Priest told: put up, or shut up

This one goes out special to Alberto\\\.

An Italian judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed, the Times of London reports.

The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist.

Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ’s historical existence.
Yesterday Gaetano Mautone, a judge in Viterbo, set a preliminary hearing for the end of this month and ordered Father Righi to appear. The judge had earlier refused to take up the case, but was overruled last month by the Court of Appeal, which agreed that Signor Cascioli had a reasonable case for his accusation that Father Righi was “abusing popular credulity”.

If anything should be illegal in the US, “abusing popuarity popular credulity” is certainly it.

If APC were illegal in the US, or at least, or ruled a suffiient legal basis for bringing a tort suit, think how much better life would be -- and how rich a freelance Little Attorney General could grow exposing it.

Christers, congressmen and sellers of plastic residential siding would be in jail or the poor house.

Signor Cascioli’s one-man campaign came to a head at a court hearing last April when he lodged his accusations of “abuse of popular credulity” and “impersonation”, both offences under the Italian penal code. He argued that all claims for the existence of Jesus from sources other than the Bible stem from authors who lived “after the time of the hypothetical Jesus” and were therefore not reliable witnesses.

Signor Cascioli maintains that early Christian writers confused Jesus with John of Gamala, an anti-Roman Jewish insurgent in 1st-century Palestine. Church authorities were therefore guilty of “substitution of persons.

Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest
Times of London
January 3, 2006