{"id":5892,"date":"2006-01-03T08:26:39","date_gmt":"2006-01-03T08:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/god-in-the-dock.html"},"modified":"2006-01-03T08:26:39","modified_gmt":"2006-01-03T08:26:39","slug":"god-in-the-dock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/god-in-the-dock.html","title":{"rendered":"God in the Dock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italian judge tells priest to prove Jesus’ existence<\/a><\/p>\n

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AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ<\/em>, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ\u2019s historical existence. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cabusing popular credulity\u201d. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Italian judge tells priest to prove Jesus’ existence 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGod in the Dock - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/01\/god-in-the-dock.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"God in the Dock - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Italian judge tells priest to prove Jesus’ existence AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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