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Family sues over prediction of hell

July 18 2003

Members of a New Mexico family are suing their local Catholic church over a funeral mass in which the priest allegedly said their relative was only a middling Catholic and going straight to hell.

Lawyers for the family of Ben Martinez said this week they had filed a lawsuit in June against the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe and one of its priests.

Court papers say that Father Scott Mansfield said at Mr Martinez's funeral last year that the deceased was "living in sin", "lukewarm in his faith" and that "the Lord vomited people like Ben out of his mouth to hell".

Mr Martinez, 80, died on June 17 last year. About 200 people attended the funeral at St Patrick's Parish in Chama, New Mexico, a small town north of Santa Fe. Family members say he was a practising Catholic all his life, but was too ill to attend church in the last year of his life. ...