LAST night, in a desperate last-minute search for a Hallowe’en costume, I ducked into La Rosita, an enormous toy emporium in Benidorm which, this year, displayed the largest-ever collection of ghoulish accoutrement I have ever seen. What puzzled me, though, was that priestly garb featured largely among the werewolf, witch and vampire costumes, and, for [...]
FATHER Laurence Soper, an ex-London abbot accused of sexually abusing children, is reportedly on the run from police after jumping bail. Soper, an abbot in Ealing between 1991 and 2000, was arrested last year on suspicion of sexual assault. He is now the subject of an international manhunt after jumping bail earlier this year. The [...]
FRESH revelations about the Catholic Church’s involvement in a host of human rights abuses in Spain under Franco’s dictatorship and even later have surfaced in the last week, causing outrage in a country fast distancing itself from its Catholic past. The latest scandal centres on baby-trafficking by Church, government officials and clinics over several decades. [...]
A ROMAN Catholic bishop faces a possible prison sentence and $1,000 fine for failing to report a priest who was found to have hundreds of pictures on naked children on his laptop computer. Bishop Robert Finn, who heads the Kansas City diocese, became the highest-ranking US church official to be charged in the long-running Catholic [...]
PAKISTAN – a world leader in religious lunacy – is back in the headlines, this time over the treatment of a 10-year-old Christian schoolgirl who misspelled a word pertaining to a poem in praise of the “prophet” Mohammed. The Urdu word, according to this report, was “naat” (hymn), but Faryal Bhatti, an eighth grade student [...]
Continue reading about Girl, 10, beaten and expelled from school for ‘blasphemous’ spelling mistake
A DEVOUT Christian’s horror of bare boobies has set the blogosphere alight this week – but a much more disturbing story, concerning the Catholic Church’s cover-up of a the abuse of children with learning difficulties, has just emerged from Australia. The first tale concerns Northern Ireland farmer Alan Graham. He apparently got all of a [...]
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
