AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.
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”.
Signor Cascioli’s contention — echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites — is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims....The Vatican has so far declined to comment....
How peculiar that the Vatican has declined to comment. They seem to be quite happy to issue pronouncements on practically everything lately; a court presuming to rule on the basis of their existence would seem to be par for the court. (And, honestly, not entirely unreasonable. It has to be a rather startling development.)
I can just imagine the operatic hysteria a case like this would produce in this country if any judge had tried something like that. Although I'm not sure that a court in this country could produce a ruling like this; the separation of church and state would likely prevent them from putting the concept of faith itself on trial, thank goodness. (One of the few things that both the liberal left and conservative right would agree on is that this particular type of trial would be a very very bad thing. In this country, it would be savagely divisive -- vide the recent Intelligent Design Follies. It's surprising that the case wasn't redirected so that it was a trial for whatever the Italian legal equivalent of libel and/or slander is. That would seem less ... fraught.
Strangely enough, I had though that there was evidence that Jesus, or someone like him, had been in the Roman provinces of Judaea and Palestine, doing something at least somewhat like that which appears in the Gospels. It's been ages since I studied that period of history, so I may be misremembering.
Posted by iain at January 04, 2006 01:24 PM
