Pope Francis, pretty much since his election as supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, has also been the de facto supreme pontiff of world religious leaders among the secular media. Other than the 14th Dalai Lama, long serving Tibetan Buddhist, most journalists would likely be hard pressed to name the current Archbishop of Canterbury (Justin Welby), who leads the worldwide Anglican Communion, much less the leaders of any other Christian denomination.
Pope Francis, of course, rocketed into the media stratosphere on July 28, 2013, little more than four months after being elected pope, when returning on his first foreign papal trip from Rio de Janeiro on the Alitalia flight to Rome July 28, at the end of his seven days in Brazil, wandered back to the press compartment in the rear of the plane and took questions from 21 reporters travelling aboard the papal aircraft for 81 minutes with nothing off the record. Francis stood for the entire time, answering in Italian and Spanish without notes and never refusing to take a question. The Pope’s answer to the last question became the worldwide take-away quote: “If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?” While Pope Francis’ answer shot around the world – for the most part without benefit of being prefaced by the question or contextually situated – it didn’t break any new Catholic theological ground or offer up a new heresy. What it did represent was a change in tone.
And if there was any doubt whether that was the start of a new tone and emphasis, Pope Francis answered that less than two months later on Sept. 19, 2013 when the Italian Jesuit journal La CiviltÀ Cattolica published a 12,000-word interview that took place over three days in August at Santa Marta in Rome between the first Jesuit pope, until little more than six months earlier, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Father Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit confrere and the journal’s editor-in-chief.
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis said. “This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.
“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”
While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations. With no disrespect to either side of the now 43-year-old Joint International Commission for Catholic–Pentecostal Dialogue, Pope Francis has probably done more for harmonious and improved relations between the two groups, as he has with Christian evangelicals of various denominations and non-denominational identities, such as with his now famous impromptu iPhone video message for Kenneth Copeland and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Tony Palmer.
A young English bishop with the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a group that broke away from the Anglican Church and considers itself part of the Convergence Movement, founded by Anglicans and other Protestants and embracing a middle ground of Anglican identity, Palmer had known Pope Francis since his days in Buenos Aires where he and then-Archbishop Bergoglio had become friends in 2008 when Palmer was a missionary in Argentina and has asked the future Pope’s permission to work with charismatic Catholics in the city. Prior to becoming a Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches bishop, Palmer, married to Emiliana Serzio Palmer, an Italian Roman Catholic, was the director of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries’ office in South Africa. Palmer also served as the director of The Ark Community, an international interdenominational convergent church online community.
During their extended breakfast the Pope asked Palmer what he could do to encourage unity with evangelical Protestants and Palmer pulled out his iPhone and said, “Why not record a video greeting to the group of influential charismatic Christians I am going to meet at a conference in Texas next week?” Palmer was en route to a charismatic conference hosted by Copeland, the well-known American television evangelist who heads up Kenneth Copeland Ministries, at his Eagle Mountain International Church, near Fort Worth. With Palmer holding the iPhone, Pope Francis refers to him as “my brother, a bishop-brother,” saying they had been friends for years.
In that video, which was released publicly in February 2014, Pope Francis says to the evangelicals gathered at the Copeland conference, “Let’s give each other a spiritual hug.”
In introducing the Pope’s video at the Copeland meeting, Palmer pointedly remarked: “Brothers and sisters, Luther’s protest is over. Is yours?”
Pope Francis wound up meeting privately again on June 24, 2014 – a year ago today – with Palmer, and also this time with Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting also lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.
The Pope told the evangelicals he believed the division in Christianity was not now between Catholics and Protestants but between those Christians who believe in a revealed religion and those who believe in a relative religion. “The real divide is between progressives who wish to alter the historic faith according to the spirit of the age, and those who believe the spirit of the age should be challenged by the eternal and unchanging truth of the Christian gospel.”
James Robison was baptized as a child in the Episcopal (Anglican) Church but as an adult became a Southern Baptist and in the 1980s was one of the first prominent Southern Baptist ministers to openly proclaim he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
He told the Fort Worth Star Telegram after the meeting last June with Pope Francis, “This meeting was a miracle … This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”
Tragically, Palmer, 48, died less than a month later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.
About a week later, Pope Francis made a private visit to the Pentecostal Church of Reconciliation, still under construction in Caserta in southern Italy to meet with Giovanni Traettino, its pastor, and 200 people, including members of Traettino’s congregation, other Italian evangelicals and representatives of Pentecostal ministries in Argentina and the United States.
The pope and Traettino first met in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s when Traettino was establishing ties between charismatic Catholics and Pentecostals. The then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Traettino also appeared together at a large ecumenical charismatic gathering in Buenos Aires in 2006. Traettino was present on June 1, 2014 in Rome’s Olympic Stadium when Pope Francis spoke to an international gathering of Catholic charismatics.
At the meeting with Traettino at the Pentecostal Church of Reconciliation, Pope Francis apologized for the the complicity of some Catholics in the fascist-era persecution of Italian Pentecostals and evangelicals.
“Among those who persecuted and denounced the Pentecostals, almost as if they were crazies who would ruin the race, there were some Catholics. As the pastor of the Catholics, I ask forgiveness for those Catholic brothers and sisters who did not understand and were tempted by the devil.”
Pope Francis made a similar apology two days ago on Monday of this week to the small Italian Waldensian evangelical community, seeking forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s persecution of members of the community whose leader was excommunicated and his followers branded as heretics during the Middle Ages.
Pope Francis made the appeal June 22 during the first-ever visit by a pope to a Waldensian house of worship.
The Waldensian church was founded in the 12th century by Pierre Valdo, a wealthy merchant from Lyon in France, who gave up his belongings to preach a Gospel of simplicity and poverty that condemned papal excesses. He was excommunicated and his followers persecuted as heretics by Rome.
The Waldensians today are united with the Methodist Church of Italy and claim 45,000 followers, mostly in Italy, Argentina and Uruguay.
“On the part of the Catholic Church,” said Pope Francis, “I ask your forgiveness, I ask it for the non-Christian and even inhuman attitudes and behavior that we have showed you. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us!”
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