Isn’t it great when religion and politics mix?

Italian government near collapse after Vatican ‘plot’

The Vatican has been accused of trying to bring down the Italian government after a Catholic minister abandoned Romano Prodi’s coalition government, leaving it facing collapse.

The prime minister was forced to call a vote of confidence after Clemente Mastella, the former justice minister, withdrew his support on Monday.

Mr Mastella’s Udeur Christian Democrat party has three crucial seats in the Senate, where Mr Prodi had a majority of two, at best.

New elections could be called, or a caretaker government could be appointed to reform the complicated electoral law if Mr Prodi loses the vote of confidence in both chambers.

Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of the opposition, said yesterday that he wants “elections in the spring”.

Mr Mastella resigned from the government last week, after he and his wife were implicated in a cash-for-favours scandal.

He promised that his party would vote with the government, but changed his mind over the weekend. Now he has said Mr Prodi’s coalition was “dead, dead, dead”.

The impetus for his change of heart appears to have come from the Vatican, which has voiced its disapproval at Mr Prodi’s stance on gay rights and abortion.

The Vatican also shook the government last year, when Mr Prodi lost a vote on his foreign policy on the same day that a gay marriage bill entered parliament.

In case any of you religious moderates out there were wondering, this is when your money goes when you donate to your local church. Reading stories like this makes me feel like I just received a lobotomy. What the fuck is wrong with people who insist on brining back the dark ages? They were shit times and we’re glad to be out of them, stop fucking up the human race you pricks.

Vatican to train more exorcists

ROME: The Catholic Church has vowed to “fight the Devil head-on” by training hundreds of priests as exorcists.

Father Gabriele Amorth, 82, the Exorcist in Chief, announced the initiative amid church concerns about growing worldwide interest in Satanism and the occult.

Under plans being considered, each bishop would have a group of priests in his diocese who were specially trained in exorcism and on hand to take action against “extreme Godlessness”.

“Thanks be to God that we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on,” Father Amorth said.

“Now bishops are to be obliged to have a number of established exorcists for their diocese. Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist.

“Thankfully Pope Benedict XVI believes in the existence and danger of evil, from the time he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith deals with promoting and safeguarding Catholic beliefs. It was headed by the Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, from 1982 until his election as Pope in 2005.

The Vatican is concerned that young people are being exposed to Satanism through the media, rock music and the internet.

All priests can perform exorcisms, but in reality only a select few are ever called on to do so. The rite involves gestures and prayers to invoke the power of God and stop the “demon” influencing its victim.

This is sort of funny, since it’s truth coming from the Vatican, but at the same time ignoring it’s own stupidity. My favorite quote has to be:

“Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That’s why science and religion need to talk to each other”

Science needs no help from religion, but religion needs a lot of help from science.

Creationism dismissed as ‘a kind of paganism’ by Vatican’s astronomer

BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.

Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. “Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That’s why science and religion need to talk to each other,” he said.

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”