One of the good guys - Bishop Walter Mixa: "A society without God is hell on earth."

You know the way bishops sometimes can be accused of being on the verge of taking a stand.  Well here's two who have taken stands - and they're not good stands either.

Firstly from Germany:  The Chairman of the German Bishops' Conference and archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, believes that Christ’s crucifixion is just a psychological support for those who suffer.

On Holy Saturday, the archbishop denied the Expiatory Death of Christ in an interview with the German TV station 'Hessischer Rundfunk'.

Christ "did not die for the sins of the people as if God had needed a sacrificial offering or something like a scapegoat" - the archbishop said.

According to him the dying Christ simply expressed "solidarity" with the suffering of the people even to death.

Then this from the Archbishop of Montreal:  "Personally, I am against murder," he said, "but can understand that sometimes, when someone is being attacked, they need to kill someone in self-defense. I am against abortion, but I can understand that in certain cases, there is almost no other choice than to practice it."

Then he tried to help us understand what the silly old Pope meant:  "Essentially, the pope said that it took two things to fight this disease, the means, but also a change of mentality. He pronounced this sentence to show that condoms were not in and of themselves the perfect solution; we took his words out of context and all this was largely amplified," said Cardinal Turcotte.  "As if the pope had said that condoms should not be used. This is ridiculous! When someone has AIDS, it is his or her responsibility to protect the people with whom he or she has intercourse."

The Apostles must be very proud to have such illustrious successors.

But, some good news from Germany.  This bishop firmly plants the blame for Nazism on atheists - and they don't like it one little bit.  "In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice." Christians and the Church were always the subject of "special persecution" under these systems, he said.