From editorial director of books and ideas Bonnie Kristian: When a colleague asked me to write a few lines on the pope’s importance to evangelicals, I realized I wasn’t quite sure what to say. After all, we’re Protestants. We reject not just the authority but the very concept of the papacy.

Sometimes we reject it pretty vehemently. In the evangelical churches of my childhood, many adults had converted out of Catholicism. They’d found Jesus through Baptist altar calls and nondenominational tent revivals, and they wanted nothing to do with “smells and bells” or priests and popes.

But the Catholic-evangelical relationship has changed in recent decades, not least because of our shared commitment to the pro-life cause. Many evangelicals are newly interested in liturgy, creeds, and Catholic thought, as theologian Brad East has written for CT. The late Pope Francis, as CT Latin America editor Franco Iacomini observed in his obituary, “was always willing to take … the risk of friendship with evangelicals.”

And whatever we think about his office, the pope retains a unique and undeniable prominence as a global representative of our faith. There’s no Martin Luther or Billy Graham today, but everyone knows the pope. Even for Protestants, that warrants attention.