In the Endtime Issues newsletter #156, Samuele Bacchiocchi says:

It almost seems that to be a loyal Adventist you must always find something wrong with the Pope.

He is quite right - that is how many Adventists feel and respond to the pope.  Anything Catholic, in fact.

He continues:

I do not share this view.

Sometimes.  Sometimes not.

There are times when I condemn the pope for actively promoting the idolatrous worship of Mary, but there are also times when I commend pope for addressing the socio-political issues of our time in a responsible way.

Since Catholics do not worship Mary, and since the Pope doesn't either, Bacchiocchi is quite out of line condemning him.  It would be like the Pope condemning Adventism for worshipping Ellen White.  [Icon of Ellen White]

And yes, he does, at times, "commend the pope for addressing the socio-political issues of our time in a responsible way" ... but he says that on such issues, Adventists and Catholics should not be united in their work towards that goal.

A good point on the 3 horns and the Ostrogoths that I never noticed before was brought to my attention in a recent e-mail:

Daniel would have been talking about the Jewish year of 360 days.  If we use the day/year principle for 1260 years,  (453,600 days) and divide that by 365.25 (Gregorian calendar) it equals 1242 Gregorian years.

Subtracting 1242 from the year 1798 we arrive at 556 AD.  That would seem to fit your 555 AD of the final defeat of the Ostrogoths.  The persecution may very well have started 1 year later???

A few problems with using this type of year:

• We don't know that Daniel was talking about a 360-day year.  They certainly knew the difference between the 360-day year and the solar year, and he could have been talking about either.
• The Jewish calendar had an extra month every few years in order to keep Passover at the same time every solar year.  The Islamic calendar doesn't have this, so Ramadan, for example, moves earlier and earlier as each solar year passes.  For the Jewish calendar, Passover stays at the same time, synchronised with the solar year.
• Therefore the concept of 1260 years (and the day/year principle in this case is very dubious) is unlikely referring to 1260 years of 360 days, because such a timeline was foreign to the Jews, whose calendar was synchronised with the solar year.

A few problems with the dating of 555 and the Ostrogoths:

• That would make the count of 1260 years inaccurate - the Bible should then have said 1261 years.
• The Ostrogoths were defeated by Justinian, who was neither Roman nor acting under the command of the pope.  (The Heruli were in fact overthrown by the enemies of the papacy.)  So this was not a papal overthrow of the Ostrogoths.
• The defeat of the Ostrogoths was of the same nature as the defeat of the Visigoths - so taking the Ostrogoths as a horn that was uprooted, but excluding the Visigoths, is arbitrary and therefore their defeat is meaningless in the context of Daniel 7.

Many other problems with the 3 horns interpretation can be found here.