The Diocese of Sora-Cassino-Aquino-Pontecorvo made the announcement on June 5 concerning the self-styled Universal Christian Church of the New Testament.

This followed an examination by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of what the diocese termed "very grave abuse".

Issuing the decree required the approval of the Pope.

A diocese statement noted the group obliged "the faithful not to receive sacraments, to disapprove of the Pope's teaching and authority, not to entertain relations with priests and their parish communities, and not to observe ecclesiastical discipline".

The diocese said the group is "committed to spreading false religious doctrines and teachings that distort the Bible and are outside the truth of the sacred text".

In 1947, Giuseppina Norcia reportedly saw an apparition of the child Jesus in the town of Gallinaro.

This was followed by subsequent apparitions in 1974, and her family built a chapel on the site the following year.

Samuele Morcia, the son-in-law of Giuseppina Norcia, took over the prayer groups dedicated to the "apparition" after Norcia's death in 2008.

He turned the groups into a sect based on a cult of personality.

He claimed that Norcia had transferred to him her capacity to receive messages and prophecies from Christ.

The group holds that Gallinaro is the "New Jerusalem," and it has attracted tens of thousands of worshippers from across Italy.

Many prayer groups have spread dedicated to the worship of the supposed apparition of the child Jesus.

In establishing themselves as the Universal Christian Church of the New Testament last year, the group committed an act of schism and thus incurred automatic excommunication, the diocese stated.

The diocese stressed that "all the faithful of the diocese must be informed" of the consequences of "this very grave abuse".

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Crux

The police generated a photo-fit image from the negative facial image on the shroud.

From this they reversed the aging process to create an image of a young Jesus, the Independent reported.

They did this by reducing the size of the jaw, raising the chin and straightening the nose.

The technique effectively reverses the method that Italian police use to generate current likenesses of criminals when they have been on the run for decades.

Such techniques were used to produce an image of Mafia boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano, from a photo taken in 1959.

Provenzano was eventually captured in 2006.

The image of Jesus as a young boy, and the methods used to create it, will be the subject of an upcoming programme on Italian television.

But the exercise was done to mark the current public display of the shroud at Turin Cathedral.

It will be on public display for two months, with millions of visitors expected.

Pope Francis is due to visit and pray before the relic on June 21.

Some believe the shroud to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, citing evidence including findings that the cloth contained pollen grains from plants that could only be found in the Holy Land.

But others maintain the shroud is a medieval hoax, citing carbon dating tests for instance.

The Church has never officially proclaimed that Christ's body was wrapped in the shroud.

The sceptics' case was boosted when researchers recently presented findings based on bloodstain pattern analysis.

American and Italian researchers did tests with a dummy to see which way blood would have flowed from crucifixion wounds and how they would have stained a burial cloth.

Their tests showed remarkably different staining from that on the shroud.

Sources

• The Independent
• BBC
• Image: Christian Post