God is having to wait while a magistrate makes up his mind. In his courtroom in Viterbo, Italy, Gaetano Mautone has heard opening argument in a preliminary hearing in respect of an allegation made by atheist Luigi Cascioli against Roman Catholic priest Enrico Righi, but has delayed making a decision on whether the matter should be be brought to open trial. The delay suggests Mautone can’t decide whether to put the Christian version of history in the dock.
Righi did not make an appearance at the January 27 hearing, but was represented by his attorney. Attorneys for both Righi and Cascioli presented argument. Cascioli’s attorney, Mauro Fonzo, fired the first salvo, presenting voluminous historical evidence to support the notion that the Christian version of Jesus Christ never existed.
Righi’s attorney, Severo Bruno, did not respond to this argument, but chose entirely different grounds for his defence. He did not tackle the substantive facts of the argument based on historical evidence put before him. He chose instead to argue that if the ancient, sacred texts of Christianity were misleading or forged, then only the original perpetrators of such forgeries could be held liable for the charges that had been brought against Righi. Righi, he said, was only repeating what others had written.
Talking to reporters after the hearing, Bruno said Righi was not ”asserting a historical fact” when he wrote of the existence of Jesus, but expressing ”theological principles”. On the face of it, this would seem like a major concession. Commenting on this argument after the hearing, Cascioli writes (on his website) that this is much like saying that the person who knowingly sells poison cannot be held guilty of a crime, only the person who manufactures the poison in the first place.
Meanwhile, another sensational case is being heard in Italy that reverberates with elements not only of the Cascioli affair, but also with worldwide divergence of views about the place of religion and religious icono-graphy in secular society.
An Italian judge who refuses to sit in court rooms bearing the Christian crucifix has been suspended from duty. The crucifix is customarily appended to courtroom walls and other public places in Italy. But Judge Luigi Tosti, who is Jewish, insists that defendants have the constitutional right — Italy being a secular state — to refuse to be tried under the symbol of the cross.
He has fought this battle for a number of years and it was as a result of his objections that the Italian Constitutional Court confirmed in 2004 the obligation to adorn the walls of public buildings with the Christian cross. The court gave no juridical explanation for its ruling.
Judge Tosti argues that the legal precedent enforcing display of the cross in public buildings is drawn from the Rocco Code, the criminal law formulated and adopted in fascist Italy, and therefore no longer binding. But the Justice Ministry holds that the Rocco Code was never abolished and, therefore, remains in force.
With resonant irony, Judge Tosti has been publicly supported in his attempt to secularise this aspect of the law in Italy by the Union of Italian Muslims, which — for obvious reasons — also resents in general the assumption that Christian iconography should occupy a place in Italian public life and, in particular, the assumption that all law in Italy is dispensed in the name of Christianity.
The leader of the union, Adel Smith, won a 2003 court battle to have crosses removed from the walls of the school his children attended, but the court order was later reversed after a nationwide protest. It seems that Judge Tosti, who wanted to replace the cross in his court with a Jewish menorah candle holder, was embarrassed by the Muslim support of his cause, for it led him to a temporary cessation of his crusade against the cross in 2004.
For religious fundamentalists, it is clearly a challenge differentiating between one set of closely held preju-dices and another. In the absence of helpful guidelines, the argument seems to be: ”I am entitled to my beliefs and you are entitled to yours, except of course when they conflict with mine.”