Browsing through one of my favorite websites: ‘Gullibility Isn’t In The Dictionary’, I hit on an article that really caught my imagination:


[Italian]Father Enrico Righi is being sued by Signor Luigi Cascioli because the former denounced the latter for saying that Jesus Christ is a myth.
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” [a crime according to Italian Law].


Gaetano Mautone, the judge hearing the case, has ordered Father Righi to appear and prove that Jesus actually existed.





So who’s this Luigi guy? Well I’ll tell you who he’s not – he’s not the foolish brother of the world’s most famous plumber. If you read his website www.luigicascioli.com he’s obviously thoroughly researched his source material as well as penning a major book on the subject, ‘The Fable of Christ’. It’s this work that seems to have attracted the ire of the Catholic Church and in particular, Father Enrico Righi who couldn’t contain himself and proceeded to denounce the good Signor. The Catholic Church itself tends to back away from such debates, realizing that there’s little mileage in the exists/doesn’t exist argument.


The Catholic Church has never chosen to debate the existence of God, or the significance of Christ. A couple of hundred years ago, they didn’t have to bother: ‘Don’t believe? Burn at the stake then’. Nowadays, the situation is, irritatingly, more complex. Most developed countries currently have a moratorium on stake-burnings and the Church is hardly going to enter into a good-old 20th Century public debate, a debate that they cannot win as their ‘evidence’ is unable to hold up to rational scrutiny, reliant as it is on a time-honoured belief systems and archaic ritual. So they leave it to this poor sap, Righi who’s clearly way out of his depth and who responsed to Cascioi by saying: 'If the sun is shining, he cannot sue me because I see it and he doesn't'.


According to The Time Online: Signor Cascioli said that the Gospels themselves were full of inconsistencies and did not agree on the names of the 12 apostles. He said that he would withdraw his legal action if Father Righi came up with irrefutable proof of Christ’s existence by the end of the month.


Luigi’s lawsuit was actually filed in September 2002, but only got interesting a couple of months ago, after a prolonged tennis match of requests and objections.


One thing’s for sure, the mighty Church in Rome are unable to shake Luigi just yet. Though this particular commentator feels that they’ll do all they can to break the man before any ‘evidence’ is presented.