The Vatican is reaching out to atheists. They are creating a foundation called “The Courtyard of Gentiles” to encourage discussion between Catholics and the godly — I can hardly wait. Except, alas, it turns out their invitations are only going to a select few.

But in an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.

The foundation, he said, would only be interested in “noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins”.

Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with “irony and sarcasm” and tend to “read religious texts like fundamentalists”.

There has got to be a cabal of atheists working within the church — I can’t imagine them being this incompetent by accident. So apparently they only want faitheists in their little clubhouse, because as we all know, the primary weapon of the atheists is irony and sarcasm…the two weapons of the atheists are irony, sarcasm, and ridicule…wait. Man, we are so danged vicious. We actually mock Catholics, so we’re just too mean to come to their party.

Except me, right? They didn’t mention that little guy in Minnesota as being on their blacklist, so there’s still hope…