{"id":5460,"date":"2005-07-13T23:29:07","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T23:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/chavez-hits-back.html"},"modified":"2005-07-13T23:29:07","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T23:29:07","slug":"chavez-hits-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/chavez-hits-back.html","title":{"rendered":"Chavez hits back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chavez against the bishops<\/a><\/p>\n

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President Hugo Chavez denounced leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela on Wednesday, calling them an elitist group that has wrongly accused him of dividing society along political and class lines. <\/p>\n

Top Catholic Church leaders regularly accuse Chavez, a leftist former paratrooper, of fomenting class hatred and becoming increasingly authoritarian. <\/p>\n

The Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, the nation’s highest church authority, warned this week of increased polarization under Chavez and alleged the government was trying to silence dissidents<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Actually, the most startling thing on the page was the ad (when I looked at it) for a mayoral candidate, endorsed by a smiling priest named "Father Joe." This seemed to violate about twenty different rules, but then I figured out that Father Joe runs a bunch of very successful homeless shelters in the San Diego area, and is obviously well known.<\/a><\/p>\n

But still. I can’t remember ever seeing a priest directly endorse a political candidate before. Have you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chavez against the bishops President Hugo Chavez denounced leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela on Wednesday, calling them an elitist group that has wrongly accused him of dividing society along political and class lines. Top Catholic Church leaders regularly accuse Chavez, a leftist former paratrooper, of fomenting class hatred and becoming increasingly authoritarian.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChavez hits back - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/chavez-hits-back.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chavez hits back - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chavez against the bishops President Hugo Chavez denounced leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela on Wednesday, calling them an elitist group that has wrongly accused him of dividing society along political and class lines. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}