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.”

After shooting video undercover in 10 Army recruiting offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, ABC News released in November an episode of recruiters telling a prospect that no one is going to Iraq anymore. “No, we’re bringing people back,” he said, and his partner followed with, “We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago.”

In a separate on-camera interview, Col. Robert Manning, who is in charge of Army recruiting in the Northeast, generously told ABC News that he disagreed with the recruiters. “We are a nation and Army at war still.”

Sign of the Times

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Four Mexicans were killed when a dispute between two Tzotzil Indian families over a pothole in the street escalated into a full-blown shootout. I can’t imagine how a dispute over a pothole lead to gunfire but somehow it did.

As the story goes, one of the families closed off the cracked concrete and mud road in the town of Banelos in the poor southern state of Chiapas to fill in a hole left by heavy rain. That sounds like a reasonable excuse for closing off a round. Take the repair into your own hands.

However, the closing of the roadway angered a family with a transport business who needed to get their truck through.

When the first family refused to re-open the road, insults led to blows and finally the two families shot at each other using various caliber guns and a hefty AR-15 rifle. Shootings are not uncommon in Mexico’s little-policed indigenous regions, where many take the law into their own hands.

Something about this story sounds a little fishy to me. Where on earth did these families get all their gun power? Just what kind of transportation business did the second family run? I wonder.

The pothole has since been filled in with rubble to repair the orginal damage.

Who’s Teasing Who?

(1) WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported in August that the pregnancy rate among girls at Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, was 13 percent, despite the fact that the school’s athletic teams are known as the Trojans.

(2) Police Chief Michael Chitwood of Daytona Beach, Fla., reported that his house was burglarized in August during the time he was speaking to a Neighborhood Watch group on crime prevention.

(3) In August, Kosco, a police dog assigned to the Watertown, N.Y., force, was the first cop on the scene to bring down Mark A. Adams, 22, who had eluded officers for seven hours after violating probation for cruelty to his pet dog.

Lack of Remorse:

In Tacoma, Wash., in September, a smirking Ulysses Hardy III, 24, pleaded guilty to three aggravated murders, laughed at the victims’ families in court, and told them to “get over it” and that “pain is part of life.” Hardy said there are two kinds of people, “us and them, predators and prey,” and that he’s “damn sure not prey. I did what I did. And that’s not going to change.”

A week earlier in Norristown, Pa., Janeske Vargas, 35, was sentenced to life in prison for setting a friend on fire with vodka and nail polish remover, but said she had nothing to say in court to her friend’s family. “No, why should I? … They’ll get over it.”