A saint for our times

A couple of friends of mine are spending the month of May traveling through Austria, the Czech Republic and Eastern Germany. I’m acting as conduit for their electronic postcards, because there appears to be some difficulty accessing Facebook on his mobile device. So he emails me a photo and blurb; I post it to FB and then email it to a list of people with whom he regularly shares jokes.

This one—a photo of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna—came with this annotation:

"One of the most successful public relations creations of all time. By putting Prague's St. Virus Cathedral in the shade, its creators won archbishopric status that eventually transformed Vienna from a frontier encampment to the capital of the Holy Roman Empire."

First of all, I am not in the least making fun of what he wrote. Because I'm laying big money on the probability that he actually did type “St. Vitus Cathedral”, but Nanny Autocorrect changed it to St. Virus. Because virus is something it knows; Vitus, not so much.

But thinking about it, it seems to me that there really ought to be a Saint Virus, perhaps the patron saint of black-hat hackers, venture capitalists and officers of the People’s Liberation Army.

Why not? Saint Vitus is the patron of actors, comedians, dancers and epileptics. There should be someone looking after their Internet-age equivalents.

The Roman Catholic Church has been on a real canonization tear lately. If they’re going declare John Paul II a saint, I think this Virus guy should get a shot at it, too

Maybe this'll go viral.