Found On The Internet...

While impatiently drumming my fingers waiting for a solicitor to turn up to a con that was supposed to start half an hour ago and must finish in half an hour so I can go and catch a train to Swindon for a CMC...

Six Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to leave a sect whose founder claims to be possessed by the Virgin Mary, a US diocese has announced.

Reverend Gaston Hebert, the Little Rock, Arkansas diocese administrator, said he notified the nuns of the decision on Tuesday night after they refused to recant the teachings of the Community of the Lady of All Nations, also known as the Army of Mary.

The Vatican has declared all members of the Canadian-based Army of Mary excommunicated.

There has to be at least a short story in this...

Apropos of something mostly but not completely different, I discovered yesterday, via a footnote in a paper about the text of the bible, that there are still Samaritans. 701 of them to be precise, in four families. Half of them live in a town in Israel and the other half on Mount Gezirim in the West Bank (they used to live in Nablus but moved up the mountain at the start of the first Intifada, their attitude to Israeli-Palestinian conflict being to keep their heads down, though they have passports from both the PA and Israel, and Jordan too). It seems to be a matter of some debate in Israel whether they should be counted as just another odd little sub-group of Jews, like the Falashas for instance, or as Something Else. They are, unsurprisingly, rather inbred, so all their marriages have to be approved by a genetic consultant, though they have recently decided to allow marriage out. I dislike citing wikipedia but there isn't a great deal else, beyond the links cited there.

Sorry, I'm just fascinated by tiny remnants of cultures and peoples like this, and I had no idea at all that this one still existed.