[nathanbedford]

'This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability,' he said according to speech notes distributed by the Vatican. The meeting was held behind closed doors.

As the product of a fundamentalist Protestant and an Irish Catholic marriage, I am at a loss to know how to respond to this.

Evidently his Holiness was referring to those Protestant sects which both proselytize intensively in the Third World and are either fundamentalist or Pentecostal:

The pope was referring to fundamentalist Protestant and pentecostalist groups which not only proselytize in non-Christian regions of the world, but have also converted hundreds of thousands of former Catholics in Asia and Africa.

I think that most Protestants recognize a distinction between fundamentalist and Pentecostal and I assume that the Vatican does as well. But these descriptive terms embraced a multitude of sects some of which might fit the description in part or in whole but many, perhaps most, do not.

I am at a loss because the very idea of most Protestants sects is not to build "institutional depth" but, quite the contrary, to break through the institutional barriers between man and God. To the degree that every man is a priest, I suppose one at the peak of the Roman Catholic. would regard the collective faithful of a Protestant faith to be of "little stability." The Protestants might rejoin that is not stability but solvation which they seek and one of the reasons they "protest" against the Catholic Church is because in their eyes its very stability poses a barrier to that goal.

The rationality and "dogmatic" content (I assume this is some sort of problem in translation) of Protestant faith is an observation wide of the mark if one is mindful of Martin Luther's injunction: "Sola Scriptura."

It is not my purpose here to refight the thirty years war, God knows that was a terrible experience for Western civilization and lead to a kind of modus vivendi in which Lutheranism and Catholicism could co-exist. It was one of the most brutal, bloody, and prolonged wars in our history. It was only through exhaustion that an accommodation could be reached. I hope that does not presage our experience with radical Islam.

But it should tell us why the American Bill of Rights starts off with the First Amendment which is a direct product of that European experience.

His Holiness is quite right to defend his faith. I share much of his concerns even though I have chosen the Protestant path. However, his words are impolitic and he should measure them more carefully in the future.

[marshmallow]

You realize that the Pope made his remarks to Lutherans, right? He was not talking about Protestantism in general. He was discussing the subject of Pentecostals and he was contrasting their methods and success with those of "mainstream Christian denominations", to quote the article. This presumably includes not only Catholics but also Lutherans (to whom he was speaking), Anglicans, Episcopals and perhaps others such as Methodists and Presbyterians.

This was not a "Catholics vs Protestants" speech although some apparently would like to spin it as such.

[Cronos]

Again, note that this is addressed to Germans. Which are the religious groups besides Moslems that are most active in Germany — it’s not Baptists or evangelicals in the American sense, rather it is primarily Jehovah’s Witnesses and to some extent Mormons and Adventists.