Europe & UK Cult News: 7–12 September 2026

By He Who Shan't Be Named

Published 13 Sept 2026

Updated 14 Sept 2026

Europe & UK Cult News
UK
Europe
France
Switzerland
Germany
Italy
Spain
Ukraine
United States
BAPS
AROPL
Methernitha
Féminin sacré
Exclusive Brethren
Plymouth Brethren Christian Church
Nine O'Clock Service
Church of England
Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame
NatureBoy

Europe & UK Cult News: 7–12 September 2026 featured image — Protesters outside Chester Magistrates’ Court, 11 September

In the UK, Cheshire East Council said it could not remove the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light from its Crewe headquarters while a police investigation continued, and protesters clashed at Chester Magistrates’ Court. The Inner London Crown Court continued the retrial of Chris Brain, former Church of England priest and leader of Sheffield’s Nine O’Clock Service. In Germany a Frankfurt court listed a fresh murder trial over a child’s death in a Hanau cult in 1988.

In France, Eiffel Tower staff went on strike after women were told to stay out of sight for a private visit by the Hindu group BAPS, and Paris opened inquiries as the movement’s new temple east of the capital opened to worshippers. A France Télévisions film looked at the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame in an Ardèche village. In Switzerland a Methernitha survivor spoke again about abuse by Paul Baumann.

France Télévisions also made Féminin sacré available, an inquiry into cult behaviour in the sacred-feminine wellness market. More than two hundred former members of French religious communities wrote to Pope Leo XIV demanding action on spiritual abuse. In Italy la Repubblica returned to gurus and the country’s missing anti-cult law. A Barcelona clinic published a study of people harmed by abusive groups. ENDEVR reissued a 2022 Exclusive Brethren film on YouTube. In Ukraine a Kyiv psychic consultation ended with police.

Beyond Europe: Hulu’s The Cult of NatureBoy drew fresh US coverage of Eligio Bishop’s Costa Rica cult.

Crewe headquarters and Chester court

In the UK, Cheshire East Council told its cabinet it has no power to remove the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL) from Webb House in Crewe, in north-west England. AROPL claims Islamic and Shia roots but is rejected by mainstream Muslim authorities, and is not the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. The group owns Webb House as its headquarters and home for members, having moved there in about 2021, Cheshire Live reported on 8 September.

Council leader Nick Mannion said the authority was still working with Cheshire Police after hundreds of officers raided the site at the end of April. The raid followed allegations of serious sexual offences, forced marriage and modern slavery said to have taken place in 2023.

He stressed that the live investigation is into those allegations, not into the religion itself. Freedom Times covered the April raids on Webb House and the June protests and public-order hearings that followed.

On 11 September about twenty protesters who called themselves Against Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light gathered outside Chester Magistrates’ Court, the Chester Standard reported. The hearing concerned a slavery and trafficking risk order involving members of the group.

A scuffle broke out at the doors when it emerged that the defendants would appear by video link. Police monitored the scene. Some protesters tried to film inside the building, which is a criminal offence.

Chris Brain’s Nine O’Clock Service retrial

In the UK, the Inner London Crown Court continued the retrial of Chris Brain, 69, former Church of England priest and founder of Sheffield’s Nine O’Clock Service, Premier Christian News reported on 7 September. The Nine O’Clock Service was an Anglican youth and rave church of the late 1980s and early 1990s that became a cult around him. He denies one count of rape and four counts of indecent assault against four women from the movement he led between 1986 and 1995.

Last year a jury convicted him of 17 indecent assaults against nine women and cleared him of 15 further counts. It could not agree on the five counts now being retried.

Prosecutor Tim Clark KC told the jury that the Nine O’Clock Service presented itself as a progressive force for good, then became a cult. Some women, he said, were put on a “homebase team” rota that included putting Brain to bed with sexual favours.

Clark told the jury:

“This was a cult, in which the young women were reduced to such an emotional reliance on the defendant’s approval that they no longer had the capacity to freely consent to the sexual behaviour involved.”

The trial continues. Freedom Times covered the opening of the retrial last week.

Hanau child’s death returns to court

The accused mother beside her counsel Wiebke Otto (left) in the courtroom, at the earlier trial.

In Germany, Frankfurt regional court will retry a mother formerly linked to a cult in Hanau, a town in Hesse near Frankfurt in western Germany, for murder. Her four-year-old son died on 17 August 1988 after being put in a tied sack and left to suffocate, Die Zeit reported. The new hearing is listed to start on 25 September.

The group had no formal public name. It was a small closed cult formed in the early 1980s around Sylvia Dorn, a nurse who claimed to receive messages from God that members had to obey. Her husband Walter Dorn was a former Methodist pastor.

Prosecutors say the mother put her son in the sack, tied it, and left him with Dorn, the cult’s leader. Dorn was convicted of murder in Frankfurt in 2023 and sentenced to life. The court found she saw the boy as possessed by dark powers and left him screaming in the sack.

Authorities long treated the death as an accident until former members spoke in 2015. Hanau regional court acquitted the mother in 2022 after about a year of proceedings, finding the claim that she took part in the murder unproven.

Prosecutors appealed. Germany’s Federal Court of Justice overturned that acquittal and sent the case to Frankfurt for a fresh trial.

BAPS at the Eiffel Tower

BAPS monks in a ceremony before the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 3 September

In France, Eiffel Tower staff walked out on Monday 7 September after female employees were told to make themselves “invisible” during a private Saturday visit by a delegation from Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), RFI reported. BAPS is a global Hindu group close to India’s ruling Hindu nationalist politics. The tower reopened on Tuesday after the one-day strike.

The company that runs the tower, SETE, said the visitors had asked for the tour to limit “interactions with women,” then acknowledged that those conditions should not have been accepted. SETE president Ariel Weil called the episode “totally shocking and unacceptable” and said an internal inquiry’s findings would come within days. Paris city hall opened a parallel inquiry.

Staff said women were pulled from posts, replaced by men in some roles, and told not to cross certain areas while the delegation was present. France Info later named a lift operator who said she was told to leave her post, and reported an internal SETE memo describing a “special arrangement” for the visit. The CGT union said about twenty women were affected, some told to wait in basement rooms.

BAPS apologised for “any pain or inconvenience caused” and said that, to its knowledge, nobody was barred from the tower. Gender equality minister Aurore Bergé said: “In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves.” Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire called the exclusion of female workers unacceptable.

The visit came as BAPS opened a large new temple at Bussy-Saint-Georges, a town east of Paris. Spiritual leader Mahant Swami Maharaj, 93, dedicated the building. It welcomed worshippers from the weekend of 6–7 September, RFI reported.

Valeurs Actuelles reported accusations of forced labour around that building site, including claims of confiscated passports, threats and marathon working days.

Methernitha survivor returns to Thun

Filmmaker Marina Klauser (left) with Methernitha survivor Béatrice

In Switzerland, survivor Béatrice, now 69, returned to Thun Castle near Bern, in western Switzerland, where she testified half a century ago against Methernitha leader Paul Baumann, known as “Vatti,” Blick reported. Methernitha is a closed Christian cult based in Linden, a village near Bern. Béatrice had entered the group as a child with her parents.

In the 1970s she told investigators and the press that Baumann abused her and other girls. He was convicted in that era. About a hundred members still live in Linden.

Her new interviews follow Marina Klauser’s documentary series Der Engelmacher, also titled Le faiseur d’anges in French. Freedom Times reported in late August on Baumann’s abuse after the 1976 verdict and on Klauser’s film.

On 11 September the Berner Zeitung reported that Lena Allenspach, a Social Democrat in Bern’s regional parliament, had filed a question asking how the region would face years of alleged failure to supervise Methernitha after Baumann’s release.

An Ardèche village and the Famille Missionnaire

The Missionary Family of Our Lady in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier, Ardèche, from Un village sous emprise

In France, Edgar Sabatier’s 52-minute documentary Un village sous emprise had its premiere on 9 September at the Navire cinema in Aubenas, a town in the Ardèche, a mountain region in south-eastern France. The house sold out, Le Dauphiné Libéré reported.

France Télévisions and Cover Films co-produced the film. ICI Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes lists it for broadcast on 17 September on regional television and on france.tv.

The film examines the Famille Missionnaire de Notre-Dame (the Missionary Family of Our Lady), a traditionalist Catholic group of about two hundred members with its mother house in Saint-Pierre-de-Colombier, a mountain village of about four hundred people in the Monts d’Ardèche. Members, active on YouTube, describe a “spiritual combat for purity” against abortion, same-sex marriage and what they call a Muslim threat.

Opponents say the group dominates local life and pushes an intrusive faith. Supporters say they face hostility to the church and invoke religious freedom. The dispute centres on a planned church 53 metres high, meant for 3,500 pilgrims, in a nature park beside the village, against environmental rules, local opposition and the diocese’s disapproval.

ICI Drôme-Ardèche’s write-up after the premiere also describes property bought up for pilgrimages and municipal politics in which two lists fought the 2026 town-hall race, with members living elsewhere said to tip the vote. Former members, often former nuns, allege isolation and exhausting household conditions. In the film their words are read from police interview records rather than spoken to camera.

The press kit says the grip on members can go “sometimes as far as suicide.” Leaders refused on-camera interviews for the film. Sabatier used their YouTube clips instead.

The group says it cooperated and that other interviews were left out.

Féminin sacré on france.tv

In France, the 46-minute documentary Féminin sacré : enquête sur des dérives sectaires (an inquiry into cult abuses), which Freedom Times covered in preview last week, became available on Wednesday 9 September on france.tv and the Slash Enquêtes YouTube channel, Série-News reported. Nadège Justiniani directed. Journalist Astrig Agopian appears on camera.

Agopian, 26, follows unexplained menstrual pain into retreats, breathing sessions and rituals in the booming “sacred feminine” wellness market. The film shows how promises of healing without medical basis, psychological control and heavy spending can trap women, often aged 18 to 35, who are already dealing with illness, grief or job loss. French cult-watch authorities flagged the trend in their 2021 report.

Not available outside France.

Spiritual abuse letter to Pope Leo

In France, more than two hundred people who say they suffered spiritual abuse in Catholic orders and communities, or their relatives, wrote to Pope Leo XIV ahead of his state visit from 25 to 28 September, La Croix reported on 8 September. Spiritual abuse means the misuse of religious authority to control conscience, identity and free will. The letter argues the Church still has no clear definition of the harm and no fixed measures against religious abuse of power.

Signatories want the term rooted in theology and canon law, independent reporting points for survivors, and protection for whistleblowers inside communities. Two hundred and fifteen former members of 37 French orders and spiritual communities signed, among them Jesuits, Carmelites, Opus Dei and the Focolare movement.

All but three asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal steps by their former groups. A meeting with abuse survivors is expected in Lourdes, the pilgrimage town in south-western France, during the visit.

Italy’s missing anti-cult law

In Italy, la Repubblica’s Friday magazine of 12 September carried an interview with Stefano Nazzi on the country’s cult landscape, from the Beasts of Satan murder case to contemporary guru and supremacist networks. The piece put about two million Italians in the reach of such figures. A companion article noted that Italy’s old crime of plagio (psychological domination) no longer exists, leaving a gap with no dedicated anti-cult law in Parliament.

Barcelona study of abusive-group harm

In Spain, Atención e Investigación en Socioadicciones (AIS), a Barcelona clinic that treats people harmed by high-control groups, announced on 8 September a clinical study in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma. AIS researchers worked with the Free University of Brussels and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Seventy-one people took part: 41 still in an abusive group or out for less than a year, and 30 people from the general population as a control group, assessed in a specialist clinic. Those exposed to abusive groups showed higher distress, including depression and lower self-esteem.

Longer membership went with higher scores for disordered thinking. AIS said mental-health clinicians should ask whether patients have been in high-control groups.

Exclusive Brethren on ENDEVR

In Canada, documentary channel ENDEVR reissued on YouTube in early September the hour-long special VeraCity: Breaking Brethren. The film first aired on CityNews / VeraCity on 27 March 2022. It follows former members of the Exclusive Brethren, also known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, a closed Christian cult in which leaving often means cutting family ties.

It is separate from the Netflix Unchosen story Freedom Times covered last week.

Kyiv psychic and the police

In Ukraine, UA.NEWS on 11 September reported how a paid consultation with Kyiv psychic Olena Kurylova ended for client Olena Krasvitna. Krasvitna paid 12,000 hryvnias (about £220). The session, filmed with signs of heavy intoxication on Kurylova’s part, offered no accurate answers and ended in abuse.

When Krasvitna, with help from Natalia Yakovleva’s “Psychics’ Razor” project, sought a refund and apology, Kurylova complained to police in Podil, a district of Kyiv, of “extortion.”

Investigators opened a case against the client under Ukraine’s law on coercion. After a parliamentary inquiry and legal pressure, the criminal case was closed for lack of an offence.

Police apologised for the summonses. Kurylova returned 11,950 hryvnias. Yakovleva framed the episode as part of a wartime market that preys on families of the dead, missing and captured.

Beyond Europe

The Cult of NatureBoy

In the United States, ABC News on 12 September highlighted Hulu’s documentary series The Cult of NatureBoy, about Eligio Bishop, who drew followers with the promise of a Black utopia and built a following that moved toward Costa Rica. The series describes coercion, control and sexual exploitation behind the paradise promise.

On Disney+ in France the series keeps the English title. The four episodes are listed as À la recherche du paradis, La Secte Carbon Nation, Le Paradis perdu and La Chute d’un dieu.