Against Satanic Panics.

Last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald contained news about Father Gerald Robinson, a Catholic priest in the USA found guilty of murdering a nun 26 years ago. Diane Vera, at the website Against Satanic Panics has taken a skeptical view of the proceedings:

"The [Satanic Ritual Abuse] allegations are highly improbable. Just think of the logistics involved in keeping a coffin full of live cockroaches around in the rectory, or wherever a bunch of deranged Catholic priests might possibly have kept such a thing. This imagery is the stuff of nightmares, not real life...
A lot of the alleged rituals are extremely messy (killing babies, killing animals, eating eyeballs, putting kids in coffins filled with cockroaches) and thus ought to leave some physical evidence -- significantly more evidence than ordinary child molestation does. Thus the lack of evidence is a far stronger argument against allegations of ritual abuse than against ordinary child molestation...
How could all those women have had similar nightmares about the same people, despite not knowing each other? I have to wonder: Was there really no connection amongst these four women? Might they possibly have had the same psychotherapist, for example?..."

www.theisticsatanism.com/asp/cases/GRobinson.html