Rome – An Italian judge dismissed an atheist’s case that a small-town priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed, a lawyer said Friday.<\/p>\n
The priest’s accuser, Luigi Cascioli, contended the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2 000 years with a fable that Christ existed and he accused the priest of violating two laws with the assertion.<\/p>\n
"The judge has ordered that the case be shelved," said Severo Bruno, a lawyer for the prelate, Reverend Enrico Righi.<\/p>\n
"The Reverend Righi is very satisfied and moved," Bruno said. "He is an old, small-town parish priest who never would have thought he’d be in the spotlight for something like this."<\/p>\n
‘He is an old, small-town parish priest who never would have thought he’d be in the spotlight’ The ruling was released on Thursday in Viterbo, a town north of Rome. In his decision, Judge Gaetano Mautone also said prosecutors should investigate Cascioli for possible slander, the lawyer said.<\/p>\n
Cascioli, a 72-year-old retired agronomist, filed a criminal complaint against Righi, his old schoolmate, in 2002 after Righi wrote in a parish bulletin that Jesus did indeed exist, and that he was born of a couple named Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth. [Source<\/a>]<\/p>\n About what I expected would happen, though I kind of wished the trial would have gone ahead. If no publicity is bad publicity it might have had some interesting repercussions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rome – An Italian judge dismissed an atheist’s case that a small-town priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed, a lawyer said Friday. The priest’s accuser, Luigi…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}