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Pope John Paul II greeted several prominent American evangelicals during his five-day East Coast trip in October. Broadcaster Pat Robertson, Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson, and Don Argue, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, were among the 25 Christian leaders who met with the pontiff October 7 at the residence of Cardinal John O'Connor of New York.

Robertson found the meeting "very warm" and called the 75-year-old leader of the Roman Catholic Church "a humble and caring servant of the Lord." He also pledged, through a hand-delivered, three-page letter to the pontiff, to work for Christian unity between Catholics and evangelicals.

"While there are doctrinal differences that separate us, I strongly believe the moral crisis facing society today and the obvious social breakdown mandates a closer cooperation between people of faith, including evangelicals and Catholics," Robertson told the pope in the letter.

Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and the only woman at the meeting with the pope, also praised the Polish pontiff's call for Christian unity by the year 2000. "I don't sense he's saying, 'My dream of unity has to be my way,' " Campbell says. "The pope talks about unity and diversity being held together. Our task is to say even with our diversity we can respect each other as people who love Jesus."

ROBERTSON MEETING CRITICIZED: But not everyone applauded the choice of guests for the papal get-together.

Some questioned the inclusion of Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, saying it gave unmerited religious recognition to a political figure. Robertson gave up his Southern Baptist ministerial credentials when he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.

And some liberal Catholics were downright incensed that Robertson would be included among the limited number of papal guests. "The invitation is scandalous," read an editorial in the October 6 issue of the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly newspaper.

The editorial's author, senior news editor Tom Roberts, criticized the Catholic church for "climbing into the sack" with the likes of Robertson out of desperation for a political answer to abortion. He singled out as an example the 1994 document "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Church in the Third Millennium," signed by leading conservative Catholics and evangelicals, including Robertson, for its economic and political agenda.

Roberts said, "I think any mainstream Catholic leader would have enormous problems with Pat Robertson's theology—his 'prosperity gospel'; his nervous, frightening end-times speculation; his thinly disguised anti-Semitism, and his exaggerated statements about other mainline Protestants."

Although Roberts praised the idea of dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics, he questioned why the leader of the world's billion Catholics would meet with the controversial religious broadcaster.

"When [Robertson's] political agenda is so at variance with the social teaching of the church, why invite that person in and aid and abet that venture when he's no longer even a religious leader?" Roberts asked. "There are evangelicals and fundamentalists who find it offensive to have Pat Robertson identified as the spokesperson and leader of that segment of American Christianity."

Even historian Nathan Hatch, an evangelical Presbyterian, admitted that "possibly a more thoughtful and centrist sort of figure could have been chosen."

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November 13 1995, Vol. 39, No. 13