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.”
But Robertson most likely was invited “as a recognition of the prominence of that sector of American society—both religious and political,” says Hatch, vice president of graduate studies at the flagship institution of higher learning for American Catholics, the University of Notre Dame.
Still, Hatch praised the idea of dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals. “There are real differences, and they will remain,” Hatch says. “But in a world that is quite secular, it’s amazing how much agreement there can be among people who can agree on basic Christian convictions.”
Hatch disagreed that opposition to abortion is all that unites evangelicals and Catholics. “In one sense, that’s a minor issue compared to issues such as the nature of the person and society, and larger fundamental questions about the meaning of things,” Hatch says.
RESPECTING LIFE: The sanctity of human life was the thread woven through nearly all of Pope John Paul II’s speeches during what many believe may be his last visit to the United States.
He told a group of seminarians in Yonkers, New York, “You need courage to follow Christ, especially when you recognize that so much of our dominant culture is a culture of flight from God, a culture which displays a not-so-hidden contempt for human life, beginning with the lives of the unborn, and extending to contempt for the frail and the elderly.”
His parting words were a plea for Americans to “love life, cherish life, defend life, from conception to natural death.”
“Democracy serves what is true and right when it safeguards the dignity of every human person, when it respects inviolable and inalienable human rights, when it makes the common good the end and criterion regulating all public and social life,” the pope said in his farewell address in Baltimore.
His earlier address to the United Nations challenged people to look to the future with hope, not fear.
“He is certainly the most compelling leader on the world stage at the end of the twentieth century,” says Richard John Neuhaus, president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and educational organization in New York.
Neuhaus cited the newly released Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first compendium of Catholic teaching since 1566, as one of this pope’s greatest accomplishments. John Paul II’s ecumenical initiatives also will go down in the history books, Neuhaus says.
Although opinion polls show that a minority of Americans agree with many of the pope’s teachings, particularly on women’s issues and sexuality, they still maintain reverence and respect for him. Wherever the pope went, he was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, including more than 350,000 in Baltimore.
“People love him because at least he reminds them of what it is they’re supposed to believe,” Neuhaus says. “In a world of great confusion, it’s a treasure to have such an estimable point of reference.”
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