When a priest who received complaints from one of his parishioners on his answering machine played the tape in church and asked his congregation “Should we send him to hell or to another parish?”

Angel Llavona, the parishioner who left the complaint, filed a defamation lawsuit Monday claiming the events at St. Thomas the Apostle Church caused him emotional distress that forced him to leave the Roman Catholic parish.

All this started about a year ago when Llavona left a message for the Rev. Luis Alfredo Rios complaining about a sermon he had given, the lawsuit said. “I attended Mass on Sunday and I have seen poor homilies, but yesterday broke all records,” Llavona said.

The lawsuit says Llavona, a high school teacher who helped out with the church’s religious education program, tried to meet with Rios. But when the meeting fell apart, he left another complaint on the priest’s answering machine.

Llavona said on Oct. 1, 2006, Rios played his voice messages for the congregation.

Then, according to the lawsuit, Rios said: “This is the person in charge of religious education here last year. That’s why it is no surprise to me we had the kind of religious education we had. That’s why we didn’t get altar boys. What should we do, should we send him to hell or to another parish?”

Llavona is seeking at least $50,000 in damages. “Rios impugned Llavona’s reputation as a teacher and as a good Catholic before his fellow parishioners,” the suit said.

Penny Wiegert, a spokeswoman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockford, said Rios was at a retreat Wednesday and unavailable for comment.

The diocese is also named as a defendant. Wiegert said she couldn’t comment on the specifics of the lawsuit, but released a diocese statement expressing hope for “a peaceful solution.”

We often hear news stories about those who’ve been wrongly convicted being freed from jail, sometimes after being incarcerated for many years. The newly freed often sue the legals system for wrongful confinement.

Three men in Birmingham, England who were recently freed after respectively spending 18, 18 and 11 years in prison for murder, were, in separate trials, awarded a total of 2.16 million British pounds.

Unfortunately for these men the Court of Appeal ruled in March that the mean will each have to give back 25% of their award to the government as compensation for their “room and board”. You know, those tiny cells they stayed in and the awful prison food that they were served for years.

Isn’t that outrageous!

Often when an evangelical parishioner comes to the altar to receive “the spirit of the Lord” and falls backward, church-supplied “catchers” ease them to the floor.

That didn’t happen when Judith Dadd received the spirit of the Lord and her lawsuit against Mount Hope Church recently went to trial near Lansing, Mich.,

She’s seeking compensation for head trauma and lacerations after no one was there to break her fall. There’s no word yet as to the outcome of her trial.

At least her case doesn’t seem as bad as that of a 1995 incident that occurred at a tent revival in Lafayette Parish, LA. Apparently the first overcome parishioner was caught as she should have been, but another parishioner was overcome much faster than anyone expected and she landed hard on the first woman and broke three of her ribs!

In the year 2003, a Bryn Mawr College student, Janet Lee, attempted to board an airliner with several flour-filled condoms. She claimed that her classmates and she used the soft and squishy condoms as stress relievers. They would give them a squeeze to ease their tension.

She must not have ever listened to the news or read a paper if she didn’t know that drug smugglers tend to fill condoms with cocaine and heroin and use mules who swallow the condoms in order to get the illegal drugs into the Country.

She was astonished when she was arrested at the Philadelphia airport and then jailed for three weeks until the lab could verify that the substance was indeed flour as she had claimed it was.

Unfortunately for the city of Philadelphia she smartened up and strapped them with a lawsuit for wrongful detention and was awarded $180,000 in January, 2007.

You can bet she’ll never make that mistake again!

________________________________________

For more stories like this visit our “Dumb People” section.