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It's through the Oasis meetings that I first heard of the ecumenical community of Taizé in France. There I and hundreds of thousands of young Europeans abandoned ourselves for a week in beautiful, simple, ceaseless worship and Bible study in 1993. That's when, for the first time, I met Christians of other faiths, and realized that, contrary to the common suspicion held by Polish Catholics, evangelicals weren't cult members.

This encounter, in turn, prepared my brain cells for the conversations I would have that year with an American evangelical missionary who popped in our town out of nowhere. Knowing of the pope's ecumenical bent alleviated the suspicions I would normally have had toward a missionary to a country that was 99 percent Catholic.

As we began meeting for conversational English lessons, which were free—under the shrewd condition that we use the Bible as our reading material—I met Christ in an evangelical way, and soon shed my devotion to Mary and the pope, forgetting how much I owed both of them.

But now I return to them. I buck against the stereotypes of evangelicals The New York Times propagates and I'm proud to be an evangelical. Still, I'm not as defensive as I used to be in my early post-conversion stage.

I return to Mary as to a sister whose obedience I wish I had. And I return to the late pope, with a prayer of gratitude. I thank God for his firm pro-life testimony, for his humility in steering the eyes of Poles from his image and toward Christ, for his sense of humor, for the way he gently worked to correct Poland's national sins.

And I thank God for his ecumenism, which gave me permission to explore the religion of Billy Graham—whom the pope, while he was still a cardinal, invited to preach in his pulpit in Krakow, against the annoyance of the Polish Catholic establishment, in a sign of things to come.

Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor of Christianity Today.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49