This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
With the death of Pope Francis this week, my thoughts went in many directions, but one of them was the memory of my humiliation at the front door of his house.
Invited by the pope to speak at the Vatican on an evangelical view of marriage and fidelity, I arrived in Rome jetlagged and exhausted, having just finished teaching at a Southern Baptist seminary on Martin Luther’s view of conscience.
Going through security at the Vatican, I handed the Swiss Guard what I thought was my passport, pulling it absentmindedly out of my pocket, from the same suit I had worn back home. After a moment or two of his puzzled expression, I realized that I had given him a pocket-sized copy of Luther’s 95 Theses.
An archbishop there with me said, “Just don’t nail it to the door and you should be fine.”
As I wrote shortly afterward for the National Review:
I wondered which of my grandparents would be more ashamed of me: my Roman Catholic grandmother, for my ushering the tumult of the 16th century right there to the pope’s door; my Baptist-preacher grandfather, for entering the Vatican at all; or all of my grandparents together—evangelicals and Catholics alike—for my violation of Southern manners.
The pope, of course, never knew about the awkwardness of my entrance—and my Catholic friends in line with me, far from offended, joked with me about it for years. But even if the pope had known about it, he probably would have waved it off. Martin Luther is not as dangerous as he used to be, and one might wonder whether that’s a good development or a bad one.
Perhaps one of the reasons for better relations between Catholics and evangelicals is that both have changed for the better.
Apart from the writings of “integralists,” mostly in ivory towers, the Catholic church has revised its previously authoritarian views of human rights, religious freedom, and the relationship between church and state, as well as its conclusions about the eternal destiny of “separated brethren.”
Evangelicals—for the most part—no longer think of the pope as the “antichrist” or of the Roman church as the “whore of Babylon” from the Book of Revelation.
But better relations might be a sign of something else—of the ways a secularized Western culture has affected all of us, to the degree that we no longer feel the existential weight of the arguments that once led to reformations and counter-reformations, inquisitions and uprisings.
Those are not minor matters, after all. The books of Romans and Galatians are all about what it means to say that God justifies the ungodly—what could be more important? And if the Roman church is right that Jesus’ promise to build the church “upon this rock” (Matt. 16:18) is about a Petrine office continuing from then until now, then what follower of Jesus could ignore that?
Probably some degree of both factors are at work. But probably, also, both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants have, over the centuries, learned to take their doctrines more seriously, not less.
A Roman Catholic who believes that the Eucharist is the real presence of Christ would find that beautiful enough to attest to itself—with no thought of torturing a detractor or withholding the Bible from the laity.
An evangelical Protestant might believe in justification by faith alone—in the right sense of “alone”—strongly enough to believe that one is justified by faith in Christ, not by one’s doctrinal formulation of justification by faith.
For Catholics, Pope Francis was (and is) a kind of Rorschach test of where one thought the church should go in this century after Vatican II, after the world-shaping influence of Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis was, after all, a polarizing figure precisely in the ways he didn’t polarize.
He wanted divorced and remarried Catholics to have access to the Eucharist. He supported gay civil unions and the baptism of transgender people. He expressed his hope that hell was empty. He actively opposed the Latin Mass movement and emphasized the long-standing Catholic social teaching on the treatment of migrants and refugees and on the protection of the environment.
But Francis was no “progressive” in the ways that word is typically defined. Even as he wanted to expand roles for women in the church, he opposed women’s ordination. Despite his “Who am I to judge?” rhetoric on sexuality, he believed and taught the historic Christian sexual ethic restricting sexual union to the married, and he defined marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman.
He was pro-life on abortion (as well as on the death penalty and euthanasia and surrogacy), speaking out about the evil of seeing human beings as “disposable.” He opposed what he called “gender ideology”—warning that “canceling” difference when it comes to the creation categories of male and female would ultimately mean canceling humanity.
It was hard, then, for the world or the church to fit Francis into an ideological niche of traditionalist versus progressive, much less into American red versus blue. In the end, that leaves any observer of Francis to make a choice—either to shoehorn him into one tribe or another, and thus to valorize or villainize him, or to see him not as a set of ideas but as a man.
And in that sense, who cannot admire the simplicity and humility of this man, especially at this moment?
The pope exasperated me theologically when he told a little boy that his atheist father would be in heaven because he had been a “good father.” But at the same time, I teared up with admiration to see him hug that little boy—grieving the loss of his dad and fearing what must seem like an eternal orphanhood.
I would differ from the pope on some of the ways he would talk about the implications of “accompaniment” (though as a Protestant, I would have to say, “Who am I to judge?”) and the boundaries of the Lord’s Table. But can we not all affirm that seeing the church as a field hospital is no doubt rooted in Jesus, who told us, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Luke 5:31, ESV throughout)?
One can acknowledge that some of Pope Francis’ statements on matters of sexual morality could be confusing at times while still seeing that he recognized what far too many of us ignore—the double standard of people who call out sinners in the flesh while ignoring those with more “angelicity,” as he put it, who “dress themselves in another guise: pride, hatred, falsehood, fraud, abuse of power.”
The specific applications of his impulse need not be replicated by evangelicals or other Christians for us to see that the impulse itself—toward mercy and grace—is one we ignore at the peril of our own witness.
Pope Francis made mistakes. So did his namesake, Francis of Assisi, and so did the apostle Peter, whose legacy he sought to fill. So did every human being except one (and let’s not get into a debate about Mary right now). So will you, and so do I.
As we look back on the life Pope Francis, though, can we not hope that when we do err, by God’s grace, we might do so while aspiring to mercy rather than to vengeance?
Even those of us without a pope, even those of us with our pockets full of protestations, can agree to that.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
