For the last few years, everything that has happened on this planet seems like it has been part of an attempt to create the most ridiculous series of words imaginable. Five years ago, the phrase “US Navy confirms veracity of Tom DeLonge UFO videos” would have been unthinkable, and yet here we are. Today, our real but absurd phrase is “Vatican Minecraft server DDoS attack”.

Yes, the Vatican has a Minecraft server, courtesy of Robert Ballecer, a self-described “Digital Jesuit” who did a poll in September reaching out to gamers to nominate a game that he could “spin up a few servers in the Vatican for” to provide a “less toxic” environment for gaming with “more community”. Minecraft, the famous block game everyone loves, beat out ARK, Rust, and Team Fortress 2 (the funniest option to my mind).

True to his word, he launched the server and, of course, people immediately started fucking with it.

The trolls have already showed up to blow stuff up, but I never thought it would be easy. ???? (https://t.co/y2ernEVRDQ) https://t.co/sNNL4Kq7Yv — Fr. Robert R. Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) December 1, 2019

In addition to griefing the shit out players, Ballecer suggested ‘trolls’ had been deliberately attempting to DDoS the server:

I'm looking at the logs of the Minecraft test server and it looks like there is a handful of people who are constantly connecting and disconnecting to fill the player slots and kill the server. Interesting… — Fr. Robert R. Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) December 2, 2019

He appears unfazed though:

Truth-time: The MC server we've been running was the test server. It allowed us to build up a ban-list of 100 or so User IDs and IPs and see where we would be attacked. Tomorrow we launch the production server. ???? It will still get attacked, but now we've got a head start. pic.twitter.com/XvuLkvB0MA — Fr. Robert R. Ballecer, SJ (@padresj) December 4, 2019

I’m sure this would never actually happen but it brings me so much joy to imagine someone trying to explain any of this to the Pope.