Pope Can't Say Christianity is a Superior Religion

So says an Italian Muslim activist who has filed a civil lawsuit against the Holy Father.

In his latest legal bid, Smith said comments by Pope John Paul II and other church officials over the years have violated the Italian constitution, which proclaims all religions are equal under the law. Italy is officially secular, but largely Roman Catholic.

In the lawsuit, Smith cited a passage of John Paul's 1994 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope in which the pope writes that the "richness of God's self-revelation" in the Bible's Old and New Testament's has been "set aside" in Islam.

The suit also cites comments by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog, who in a 2000 document said the faithful of other religions were in a "gravely deficient situation" concerning their salvation, compared to Catholics.

And he cited comments by the retired archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, who in 2000 urged Italy to favour Catholic immigrants over Muslims to "save the nation's identity" against "Islam's ideological attack."

"All of this constitutes offence, injury and insult for all those who peacefully practice the Islamic religion, in addition to defamation and incitation to racial and religious hatred," according to a copy of the lawsuit Smith sent to news organisations.

Hey, if our courts can seriously consider some crank's objection to including the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the odds that the Italian courts will entertain this goofball's lawsuit have to be pretty good.