Thursday night on “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert marveled at the announcement by Pope Francis that there are good atheists who are loved by God.

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” Francis said earlier this week.

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“Folks,” said Colbert Thursday, “as America’s most famous Catholic, I am the Pope of basic cable.”

And as such, he said, he has tried to embrace the new Pope and endeavored to follow the pontiff’s example. When Francis washed the feet of the poor, Colbert said, “I sent some homeless guys through a car wash. I even sprang for the wax.”

But Wednesday’s homily from the Pope, in which he said the God even loves atheists, was apparently too much for Colbert.

“What the flock?” he demanded. “Even atheists?!”

“What’s next? The Lord redeems Lutherans?” he said. “It’s madness.”

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Was all that time on his knees as an altar boy for nothing? he asked. All the standing and sitting and kneeling every Sunday? Ash Wednesday, in which, he said, that smudge on his forehead, he thought, was “the hand-stamp for Club Heaven?”

“After busting my apse in the vineyard of the Lord,” he said, “some godless good guy can just swoop in at the eleventh hour and and get redeemed? I want a refund!”

Watch the video, embedded below via Comedy Central: