Pope: If you aren't Catholic, you aren't Christian.

Mark Klein points to Pope Benedict's restatement that the only Christian Church is the Roman Catholic Church. Times Online tells about the new 16 page statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as “not proper Churches” in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope. [Snip]

The document said that the Orthodox church suffered from a “wound” because it did not recognise the primacy of the Pope. The wound was “still more profound” in Protestant denominations, it added.

It was “difficult to see how the title of ‘Church’ could possibly be attributed to them”, said the statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Roman Catholicism was “the one true Church of Christ”.

This position of the Pope is nothing more than a political power grab within Christianity. It is going to be a major roadblock to any further ecumenical discussions with the Protestant and Orthodox Churches. They will be dead until this statement is withdrawn. (No real loss, in my opinion.)

The document may have interesting political effects in the U.S. though. Does the old question, answered by John F. Kennedy, get resurrected against Rudy Giuliani? That question was "If you are President and decide to do something appropriate for America and the Pope tells you not to, is your position as President of America more important than your Catholic Religion? Of course, with Rudy's two divorces, three marriages, and his children not speaking to him, that may be a moot point. The discussion in Rudy's case may be whether he is religious at all. That will be an equally bad political problem for him, and with the same set of voters. He's damned either way.

The other question is whether Evangelical Protestant social conservative Churches will continue to ally themselves with the Catholics politically, particularly on things like abortion and stem-cell legislation?

Pope Benedict is clearly looking at his position world-wide, and probably has a pretty solid disdain for all things American anyway [*]. So the political ramifications of this Papal position will be played out here, and probably not given a lot of consideration in Rome.

It is going to change politics here in the U.S. to some extent. How much is the really interesting part.

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[*] As an Episcopalian (that's the American branch of the Anglican Church) I have always laughed that the real difference between the high church Episcopalians and the American Roman Catholic church is that the Episcopalians have always admitted freely and publicly that we do not obey Papal decrees, while the American Roman Catholic church members simply do not obey papal decrees, but fail to admit in public that they don't.