“Italian priests join the war on Satanic crime”
Priests are to work alongside Italian police officers to tackle a rising tide of crimes linked to devil worship.
The clerics have been seconded to the Squadra Anti Sette (SAS) anti-sect squad by the Vatican after Church officials became concerned about the number of churches being desecrated by Satanists. In recent months there have also been a string of murders that have been linked to devil worship.
One of the Vatican’s leading experts on Satanism and the occult, Don Oreste Benzi, has been brought in to liaise with police. He told The Sunday Telegraph that the natural curiosity of young people meant they were particularly attracted to the occult, and drugs were also used to influence and manipulate them.
This is the sort of thing you can do in a country without an interpretation of religious freedom that builds a wall between Church and state with the ACLU to guard on its parapets. Interesting that they’re identifying Satanism as an element in crime there. Over here, it would also be characterized as just another religious choice irrelevant to crime.
Incidentally, a friend I went to school with once told me about a cousin who was a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department on an organized crime task force. He went undercover among Satanists because people and animals were showing up dead with clear signs of ritual sacrifice. (This would have been back in the 80s, I think.) My friend said his cousin told him (sounds like an urban legend, right?) that he saw things you would never believe outside of a movie. He didn’t go into details.
I don’t know if that’s true, but apparently in Italy there’s some truth to it.
