An Italian judge has thrown out a civil suit in which an atheist activist attempted to criminalize Christian teaching on the existence and divinity of Christ. The judge threw the case out and recommended that prosecutors investigate possible evidence of slander by the atheist against Fr. Enrico Righi.
The suit, brought by a 72 year-old militant atheist and former seminarian, Luigi Cascioli, tried to force Enrico Righi, an elderly parish priest to prove the historical reality of Jesus. It alleged that the priest, and his Church, were guilty of “abuse of popular credibility” and “impersonation,” criminal charges that were meant to protect gullible people from financial swindles.
Cascioli, a former classmate of Righi’s, vowed to bring his suit to the European Court of Human Rights, where he said he would charge the Church with “religious racism.”
The suit, had it been taken seriously, would have proposed that all of Christian culture and history, an entire political cultural and economic order guiding hundreds of millions of people over 2000 years was the construction of a cynical conspiracy, a fraud of a nearly unimaginable magnitude. Cascioli, however, does not consider this proposition absurd and is the author of a self-published tract against Catholicism, titled “The Fable of Christ,” that alleges just this.
Despite its absurdity, the case gained widespread media coverage garnering attention in Moscow’s Pravda and the Islamic news source Al Jazeerah.
The widespread journalistic hatred of religious believers and faith was blatantly exposed in coverage such as that from South Africa’s Mail Guardian that ran the headline, “The end of God?”
Colin Bower called it “a mouth-watering prospect” that “no one in Italy will any longer be able to claim to be God’s agent or intermediary, to collect money for his greater glory, or to issue instructions to the human world on his behalf.”
(This update courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com.)
