Priest could stand trial for claiming Jesus existed

AN ITALIAN judge is to rule on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting Jesus Christ existed, following a hearing yesterday.

The priest’s atheist accuser, Luigi Cascioli, says the Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2,000 years with a fable that Christ existed, and that Fr Enrico Righi violated Italian law by reasserting the claim.

Lawyers for Fr Righi and Mr Cascioli, old schoolmates, made their arguments in a brief, closed-door hearing before Judge Gaetano Mautone in Viterbo, north of Rome.

Mr Cascioli filed a criminal complaint in 2002 after Fr Righi wrote in a parish bulletin that Jesus did indeed exist, that he was born to a couple named Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth.

Mr Cascioli claims Fr Righi’s assertion constituted two crimes: so-called “abuse of popular belief”, in which someone fraudulently deceives people; and “impersonation”, in which someone gains by attributing a false name to a person.

Mr Cascioli’s lawyer Mauro Fonzo said: “The point is not to establish whether Jesus existed or not, but if there is a question of possible fraud.”

Mr Cascioli says the Church has been gaining financially by “impersonating” as Christ someone called John of Gamala.

He has said he has little hope of the case succeeding in Italy, but that he is merely going through the necessary legal steps to reach the European Court of Human Rights, where he intends to accuse the church of what he calls “religious racism”.

Fr Righi, 76, has stressed substantial historical evidence - both Christian and non-Christian - of Jesus’s existence. His attorney, Severo Bruno, said he told Judge Mautone that Fr Righi was not asserting a historical fact when he wrote of Jesus’s existence, but rather “an expression of theological principles”.