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Hugo Chávez has been written into the Lord’s Prayer by Venezuela’s Socialist party.
Photograph: Boris Vergara/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Socialist party congress directs prayer to ‘Our Chávez who art in heaven’, drawing church retort that text is ‘untouchable’

Reuters in Caracas
Thursday 4 September 2014

Venezuela’s Roman Catholic church has admonished the ruling Socialist party for rewriting the Lord’s Prayer into an ode to its beloved late leader Hugo Chávez.

“The Lord’s Prayer, the typical prayer for Christians around the world, comes from the very lips of our Lord Jesus Christ … and is therefore untouchable,” the local Catholic church said in a statement.

A party member introduced the prayer on the podium of the party congress on Monday, imploring Chávez for protection from the evils of capitalism.

“Our Chávez who art in heaven, the earth, the sea and in us delegates,” red-shirted delegate María Estrella Uribe read in front of a vast image of the former president.

“Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism, deliver us from the evil of the oligarchy, like the crime of contraband, because ours is the homeland, the peace and life – forever and ever. Amen. Viva Chávez!” she exclaimed to applause.

The prayer symbolises the spiritual connection “Chávistas” feel with the former soldier who governed Venezuela for 14 years before dying of cancer in March 2013.

The opposition condemned such adulation as a dangerous personality cult and the church expressed its disapproval.

“Just as no one would be allowed to change the words of the national anthem to honour a person, so too is it illicit to change the Lord’s Prayer,” the church communique went on to say.

“He who recites this new and wrongful version of the Lord’s Prayer is committing the sin of idolatry.”

The current president, Nicolás Maduro, who calls himself Chávez’s spiritual son, said on Thursday evening that the church was seeking to undermine the late leader. “They couldn’t get rid of Chávez while he was alive so now they want to persecute the people’s spiritual love for him,” said Maduro, who calls himself Catholic but also draws inspiration from the late Indian spiritual guru Sai Baba.

“A new inquisition has emerged to massacre this humble woman,” he said in reference to the Chávista delegate.

Venezuela is a mainly Roman Catholic country, although many fuse their Christian beliefs with other forms of spirituality including the practice of Afro-Caribbean “Santeria”. Chávez himself embodied this mixture, invoking everyone from Jesus to Karl Marx in his speeches.

He often had tense relations with the church, especially after it tacitly backed a two-day coup against him in 2002.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU27t4s9lkk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU27t4s9lkk)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/05/lords-prayer-to-hugo-chavez-angers-catholic-church-in-venezuela (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/05/lords-prayer-to-hugo-chavez-angers-catholic-church-in-venezuela)