It’s news stories like this one to lend credence to Nunya’s constant claims that religious people are mentally deranged.
A Romanian Orthodox priest, facing charges for ordering the crucifixion of a young nun because she was “possessed by the devil”, was unrepentant today as he celebrated a funeral ceremony for his alleged victim.
“God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil,” Father Daniel, 29, the superior of the Holy Trinity monastery in north-eastern Romania, told an AFP reporter before celebrating a short liturgy “for the soul of the deceased”, in the presence of 13 nuns who showed no visible emotion.
He insisted that from the religious point of view, the crucifixion of Maricica Irina Cornici, 23, was “entirely justified”, but admitted he faced excommunication as well as prosecution, and was seeking a “good lawyer”.
If you ask me, what he needs is a bit of his own medicine. This news item was brought up a few days back by someone in a comment to one of the other threads (apologies for not remembering who or where, but a few minutes searching the comments led me nowhere), but I’ve not had time to rant about it until now. I don’t know what I find more abhorrent about this story; what she was put through or the fact that this schmuck thinks he delivered a miracle onto her.
Cornici was found dead on Wednesday, gagged and chained to a cross, after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police.
Mihaela Straub, spokeswoman for the police in the province of Vaslui, said Daniel and four other nuns had claimed Cornici was possessed and should be exorcised.
Before being crucified she had been kept shut up for several days, her hands and feet tied and without food or drink, he said.
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Claps of thunder from an approaching storm were sometimes the only sounds to break the silence.“This storm is proof that the will of God has been done,” Daniel said.
“You see it?” said the priest, gesturing at the body, lying in an annexe and still showing the marks of the gag.
Cornici had only been a nun for about three months before this idiocy took place. Can you imagine having just recently dedicated your life to being a Nun only to wind up accused of being possessed, starved for a few days, and then crucified? And then this asshole has the audacity to claim he did you a favor?
“Over there, in your world, the people must know that the devil exists. Personally I can find his work in the gestures and speech of possessed people, because man is often weak and lets himself be easily manipulated by the forces of evil,” said the bearded young priest.
“I don’t understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practice in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests,” he said.
The urge to slap him had he been talking to me would probably have been overwhelming. Of course, he’d probably accuse me of being possessed. He certainly wouldn’t be the first. The sad thing is that I’m sure there are some folks here in the States who would attempt such measures if they thought they could get away with it. Hell, some don’t even worry about that. There’s been various kids killed during attempts to de-possess them here in the past. We have our own fair share of religious morons. People like this asshat for example.
Posted on 06/24/2005 at 08:25 PM 
Posted on 06/26/2005 at 01:54 AM 
The more of these stories I see, the more inclined I am to agree with Nunyabiz that religious people ARE in fact mentally deranged. It’s getting more and more difficult for me to truly believe in my heart that if an otherwise normal person chooses to follow/worship/listen to an invisible being there’s no harm done, “live and let live” and all that.
People who follow/listen to invisible beings clearly have the capacity to be dangerous to society, and perhaps are even more prone to such psychoses due to the required break with reality it takes to believe in such nonsense as gods.