Free Republic

President Bush may follow in the footsteps of his brother Jeb and convert to Catholicism, several European papers are reporting. In the wake of the president’s visit to see Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Italian newspapers, citing Vatican sources, said Bush was open to the idea of converting to Catholicism. The Italian newspaper Il Foglio referred to such talk about Bush’s possible conversion and stated that “anything is possible, especially for someone reborn like Bush.� Noting that Tony Blair converted to Catholicism after leaving office as Britain’s prime minister last year, the paper also stated that “if anything happens,...

My niece's husband is a trainee Baptist pastor. Jimbo's hip, friendly, and fun to be with. He's smart and theologically savvy. I like him. He loves Jesus and believes the Bible, and on most moral and doctrinal issues I can affirm what he affirms. We agree on a lot. But even when we agree, we don't see eye to eye. Somehow we seem to have reached our religious conclusions from different starting points and through different routes. A chapter in Mark Massa's book Anti-Catholicism in America illuminated the problem for me. Massa quotes an important theological work by David Tracy,...

The Times March 6, 2008 That Martin Luther? He Wasn’t So Bad, Says Pope Richard Owen in Rome Pope Benedict XVI is to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity but only to purge the Church of corrupt practices. Pope Benedict will issue his findings on Luther (1483-1546) in September after discussing him at his annual seminar of 40 fellow theologians — known as the Ratzinger Schülerkreis — at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence. According to Vatican insiders the Pope will argue that Luther, who was excommunicated and condemned for heresy, was not a heretic....

The Future Lies in the Past -- Why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century.Many 20- and 30-something evangelicals are uneasy and alienated in mall-like church environments; high-energy, entertainment-oriented worship; and boomer-era ministry strategies and structures modeled on the business world. Increasingly, they are asking just how these culturally camouflaged churches can help them rise above the values of the consumerist world around them. For younger evangelicals, traditional churches are too centered on words and propositions. And pragmatic churches are compromising authentic Christianity by tailoring their ministries to the marketplace and pop culture....

In a videotape titled "The Pope: The Holy Father," Catholic apologist Scott Hahn claims the proliferation of Protestant denominations proves the Reformers' principle of sola Scriptura is a huge mistake: Do you suppose that Jesus would say, "Well, once I give the Church this infallible scripture, there really is no need anymore for infallible interpretations of scripture. The Church can hold together just with the infallible Bible." Oh, really? In just 500 years, there are literally thousands and thousands of denominations that are becoming ever more numerous continuously because they only go with the Bible. It points to the fact...

Does the seizure of the Labour leadership north and south of the border by Presbyterian progeny signal the revival of religion in British public life? Both Gordon Brown and Wendy Alexander are self-consciously "children of the manse": happy, we are told, to bring their Protestant sensibility to bear upon public policy. Whether it is opposing supercasinos, or rolling back cannabis liberalisation, or calling for a "coalition of conscience" against the atrocities in Darfur, the Presbyterian ethos of "giving witness in life" has returned to the higher echelons of government. But this is eyewash: the Protestant mindset has rarely played less...

In an act of jaw-dropping hubris, Pope Benedict Joseph Ratzinger recently declared Protestantism's churches "not true churches." In an effort to underscore the wisdom of such a position at this time, he then had his "document" signed by none other than Cardinal William Levada, a pro-gay, pro-pedophile, pro-molestation cleric hailing recently from San Francisco and Portland. Apparently hypocrisy is in abundant supply in the Vatican larder. Levada is one of the papal appointments that causes either great puzzlement about (or gives great insight into) this Pope's orientation. Fresh off of scandals in his previous appointments, Levada received one of the...

Pope Benedict XVI declared yesterday that Christian denominations other than his own were not true churches and their holy orders have no value. Protestant leaders immediately responded by saying the claims were offensive and would hurt efforts to promote ecumenism. Roman Catholic- Anglican relations are already strained over the Church of England's plans to ordain homosexuals and women as bishops. The claims came in a document, from a Vatican watchdog which was approved by the Pope. It said the branches of Christianity formed after the split with Rome at the Reformation could not be called churches "in the proper sense"...

My lucubrations for today’s webposting would like to argue just this one single point: Doctrinal clarity is lost when Catholics call Protestant heretics. To be sure, that habit of unthinkingly hurling accusations of heresy at Protestants pretty much died out after the Second Vatican Council, when talk of “separated brethren” became all the rage. But a random spot-check of some Catholic blogsites of a conservative bent–where heresy is often used as the term of choice when these bloggers are in their Colonel Blimp harumphing mood–tells me it’s time for some clarity here. Which prompts the following reflections. First of all,...

Seventeen-year-old Stephanie Sanchez had been impregnated for the third time by Adrian Estrada, her youth pastor, when she was strangled and stabbed, prosecutor Scott Simpson told jurors Tuesday in Estrada's capital murder trial. Estrada had held Bible studies and ministered to Sanchez in his role as youth pastor at El Sendero Assembly of God church, Simpson said in opening statements. And in December 2004, when she was 16 and he was 21, he took her to abort her first pregnancy. By the time she was killed a year later, Simpson said, Estrada was interested in another young girl. "Rather than...

Canada's Christians have been trounced and their venture into the sacrosanct precinct of secular politics has proved a singular failure, brayed the heathen last week, after the House of Commons endorsed gay marriage by a much bigger majority than when it approved of it last year. The heathen in this case was a senior columnist in the super-secularist Globe and Mail, who wrote in undisguised exaltation: "Thoughtful evangelical Christians must [now] ask themselves some hard questions, such as: 'Isn't it about time we admit we've failed? That, both here and in the United States, our efforts to influence the political...

A watchdog committee at Westminster has said the Goverment isn`t tackling the underperformance of Protestant pupils urgently enough. The committee has sent the Department of Education an end of term report. It grades the department on what it has done to lift exam results in loyalist areas. The verdict: could do a lot better. GCSE Maths: Appalling performance; literacy and numeracy: progress manifestly unsatisfactory. In fact the latter criticism applies across Northern Ireland. The Public Accounts Committe reports that one in five pupils leaves school here without being able to read and write properly. But though concerned with the broad...

My great-great-great-grandfather was named Moses. My cousins have names like Sarah, Deborah, Jeremy, Judith, Esther, Raphael, and Samuel.... Yet I do not (as far as I know) have a single drop of Jewish blood in my veins. Neither did I, nor any member of my family, convert to Judaism. But philo-Semitism, which often includes an emotional identification with the Jewish people, is part of the heritage of the community I was raised in: The French Huguenots, or Protestants.... But perhaps the most moving example of Protestant efforts on behalf of French Jewry occurred in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small, all-Protestant town...

The Church of England has broken with tradition dogma by calling for doctors to be allowed to let sick newborn babies die. Christians have long argued that life should preserved at all costs - but a bishop representing the national church has now sparked controversy by arguing that there are occasions when it is compassionate to leave a severely disabled child to die. And the Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, who is the vice chair of the Church of England's Mission and Public Affairs Council, has also argued that the high financial cost of keeping desperately ill babies alive should...

The Church of England believes doctors should be given the right to withhold treatment from some seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances, The Observer reported. The view comes in a submission from the church to a British medical ethics committee looking at the implications of keeping severely premature babies alive through technological advances, the weekly newspaper said. The Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, was said to have written that "it may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing it will possibly, probably, or even certainly result in death". Last week, Britain's Royal College...

Pity the poor values voter. She's all dressed up, but does she have anywhere to go? In 2004, she was the darling of the election. Now she feels like a wallflower, taken for granted by the Republicans and mocked by the Democrats. "Values voter" is, of course, a euphemism for evangelicals and conservative Catholics. It is more politically correct to use the euphemism than to acknowledge that one's religious faith actually influences their decision in the voting booth. After all, one must take care not to run afoul of the radical notion of separation of church and state promoted by...

Some have joked that Presbyterians are "denser" in Pittsburgh than anywhere else. All over Allegheny County, you can find Presbyterian churches within a stone's throw of each other, and despite population losses, Western Pennsylvania continues to have more Presbyterians than any other region of the nation. There's a strong historical reason for that. It is connected to a group of immigrants who were a bedrock of the region's early settlement, but whose role in American history is virtually unknown to many people. They are the Scots-Irish, although it's not a term they originally would have applied to themselves, according to...

When it comes to salaries among some church leaders, the policy seems to be "don't ask, don't tell," even though tithes from parishioners pay those salaries. While Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have no qualms about revealing pastors' salaries, many local Protestant churches do not reveal salaries to nonmembers. Salaries of pastors at Protestant churches tend to be set by overarching religious associations or by a church board or both. The figure is often based on the church's location and parish size. Salaries tend to fall within the lower to upper middle-class range. A general rule among Protestant churches may...

Terry Villaire, 69, has a neatly trimmed black goatee, pudgy expressive hands and penetrating dark eyes that are hard to avoid, even from the back pew.During a recent Mass at Holy Angels Parish in Fort Lauderdale, Villaire seemed more like a party host than a presiding bishop as he circulated, distributing kisses on ready lips and cheeks. Just as effortlessly, he slipped into the solemnity of a centuries-old ritual, singing over a wine chalice and wafers.''Our motto is love without judgment, and that's piqued some curiosity,'' said Villaire, a former Roman Catholic priest who's now a bishop in an independent...

Has anyone noticed the almost complete disappearance of Protestants from our nation? "What!" I can hear my readers exclaim, "Storck has really gone off his rocker this time. Why, just down the street there's an Assembly of God church and two or three Baptist churches and the Methodists and so on. My cousin just left the Catholic Church to become a Protestant and my niece just married one. Moreover, evangelical Protestants have many media outlets of their own and they have great influence in the Bush Administration. They're everywhere." All this, of course, is true. Except that for some...

... In the last decade or so, though, the Chinese government has started a full-out effort to become the world’s leading super-power. Unfortunately for them, though, they don’t have a free-enough social system to support a free market. As Donald Rumsfeld pointed out in a July 19, 2005, interview with radio talk-show host Rusty Humphries, "Now, they [China] have a political system that is not a free political system, so that to me is a contradiction to having a relatively free economic system" [DoD News Transcript]. The reason that the Communist Chinese government is beginning to allow more freedoms is...

New research shows that there are potentially 30,000,000 Christians in China ... Perhaps the seed for future democracy? ... Full story on this week's Nadd.com ...

Reformation Day October 31, 1517 It was a Wednesday. It was a Wednesday, October 31, 1517. It was not really all that much different from the thousands of other Wednesdays that had come before. It was fall, of course, and the air had cooled down and the leaves were putting on a wonderful show of color along the River Elbe on the hillside. It was nice time to be a German. It was a nice time to live in rural Germany. The harvest had been plentiful. That is, it had been as plentiful as the white sand fields surrounding the...

Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited to a closed-door, after-hours smoker. The men there (Pagels was the only woman) were all prominent Bible scholars. Many of them didn't even believe in God, and those who still called themselves Christian were anything but orthodox. The liquor flowed freely, and as these men got in their cups, they began to sing old gospel songs. To her...

The surprising origins of "We Gather Together," a Thanksgiving standard. Its mention of God makes it verboten in schools today. But not too many years ago this was the season when teachers would lead their students in the great ecumenical Thanksgiving hymn, "We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing." It's a singable melody, and the stirring lyrics speak directly of the Pilgrims' experience in overcoming religious persecution.

'Megachurches' draw big U.S. crowds By Joyce Kelly and Michael Conlon CHICAGO (Reuters) - On a recent Sunday at Willow Creek Community Church, a Christian rock band joined by dancing children powered up in the cavernous main hall, their images ablaze on several gigantic screens. Thousands of worshipers from the main floor to the balcony and mezzanine levels were on their feet rocking to a powerful sound system. Outside cars filled a parking lot fit for a shopping mall. Inside some people drifted into small Bible study groups or a bookstore and Internet cafe for lattes, cappuccinos and seats by...

It is not often that I commend the writings of a liberation theologian. And I'm not about to do so now, at least not in totality. But Native American liberationist Vive Deloria's thirtieth anniversary edition of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion has some important insights about the state of mainline Protestantism. Deloria, in the midst of the typical revisionist proposals for Christian theology, offers the idea that Hugh Hefner should be pronounced "Protestant saint of the century." This is because, he suggests, of the ways in which the mainline bureaucracies have embraced "almost every kind of sexual...

Fight Breaks Out At Catholic Festival Fights broke out during the annual Feast of the Assumption pilgrimage in Carey Sunday afternoon at the Our Lady of Consolation Shrine. The religious event is supposed to bring thousands of people together to honor the Virgin Mary, which falls on every Aug. 15. The annual event was interuppted after a group, known as the "Minister of Annoyance," told the numerous Catholics in attendance to not believe in God and disown their faith. It sparked a fight between the group and a few teenagers. Carey police were called and arrested three teens and one...

BELFAST, August (LifeSiteNews.com) – After a concerted effort by Christian and pro-family groups to put a stop to Belfast’s annual “Gay Pride” event, on Thursday the Northern Ireland Parades Commission gave the homosexual group the go-ahead to hold the event. The Northern Ireland Police Service requested that the Parades Commission – originally set up to decide on whether parades held by warring Catholics and Protestants be allowed to proceed – rule on the matter, after receiving complaints about the lewd nature of the parade from concerned Christian groups. A Christian coalition, Stop the Parade Coalition, originally complained that the event...

In Pakistan, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims celebrated Saint Anthony of Padua in Lahore’s Sacred Heart Cathedral on June 14. Some 500 people gathered for the solemn mass and the rejoicing. A solemn mass was also held in the churches of Karachi and Multan.In his homily, Fr Andrew Nasari, vicar general for the diocese of Lahore, spoke about Saint Anthony, calling him the “Saint of the poor”. He also explained why he was venerated by people of different faiths.“Saint Anthony does not only listen to the prayers of Catholics and other Christians but also to those of other religions,” Father...

A Jewish scholar says that over the past half-century, Christian churches have been undergoing a remarkable theological revolution in their attitude towards Judaism and their relationship with the Jewish people. Moshe Auman, who served 35 years in Israel's foreign ministry, devoted the last four years of that time largely to extensive study of Jewish-Christian and Israeli-Christian relations. He feels many of the so-called "mainline" Protestant churches have had trouble coming to grips with the rebirth of the Israeli nation over 50 years ago. By looking closely at the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations, Auman says, one finds that these...

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - At least 1.5 million evangelical Protestants rallied in the heart of this city's financial district Thursday, demonstrating their growing clout in the world's largest Roman Catholic country. Brazil's 13th "March for Jesus" began Thursday morning as hundreds of thousands of faithful from several evangelical sects walked more than 1 mile from the University of Sao Paulo's School of Medicine to skyscraper-lined Avenida Paulista. The number hymn-singing marchers swelled and by the time they reached Avenida Paulista the crowd had grown to 2 million, according to the Reborn in Christ Church that organized the event. Sao...

Orthodox Catholics love to praise the new Pope for putting the "smackdown" on heresy. While most would resist the same tight control on doctrine that Pope Benedict exercises, it's time for Protestants to get serious about rank heresy and fraud perpetuated in the church, as well as the disunity that has sprung up in the body of the Christ. Start With the Basics In taking action against out of control clergy, it's important that it be done in a spirit of love but that resolve be firm and action be decisive. The focus of those concerned with liberal clergy has...

Evangelical Protestants pray that the next pope will be in their biblical corner. First, they pray he will be the defender of babies in the womb. In being that defender, he will forcefully speak out against those who murder infants in females’ bodies. And he will state such forthrightly, in no uncertain terms, just as Pope John Paul II held such convictions. Second, evangelicals pray that the next pope will defend the culture of life by opposing euthanasia. That oft soft-pedaled issue cannot afford to be sidelined by both evangelical Protestants and the Vatican; therefore, it is prayed that the...

NPR.org, April 2, 2005 · "Tip O'Neill was correct," says Father Tom Reese, editor in chief of America, the Catholic weekly magazine. "All politics is local... even in the Catholic Church." Reese suggests that instead of focusing on the possible papal candidates as a bookie would look at horses in the starting gate, try to think about the election from the point of view of the electors, the cardinals who cast the votes. "Each cardinal is thinking, how will this candidate go over in my diocese?" Reese says. "If you're from the Third World, you're concerned with people who are...

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -- The United States has demanded that the IRA disband after the guerrilla group's astonishing offer to shoot the killers of a murdered Northern Ireland Catholic man. "It's time for the IRA to go out of business," U.S. special envoy Mitchell Reiss said Wednesday. For the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein, Northern Ireland's biggest Irish nationalist party, the U.S. demand was yet another blow to its democratic credentials. Reiss told BBC radio: "It's time for Sinn Fein to be able to say explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated. "You can't sign...

Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo, 54, a financial-services...

Roughly half of America dislike everything George Bush says, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t the President of the United States. This is a point too few people keep in mind. Take, for instance, the example of Stas, a very nice Orthodox man, who read my recent piece on concerning the Muslim reporter who implicitly threatened to kill me and nuke America. He thought the piece excellent except for my statement that the Pope was the head of Christianity: “As for the Pope, 1 billion various protestants and 300 million Orthodox don't follow his words and that's half of Christianity.”...

Protestants in north-eastern Turkmenistan have been threatened for holding services and preaching Christianity, Forum 18 News Service has learned.  "The head of the village administration, the police, the National Security Ministry (NSM) secret police and Muslim clergy in the person of the mullah started to put pressure on them," local believers who wished not to be named told Forum 18. As well as threatening to deport the Protestants from their village if they continue to hold services, local officials threatened to cut off gas and electricity supplies to the family home and withhold pensions, a serious threat in impoverished Turkmenistan.

TATARSTAN (ANS) -- The pastor of a small church in the mainly-Muslim republic of Tatarstan reports he was recently visited and threatened by a security official, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has learned. Felix Corley of Forum 18 News Service writes that Rafis Nabiullin, a Tatar pastor of a small Evangelical church in the town of Aznakayevo in the mainly Muslim-populated republic of Tatarstan, the capital of which is Kazan 800 km. (495 miles) east of Moscow, has complained of threats from a local FSB security service officer to halt the church's activity and drive him out of the town. The...

Here is a list of “religious” members of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. The list is from their website. Some may be surprised to see that their “churches” are officially pro-abort “churches.” The list: Conservative Judaism Rabbinical Assembly United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism Women’s League for Conservative Judaism Episcopal Church The Episcopal Church Ethical Culture Movement American Ethical Union National Service Conference of the American Ethical Union Humanist Judaism Society for Humanistic Judaism Presbyterian Church (USA) Presbyterians Affirming Reproductive Options (PARO) Women’s Ministries Washington Office Reconstructionist Movement Jewish Reconstructionist Federation Reform Judaism Central Conference of American Rabbis North American...

The deepest and darkest joke I’ve heard in a long time goes like this. Osama bin Laden prays to the spirit of Yasser Arafat who then appears before him. “Yasser, please help me understand something,” requests Osama. “We’re both fellow terrorists. You’ve even killed more infidels than I have. Yet you get the Nobel Peace Prize, your funeral is attended by heads of state from around the world, and European newspapers compare you to Moses – while I am the world’s most hunted and hated man, reduced to hiding in inaccessible mountain caves. How did you do it? What is...

...There is no doubt that John Kerry showed great skill at embracing deeply contradictory positions, but that does not make him unusual; all politicians have mastered the art of self-contradiction. What was remarkable in this election is that one candidate, President Bush, never changed: He said what he meant and meant what he said. If the Democrats could not appeal to the moral values of people, that fact must have been lost on the 48% of the voters who supported Sen. Kerry.... I am just as mystified by Mr. Friedman's lament that "Christian fundamentalists" are ruining his America by fostering...

The Church celebrates Reformation Sunday on the last Sunday of October, commemorating a significant event in the history of the Reformed tradition. It was on October 31, 1517, that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg... Reformation Sunday

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.The stone room is in a newly-unearthed annex to Luther's house in Wittenberg. Luther is quoted as saying he was "in cloaca", or in the sewer, when he was inspired to argue that salvation is granted because of faith, not deeds. The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat. 'Earthy Christianity'The lavatory was built in the period 1516-17, according to Dr Martin Treu, a theologian and Luther expert based in...

To an outsider George W. Bush's political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated references to God, and to resoluteness of purpose. But to a trained eye and ear these performances have the deliberate balance of a country singer at the Grand Ole Opry. Speaking in a quasi-rural dialect that his critics dismiss as affected, W is telling his core voting groups that he is one of them. No matter that he is the product of many generations of wealth; that his grandfather was a New England...

September 10, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says that the relationship between religious affiliation and political views is more complex than at first appears. Evangelical Christians, Mainline Protestants and white Roman Catholics were polled for their opinions on a variety of political issues for Pew's Fourth National Survey of Religion and Politics. In general the results show what pro-life activists have known by experience. What are referred to as 'religious traditionalists,' those who adhere closely to the official teachings of their religions, are more likely to hold similar beliefs between religious...

PROTESTANTS CLAIM VISIONS, PROPHETIC WORDS RESEMBLING THOSE OF CATHOLICS There are many Christian "denominations" -- by one count 34,000 that have identified themselves as Christian groups -- and often, of course, they're at odds with each other. This is especially true of "fundamentalist" Christians and Catholics. But they share some intriguing aspects. The charismatic branches of both major groups heal in a way that is similar (whereby the person prayed over often falls gently to the floor, known as "resting" or being "slain" in the Spirit); both pray in "tongues"; and many Christians receive alleged prophecy in the way of...

It is a sign of the times: Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists worshipping together in Valley, Neb. As CBS News Correspondent Bob McNamara reports, not enough of them are around any longer to support a church of their own faith. "There's more strength in numbers," says Cindy Matteo, a Methodist. "We can do more as a group. We can reach out to more people." But finding more members could be a long reach. A study by the University of Chicago says the number of Americans who still identify themselves as Protestants is dropping to a historic low. "They're very close to...

Benchmark statistical moments are almost always anticlimactic. When the U.S. population shifted from rural to urban areas in 1920, there was no annunciatory thunderclap. And in about 2060, the year by which census figures suggest that non-Hispanic whites will become less than 50% of the population, the switch will have long been old news. Still, such dates have historical cachet, and 2004 soon may too. The University of Chicago's respected National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has reported that the proportion of adult Americans calling themselves Protestants, a steady 63% for decades, fell suddenly to 52% from 1993 to 2002. Not...