Quoted:
There are a lot of cool things about the Pope, even if you aren't Catholic.  I mean, how many of us would personally forgive the man who tried to assasinate us?

"The Holy Father was always an inspiration for me to be more active. I knew he had attended an underground seminary in Poland, which encouraged many of us not to be afraid to be active and to work in our own underground, whatever the dangers or hardships. We were also inspired because the Pope was someone who had escaped from the same system that was oppressing us.

"Even a person who has the greatest good will but hasn't lived under that system can't understand its nuances or what we went through. But this Pope did. He knew what kind of things we were being told. The State kept telling us, for example, that only insane people went to prison for resisting the system. But the Pope contradicted that message. He kept telling us that it was good to resist, that those who resisted represented the future of the nation and the Church.

"I remember hearing one sermon he gave on Easter, sometime in the mid-1980s, when I was underground. He said that people who fight and die for their country are not only martyrs but may be holy. We took that to mean that the Pope understood what we were doing, and that we should do whatever it took to free our land. He said it again and again. He made me want to be strong and courageous too, even when I was afraid."

Quoted:
There are a lot of cool things about the Pope, even if you aren't Catholic.  I mean, how many of us would personally forgive the man who tried to assasinate us?

Quoted:
Well Old Painless, I respect your opinion.

What you have here is a man that devouted his life to the Bible and the Church.  He has studied in the best Biblical and Catholic schools.  He has risen thru the Catholic Hiercial system by the votes of his peers.

[i] SO clearly this man knows his stuff when it comes to the Catholic Religion[/i]

People have a tendancy to complain how the Church takes so long in changing things.  Well, the reason for that is because they like to study the whole picture and make sure they are making the right changes.

Catholic Red Tape if you will...........

Sgtar15

Quoted:
Ex 20:3-6
3 "You shall have no other gods before me.

4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand [ generations] of those who love me and keep my commandments.
NIV

Quoted:
It is great to see the Roman Emperor still around after all these years.

The Latin phrase sacrum Romanum imperium actually dates only from 1254, though the term holy empire reaches back to 1157, and the term Roman empire was used from 1034 to denote the lands under the emperor Conrad II. The term Roman emperor is older, dating from Otto II (d. 983). The term Holy Roman emperor is a convention adopted by modern historians; it was never officially used. The prospective heir to the throne was called king of the Romans.

The territory of the empire originally included what is now Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, eastern France, the Low Countries, and parts of northern and central Italy. But its sovereign was usually the German king, and the German lands were always its chief component; after the mid-15th century, it was known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

Originally allied with the papacy, the empire became involved in a long struggle with the popes for the leadership of Christian Europe between the mid-11th and the mid-13th century. Weakened by the effects of this struggle, the empire was further shaken by the 16th-century Reformation, during which a split developed between the Catholic emperor and those German princes who adopted Protestantism. A series of conflicts followed, climaxed by the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany in the period 1618–48. After 1648, the empire was simply a loose collection of semi-independent states under the nominal authority of the emperor. In this period the French writer Voltaire described it as “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”

In spite of their bitter quarrels, the empire and the papacy remained closely associated throughout the Middle Ages, and until the beginning of the 16th century the German king, having been elected emperor by the leading German princes, was then crowned by the pope. Maximilian I. (1459-1519) (reigned 1493–1519) was the first emperor not to be so crowned; his successor, Karl V. (1500-1558), did have a papal coronation in 1530, but the custom was abandoned in the war-torn period that followed, and it was never revived.

Beginning in the early 15th century, the imperial title and the German kingship became virtually hereditary in the Austrian House of Habsburg (Habsburg-Lorraine after 1740), although formal elections were still held. On Aug. 10, 1804, after Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself emperor of the French in a bid to usurp the Holy Roman emperor's traditional primacy among European monarchs, Francis II, last of the imperial line, adopted the title “emperor of Austria.” Two years later, on Aug. 6, 1806, he resigned the old title of Holy Roman emperor altogether.

The German Empire of 1871–1918 was often called the Second Reich (empire) to indicate its descent from the medieval empire; by the same reasoning, Adolf Hitler referred to Nazi Germany as the Third Reich.

Quoted:
There was a Pope Constantine, a Syrian, who was Pope during the reign of Justinian II.

Emporer Constantine, while a great man who made the Roman Empire a Christian Empire, was not the Pope.

These are the list of Popes during Constantine's life:

St. Felix I (269-274)

St. Eutychian (275-283)

St. Caius (283-296) -- also called Gaius

St. Marcellinus (296-304)

St. Marcellus I (308-309)

St. Eusebius (309 or 310)

St. Miltiades (311-14)

St. Sylvester I (314-35)

St. Marcus (336)

St. Julius I (337-52)