What would happen if John Hagee backed Catholics instead of Israel?
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2938
by John http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2774
Sen. John McCain is facing questions about his close ties to Rev. John http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=54, the Vatican has indicated no desire to annex these territories, which observers doubt it could govern. Such obstacles do not daunt Hagee, or his hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic supporters in Evangelical mega-churches across America, who insist that a combination of “divine assistance” and significant military support by the United States will ensure victory. America must aid in the expansion of Vatican territory, Hagee insists “because almighty GOD will bless those who bless His priestly people, and curse those who curse them.” In a controversial 2006 TV sermon, Protestant Ultramontanist Rev. Pat Robertson cited the unexpected death of Pope Pius XI in 1939 as “divine punishment” for Pius’ acceptance of the Lateran Treaty in 1929, which traded “land for peace,” and renounced papal claims on territory then inhabited by Italians. Said Robertson, “I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, ‘divide my land.’”
What motivates this movement? A particular form of Dispensationalist Protestantism that holds to a rigid set of timetables and preconditions for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. “There must be wars and rumors of wars,” insisted Hagee, “and the return of the Holy See to its Promised Land—we’re talking from Ferrara down to Velletri, the whole kit and caboodle,” Hagee told this reporter in an interview at a Waffle House in Texarkana, where the preacher stopped en route to a well-attended conference in Waco, Texas sponsored by the Protestant Ultramontanist youth group that calls itself “Teens for the Tribulation.”
Offering me one of the youth groups’ signature t-shirts, which read “Apocalypse—NOW!”, Hagee allowed his Grilled Texas Bacon Chicken Melt Plate to cool as he laid out his aspirations for the first 100 days of a McCain administration: “First, the restoration of the Kingdom, then the rise of the Antichrist. The Beast must ascend the throne of the Most High and be worshiped in the place of Christ. Then shall come the Great Apostasy, and the Chastening, and the Conversion of the Remnant, the Rapture, and the Coming of the Lord.”
Here Hagee referred to the Protestant Ultramontanist belief that after the reestablishment of the Papal States, they will come to be dominated by the “Antichrist,” who will seduce the vast bulk of Roman Catholics into a satanic cult. A saving Remnant, however, of the Catholics will convert en masse to Protestantism—after which they and the rest of the world’s faithful Christians will be “taken up into the air,” or “raptured,” to spare them the ravages promised in the book of the Apocalypse, which will doom at least one-third of the earth’s population (official estimates vary), and end only with the Second Coming of Christ.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/mccain_and_the_protestant_ultramontanists