Fake news: priest’s ‘miracle’ conversion to Islam never happened

[Source of Article: Answering Muslims originally from Australian Muslim Times]

Many of you may have spotted the story about an 87-year-old Spanish Catholic priest in Indonesia who converted to Islam after being in a coma for 17 months – well, the story is fake.

It had been claimed in the article that the priest suffered a heart attack while helping volunteers fix the roof of his church.

It was said priest Eduardo Vincenzo Maria Gomez fell two “stories” [sic] and emerged from his coma, saying that “Allah spoke to him and showed him ‘the beauty of the heavens’.”

The story was originally posted to satire website World News Daily Report and used the picture of British naturalist Professor David Bellamy as the supposed priest.

Shortly afterwards, the story went viral around the world.

The article went on to quote the fictitious priest as saying: “I know nothing of Islam. Never once have I read the Quran but God spoke to me and asked me to follow him to the heavens and the Holy light shone through my entire being and behold the golden gates of heaven appeared before me and God told me his name and it was Allah”.

According to a disclaimer posted at the top of all pages on the World News Daily Report website, it is “a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news.

“Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.”