Members of the Vatican’s elite covert bishop team.

VATICAN CITY—Anonymous sources within the Vatican confirmed Tuesday that Pope Benedict XVI has dispatched a crack team of six highly skilled bishops to sabotage the New York headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, a leading contraceptive manufacturer.


Responding to what it called the "ongoing crisis of readily available birth control," the Vatican reportedly assembled its finest clerical operatives—an elite unit consisting of the Roman Catholic Church's very best demolitions expert, cryptographer, forger, con artist, helicopter pilot, and martial arts master—and briefed them on the confidential mission in a secret command bunker deep beneath the catacombs of St. Peter's Basilica.

"Gentlemen, in today's world, God's divine plan itself is under threat," Pope Benedict is said to have told the bishops as he paced across a room full of large screens monitoring the world's top producers of oral contraceptives, condoms, intrauterine devices, and spermicidal lubricants. "Companies like Pfizer are making it possible for women to avoid bearing children they don't want or cannot afford to care for. Our intelligence assets indicate some are even engaging in sex for no purpose beyond their own pleasure."


"It's time to send a clear message that the church will not take this sitting down," the Pope continued. "It won't be easy, but you're the best consecrated men of God we have. And trust me, for this mission, we'll need the best."

Known officially as the Sixth Conclave for the Defense of Mankind Against All Carnalities of the Flesh—or Conclave 6, for short—the Vatican's most lethal squad of bishops is believed to be headed by master tactician Archbishop Wolfgang Haas of Liechtenstein, with major reconnaissance being handled by Phoenix Bishop Thomas "The Ground Hawk" Olmsted, who doubles as the group's sniper.


Sources said the team will be deployed to the extraction point near the Pfizer Building in midtown Manhattan at approximately 0900 hours this morning, at which point former KGB agent and master of disguise Archbishop Paolo Pezzi of Russia will proceed into the lobby dressed in a chemist's lab coat, while notorious ex-convict Li Shan, archbishop of Beijing, infiltrates the facility's ventilation system and dismantles all security devices.

After explosives expert Bishop Séamus Freeman plants his extremely powerful charges at key structural points within the skyscraper, the men will have approximately 10 minutes to rendezvous at their nearby safe house, St. Patrick's Cathedral.


"Conclave 6 is behind some of the Catholic Church's most crucial and dangerous operations," said an anonymous source within the Vatican, adding that the team has the highest kill count of any of the church's 33 special-ops units. "They've been known to confuse and outwit their opponents by communicating with one another across long distances using arcane liturgical chants sung piercingly in the original Latin. It's brilliant stuff. The Pope would trust them with his life."

"They'll have their work cut out for them this time," the source added, "but they can't turn this mission down—not with the potential lives of all those not-yet-conceived children on the line."


The team is expected to face tough security from Pfizer following a recent operation in which Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York replaced millions of doses of the company's Lo/Ovral-brand birth control drug with sugar pills, causing a successful number of unplanned pregnancies and a worldwide recall of the contraceptives.

"With the forces of secularism waging war against God, it is necessary that we respond with precision and—in some cases—violence," read an encrypted papal communication intercepted in Rome. "For it is nothing compared to the violence of the genocide being visited every day upon billions of unfertilized ova."


"We shall not rest until we have ensured every human sexual act concludes with the unimpeded ejaculation of each drop of semen directly into the vagina of a woman," the pope's message continued.

Reached for comment, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi refused to comment on rumors that a B-team of covert needle-wielding ordained priests had been dispatched to a latex factory in New Jersey to poke tiny holes in thousands of Trojan condoms.