1

Wow! I did not realize Chavez got his marching orders from the DNC!

This guy sounds like such a joke.

2

Luther still hasn't stopped spinning from the broad Protestant support for Israel that characterizes the modern era. He would have preferred to see the Jews converted or destroyed.

3

If anyone knows and adheres to the "classical reformered" teaching on Popery, you can really get an ugly picture of this proposal.

4

Chavez, the Castroite communist dictator of Venezeula, enemy of the church, enemy of the people. Real credible source of Christian wisdom.

Rob,
You libel Dr. Martin.

5

nah - that's him spinning on his spit. Lucifer is warming him up ready for his next doner kebab.

6

If anyone does any apologizing when President Bush meets with the Pope, it should be the Pope on account of his continuing employment of a secretary of state who publicly makes light of 9-11.

7

oh my gosh is this for real??

8

Napoleon, not King Philip II of Spain, is the model for church-state relations in most Spanish-speaking countries. Few Protestants realize how secular most Latin American governments are. Mexico, for instance, reluctantly opened a Vatican embassy after the USA and prohibits its President from any sort of public religious participation. The Sandinistas did everything in their power to embarrass and discredit Pope John Paul when he visited during the early eighties.

The President of Venezuela is no more likely than John Kerry to kiss the Pope's ring and publicly ask for the sacrament of penance. His suggestion to President Bush is not the least bit serious.

9

"Few Protestants realize how secular most Latin American governments are."

James is right. Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory is an eye-opener. I was brought up on tales of brave hedge priests being persecuted by the Protestant majority in England. So it was a shock to read how viciously anti-clerical the [semi-]elected gov't of a Catholic-majority nation like Mexico had become.

Tangentially to that, Greene includes a pair of American Lutherans who are two of the novel's most sympathetic characters (although -- of course -- they "just don't understand" Catholicism).

10

"Napoleon, not King Philip II of Spain, is the model for church-state relations in most Spanish-speaking countries."

[Cont'd] Part of the reason may be that, on average, most Protestant-majority nations became democratic long before most Catholic-dominated countries. Democracies are prone to persecuting minorities but one thing they almost never do is pick on the majority group. So if the USA a hundred years ago was 80% Prot, this means its laws are not likely to discriminate against Prot mores and doctrines. But if a country is a monarchy or a despotism, it can be 90% Catholic and yet still discriminate against Catholicism (think Jacobin France, secularist Mexico, Communist Poland... and arguably, Republican Spain and large swathes of England at the start of the Reformation).