring dwells beneath your rockery'

In his end-of-year review to Vatican staff, Pope Benedict XVI named the greatest threat to distinctions between male and female.

The garden earthworm.

"To the innocent observer, the average garden seems a place like Eden, with its flowery stamens standing erect ready to drop their masculine loads from hairy pollen sacs through the agency of passing trade, er, I mean bees," said the Pontiff. "Yet in reality corruption burrows away out of sight, undermining the laws of ecology. The earthworm, Mr David Attenborough tells us, is both male and female, neither fish nor fowl, neither Martha nor Arthur, one of nature's hermaphroditic abominations, making a nonsense of gender definition.

"One gazes at an earthworm and one thinks: 'What are you? You slimy long thing, you, with your nasty, flaccid, thin shaft and liquidy stuff - ewww!' The earthworm subverts our understanding of girls and boys, of skirt and shirt: it is a Satanic thing designed to make a nonsense of what we know to be manly and womanly." He added: "Snails and slugs, too, are bisexual Friends of Dorothy. Do not be beguiled by these seemingly humble creatures, for, each possessing both male and female reproductive parts, they brazenly and publicly fornicate in an orgy of mutual insemination behind your blushing peonies and pansies."

The Pope called upon his followers to bear their forks and hoes down on the sinners - "Seek out Gomorrah in a sod and let it bake in the sun," he screamed before asking the TV camera crew, "Is it a wrap?"

The sign of Satan: the vermitranny