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Tag Archives: Italy
Vatican: Barmy Benny, the exorcist’s friend!
And you thought everyone hated Ratzo!
Father Gabriele Amorth, the founder and head of the International Association of Exorcists, said the German pontiff had “done many things for exorcists” during his eight-year papacy, which will come to an end on Feb 28.
He said Benedict, regarded as a staunch conservative during his time in office, had “allowed exorcists to administer the sacrament of exorcism not only to people who are suffering from demonic possession, but also those who suffer other evil disorders, such as diabolical infestations.”
Our slogan: ‘Complete satisfaction or your demons back”.
Q: What happens if you don’t pay your exorcist’s fee?
A: You get repossessed.
As for ‘diabolical infestations’ — I’m sure there’s a joke there somewhere but it eludes me for the moment.
Italy: Wind power subsidies — it’s organised crime!
Even more so when the Mafia gets involved.
The still-emerging links of the mafia to the once-booming wind and solar sector here are raising fresh questions about the use of government subsidies to fuel a shift toward cleaner energies, with critics claiming huge state incentives created excessive profits for companies and a market bubble ripe for fraud. China-based Suntech, the world’s largest solar panel maker, last month said it would need to restate more than two years of financial results because of allegedly fake capital put up to finance new plants in Italy. The discoveries here also follow so-called “eco-corruption” cases in Spain, where a number of companies stand accused of illegally tapping state aid.
Italy: A Christmas message of love and goodwill from the Catholic Church…
…yeah, right.
A Catholic priest has sparked outrage in Italy by claiming women bring domestic violence on themselves by dressing provocatively and neglecting housework, Italian media report.
“How often do we see girls and mature women going around scantily dressed and in provocative clothes?” Piero Corsi said in a Christmas message posted on the door of his church in the small town of San Terenzio in northwest Italy.
Speaking personally, not nearly enough.
“They provoke the worst instincts, which end in violence or sexual abuse. They should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on ourselves?” it read.
The leaflet, a copy of which was posted online sparking a wave of outrage across the country, said the 118 women killed in acts of domestic violence in Italy in 2012 had pushed men to their limits.
And Ol’ Crazy Piero may have personal knowledge of what he speaks:
an elderly female resident told Sky Italia television that Corsi “should keep a low profile as he has lots of secrets he would not wish to come out”.
Italy: A disaster that science brought upon itself?
What happens when you believe your own hype
If you’re going to claim you have intimate knowledge of the future, you should be prepared to take the blame when it turns out that you don’t.
The jailing of six Italian scientists and a government official for failing to predict an earthquake has caused uproar in the scientific community. The men were convicted of manslaughter on the basis that they failed to give an adequate risk assessment of the 2009 earthquake in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, which killed 300 people. Outraged by the court’s verdict, the CEO of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science wrote to the president of Italy to tell him ‘there is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to inform citizens of an impending disaster’. The verdict is ‘perverse’ and ‘ludicrous’, says the science journal Nature….
But even as we condemn the Italian court for jailing these scientists, and Western society for failing to accept that sometimes disasters just happen, we should also ask whether the scientific community itself bears some responsibility for how these men have been treated. Because today, scientists are at the forefront of depicting natural events as being easily blameable on the behaviour of human beings. Through its fulsome and ceaseless promotion of the climate-change agenda, the global scientific community as it has fashioned itself continually makes a simplistic causal link between what men do now and what will befall the planet in the future – just as a link was made between the behaviour of those Italian scientists and the quake deaths that followed.
Also, the scientific community is forever depicting itself as soothsayer, as an almost all-knowing force, whose predictions of future calamity must not be challenged. When radical green activists march behind banners declaring ‘We are armed with peer-reviewed science’, and critics of the environmentalist agenda are slammed for being ‘anti-science’, you can clearly see that science has become a kind of unquestionable gospel of the future, a respectable version of what Nostradamus used to do. It isn’t only that court in L’Aquila that demonises uncertainty, lambasting those seven men for saying things that were ‘incomplete, imprecise, contradictory’; through the phrase ‘the debate is over’, the scientific community does the same thing in relation to climate change, frequently slamming those who seek to inject some healthy uncertainty about the future into proceedings.
Italy: God only made me wreck boat and kill 32 people, not 4000, says captain
“What? Didn’t they get My memo about travelling on the starboard side?”
And they were right bastards, anyway.
THE captain of the Costa Concordia has said a “divine hand” guided him on the doomed cruise ship, as he was released from house arrest.
As the ship was about to hit rocks off the Italian coast “a divine hand surely touched my head,” Captain Francesco Schettino said in a letter to his lawyers which was published by Italian media yesterday.
“If I had continued on that path the ship’s prow would have hit the rock. It would have been carnage,” he said.
Italy: Heirs and assigns? If none, write ‘nun’
In related news, Paul Cox’s film ‘The Nun and the Bandit’ is to be remade with a cast of one.
Sister Angela Gramegna is being investigated by police on suspicion of fraudulently pocketing 1.5m euro ($1.9 million) and getting the keys to an apartment in an upmarket Rome neighbourhood.
Investigators have seized the apartment and placed Gramegna under investigation after calligraphy experts decided she wrote and signed the will in which her apparent benefactor, Francesca Di Cesare, left everything she owned to the convent.
Vatican: Corruption scandal letters leaked
The Vatican was shaken by a corruption scandal Thursday after an Italian television investigation said a former top official had been transferred against his will after complaining about irregularities in awarding contracts.
The show “The Untouchables” on the respected private television network La 7 Wednesday night showed what it said were several letters that Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was then deputy-governor of Vatican City, sent to superiors, including Pope Benedict, in 2011 about the corruption.
The Vatican issued a statement Thursday criticizing the “methods” used in the journalistic investigation. But it confirmed that the letters were authentic by expressing “sadness over the publication of reserved documents.”
As deputy governor of the Vatican City for two years from 2009 to 2011, Vigano was the number two official in a department responsible for maintaining the tiny city-state’s gardens, buildings, streets, museums and other infrastructure.
Vigano, currently the Vatican’s ambassador in Washington, said in the letters that when he took the job in 2009 he discovered a web of corruption, nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to outside companies at inflated prices.
In one letter, Vigano tells the pope of a smear campaign against him (Vigano) by other Vatican officials who wanted him transferred because they were upset that he had taken drastic steps to save the Vatican money by cleaning up its procedures.
It’s that damned UNESCO again!
Italy: Weird Religious Logic, Part 43
Maybe they used a giant toaster?
Italian government scientists have claimed to have discovered evidence that a supernatural event formed the image on the Turin Shroud, believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
After years of work trying to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a similar image has been created by the scientists.
However, they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax.
So — pay attention here — it must be supernatural, even though they can do it, because they don’t know how it was done? Argument from Ignorance, anyone?
Oh, and if you’re after a high-intensity UV source that was around in the 14th Century, try looking up. In the daytime, that is.
Italy: Yoga is Satanic, says creepy old priest
Arm raises: you’re doing it wrong
Father Gabriele Amorth, who for years was the Vatican’s chief exorcist … said yoga is Satanic because it leads to a worship of Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation”.
Reading JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books is no less dangerous, said the 86-year-old priest…
“Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” he told a film festival in Umbria this week…
His views may seem extreme, but in fact reflect previous warnings by Pope Benedict XVI, when as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy.
In 1999, six years before he succeeded John Paul II as Pope, he issued a document which warned Roman Catholics of the dangers of yoga, Zen, transcendental meditation and other ‘eastern’ practises….
Father Amorth has previously said that people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron and have such superhuman strength that even children have to be held down by up to four people.
Italy: Pope libels atheists, again
“The enemies of religion…see in religion one of the principal sources of violence in the history of humanity and thus they demand that it disappear. But the denial of God has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds, which only becomes possible when man no longer recognizes any criterion or any judge above himself, now having only himself to take as a criterion. The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God’s absence.”
Ah, yes, sixty-year-old lies about atheist Nazism, how convincing. That must be why hundreds of us have been convicted of child abuse, and why we hire child porn addicts to investigate child abuse claims.
Oh no, sorry — that’s you.
Italy: Boy dies after treatment with alternative medicine
A couple who treated their sick four-year-old son with alternative medicine are being investigated for manslaughter, Italian police have said.
Luca Monsellato was taken to hospital with a high fever and cold symptoms but failed to respond to emergency medical treatment and died.
His parents, Marcello and Giovanna Pantaleo, told doctors they had been treating his apparent three-week cold with fennel tea – a popular homeopathic remedy for coughs – in an attempt to keep his fever under control. They eventually took him to hospital when his condition worsened…
Mr Monsellato, 52, of the southern Italian town of Tricase, close to Lecce, has been a doctor of alternative medicine for more than 20 years. He is honorary president of Italy’s Homeopathic Sinergy Association and an expert on acupuncture.
Feel free to add quote marks around ‘doctor’ and ‘expert’.
Italy: Churchgoer rips out eyeballs
An Italian man reportedly ripped out his own eyeballs during Sunday Mass at a church in Viareggio, near Pisa, northern Italy, according to British news reports.
Aldo Bianchini, 46, a Briton who had lived most of his life in Italy, according to the Daily Mail, reportedly stood up during the Mass at St Andrea’s and used his bare hands to tear out his eyeballs. He then collapsed on the floor in a pool of his own blood…
NBC reminded readers that in the Bible’s Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
What do the Gospels say about seeking proper psychiatric care when you get ill, rather than trusting what you’re told by old men in frocks?
Not enough, obviously.
Vatican: Pedophile investigator is — a pedophile!
Investigators examining tapped cellphone conversations between a Moroccan drug dealer and 51-year-old Father Riccardo Seppia … found evidence of arranged sexual encounters with young boys, some of whom were paid for sex with cocaine.
“I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger,” Seppia is accused of having said on the tapes. “Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues.”
Seppia is a priest in a the archdiocese of one of the top advisers working with Pope Benedict XVI “on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.”
Well, who could be better qualified? It’s called ‘cutting out the middleman’.
Italy: ‘Hollow man’ statue captures the essential JP II
SMH.
An enormous statue of John Paul II, unveiled in front of Rome’s central station just weeks after the former pontiff was put on the path to sainthood, has sparked controversy – with locals calling for it to go.
…
The five-metre-high bronze statue, designed by the Italian artist Oliviero Rainaldi, depicts John Paul II with his arms outstretched, reflecting the pope’s “message of welcome and openness towards others”.
John Paul smiles benignly down on passersby, his bronze head supported by a structure with no body, but a large cloak which falls to the ground on three sides, leaving a gaping hole at the front.
Italy: Armani frocks for the bishop
SMH.
Bishop Domenico Mogavero turned out for Mass on Monday on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria in green silk vestments designed by Armani and decorated with symbols of vines, wheat, shells and starfish.
Nice to see the Church hasn’t lost its sense of proportion.
”They are tasteful, made from a sober type of silk and give an idea of the solemnity of the occasion,” said Bishop Mogavero, who was appointed the Bishop of Mazara del Valle, in Sicily, four years ago.
Because flashy silk would be just — you know — tacky.
Italy: Jewish judge sacked for objecting to crucifix
Italy’s highest court of appeal — the Cassation Court — confirmed today (March 14, 2011) the sacking of a judge who refused to hear cases with the crucifix in the courtroom, according to the Life In Italy website.
Luigi Tosti, 62, appealed to the Cassation Court after the Italian judiciary’s self-governing body — the Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM) — struck him from their ranks in May 2010.
Come on, Luigi — it’s only an Iron Age torture device, after all. Maybe they should update it and have a waterboard instead.
Italy: Pot, meet kettle
SMH.
Italy’s most senior Catholic bishop said Silvio Berlusconi’s private life threatened to turn Italy into a moral vacuum.
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said the Prime Minister’s conduct was sowing the seeds of an ”anthropological disaster”.
Young Italians would eschew abiding by the law and working hard in favour of easy money by ”selling” themselves, he said.
And he’d rather they were available free…
Italy: Environmentalists prove just as gullible as other believers — 100+ arrested in fraud case
Here’s more proof that trading of CO2 emission certificates is fraught with fraud and attracts seedy criminal organizations – all costing the consumers and taxpayers billions.
Worse yet, it has spread out of control and appears that the authorities can’t keep up.
The Austrian online Kleine Zeitung here reports that Europol have raided an elaborate CO2 emissions scam in Italy and have arrested more than 100 persons.
The Kleine Zeitung writes: “The damage runs in the billions of euros”.
Italy: Gaddafi invites ‘hundreds’ of women to convert to Islam: three silly enough to consider it
SMH.
… the mercurial leader attracted most attention earlier in the day by summoning busloads of young women hired by a hostessing agency to a meeting at a Libyan cultural centre near the Vatican and urging them to convert to Islam.
Media reports said three women had converted, although it was not possible to verify if that was true.
Rent-a-Convert; the natural successor to Rent-a-Crowd.
Italy: Pope warns that Hell is real
So don’t just stand there — start acting scared! Honestly, what’s the church coming to when the CEO himself has to start motivating the troops with threats and horror? That’s a job for line management.
Italy: Pope John Paul II a closet self-flagellator
”Until recently nobody would have thought the fact that a pope practises self-flagellation as exceptional at all,” said Carole Cusack, of the department of religious study at Sydney University.
Well, the Marquis de Sade and Gilles de Rais wouldn’t. Normal people, however…
And he had the gall to lecture other people on sexual practices!
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