CARACAS – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez asked God to pardon Cardinal Jorge Urosa for lying when he accused the head of state of violating the constitution and wanting to install a Marxist dictatorship.

“The cardinal accuses me from Rome of trampling on the constitution and that we are constructing a Marxist dictatorship. May God pardon him because the cardinal knows he is lying,” Chavez said Thursday during a graduation ceremony at Venezuela’s military academy.

The controversy between Chavez and the archbishop of Caracas heated up recently when the cardinal accused the government of trying to impose a Marxist dictatorship and the president answered back by calling him a “troglodyte” and “unworthy.”

Urosa sent Thursday a note from Rome reaffirming his accusations.

“And he (Urosa) calls himself an ambassador of Jesus Christ. If Christ were to appear physically right now, I have no doubt he would give them a whipping,” Chavez said.

“The true ambassador of Christ is the people, because the people are the voice of God,” the leftist president said.

He also said that Urosa should present his charges in court or before the National Assembly and prove them to be true, because otherwise “he is disrespecting the people and the nation with rash, unfounded accusations.”

Urosa, Chavez said, “lives in the caverns of the past and belongs to the most repulsive element of the far right, which, rather than accept any change that favors the people, drags out the excuse of Marxism-Leninism and of dictatorship in order to keep the people down.”

“We travel the road of God with Christ the redeemer of the people, the road of justice,” the Venezuelan president said.