- ROME (Reuters) - More and more Italians are abandoning Roman Catholicism
in favor of new religions and magic cults, an Interior Ministry report
said Thursday.
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- ``Even in Italy, a country which is not
traditionally accustomed to religious pluralism, the number of cults has
grown with unexpected speed,'' the report said. According to the Interior
Ministry's findings, some 76 new religious groups with roughly 78,500 followers
and 61 magic cults with 4,600 members have sprung up across the country
over the last few years.
-
- The Interior Ministry said studied the
subject because of public concern over cults in the lead up to the year
2000. ``There is widespread fear that individuals or uncontrolled religious
groups, caught up in some type of religious fervour, might take the end
of the Millennium as a spur for acts of great cruelty or deviant acts...
-
- ``Faced with growing public alarm, it
was deemed necessary to examine the phenomenon and assess the possible
existence of true threats to order and security,'' the report said. Its
list of new religions ranged from the Communita Mamma Gina which practices
faith-healing, through the English-based Church of Cherubin and Seraphin,
which carries out exorcism, to the Orthodox Catholic Church of Siri d'Antiochia,
whose leaders are being investigated for fraud.
-
- The most worrying groups, the report
said, were ``psychological-sects'' such as Scientology, which has some
7,000 followers in Italy. ``These are regarded as the most dangerous of
all the sects. They are capable of causing complete mental breakdown in
their followers,'' the report said.
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