Posted on 11/19/2014 12:20:09 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o
The high five, which left some Catholics I know muttering, he explained in the Huffington Post a few days afterward. At a three-hour meeting at the Vatican, Francis listened to several Evangelical leaders talk about their faith and their passion for evangelism. He then responded with “a dynamic evangelical message.” He “wanted everyone to have a personal life-changing encounter with Christ and enter into a personal relationship with Jesus and become bold witnesses for the Gospel. Religion is not the way; Jesus is.”
Robison, sitting next to the pope, was pleased. “So fervent was his message that as he concluded I said, ‘As an evangelist, I want you to know what you just said deserves a high five!’” The translator apparently had to explain this idiom to the pope and when he understood what his Evangelical friend wanted, Francis raised his hand. In the picture, both men are smiling, though one of them looks as if he hadn’t done this before.
As I say, some Catholic friends muttered and grumbled at what they apparently thought was an unpapal act. It was, I think obviously, an act of kindness and friendship, with Francis adapting himself to someone else’s way of doing things. If Jesus could eat with prostitutes and tax collectors, popes can exchange high fives with American Evangelicals.
James Robison comes from a world very different from mine, and even more different from Francis’. Part of the difference is cultural, but the more important difference is religious. The Catholic and the Southern Baptist understand the Church differently, the Bible differently, the way God forms and transforms us differently. Our churches have a crucifix and a Tabernacle, theirs may have a cross (but probably don’t) and definitely don’t have a Tabernacle. It would be wrong to understate the differences in the spirit of Christian friendship. The Catholic forced to worship in a Baptist church would feel the room empty, the Baptist forced to worship in a Catholic church would feel it filled with idols. Each might, out of charity, treat the other’s church as if it were a version of his own, but that would be only a polite fiction.
And yet. Eating together in Rome, the Catholic pope and the Evangelical pastors listening to each other listened to men who spoke of souls and of Jesus Christ in the same way, who talked in similar ways about someone they knew and served, who shared the desire that others come to know and serve him too.
Sitting round a table with Robison and his peers and two other Catholics, I felt the same thing. They speak a different language than I do as a Catholic. Our Lady and the saints were not presences they felt and friends they would claim. They do not enjoy the sacraments. They do not look to the Magisterium for help in knowing what Christians believe and how they ought to live. They do not, the Catholic would say, have all the gifts of God that bring us happiness.
And yet. Here are men who love Jesus. If Jesus walked into the room, they’d hit their knees as fast, if not faster, than the Catholics with them. If he told them, “You go join their Church,” they’d do it. Perhaps not right away, and not without grumbling, and only after double- and triple-checking, but they would do it.
“The enemy has kept many Christians from loving one another as Christ loves us and have failed to recognize the importance of supernatural unity even with all of the unique diversity,” Robison wrote in the Huffington Post article. “We know it is God's will for those who have been born from above to become bold witnesses for His glory and Kingdom purpose and to go into all the world and make disciples of Christ. We have been commanded to love God with all of our heart and our neighbors as ourselves.”
We can explain the growing friendship of Evangelicals and Catholics as the result of culture: two once-dominant and now increasingly marginalized groups find each other to be allies in their marginalization, while sharing a belief in the moral law much of their society rejects. They find themselves friends, like the lonely kids on the playground who won’t have any friends if they don’t band together or the nerds in the computer club everyone else teases.
That’s certainly a reason. But what Robison calls supernatural unity seems to be a reason as well. In this meeting and others I’ve attended, people sharply divided by the Reformation felt themselves brothers not only because they found themselves huddled together in the cultural doghouse, but because they shared a friendship with the Lord. I suspect Francis saw this in his meeting, that he knew that he and the Evangelicals met, as Robison writes, “in the presence of the Lord.”
Meeting in the presence of the Lord does not erase the real differences. Whether those hosts in the Tabernacle are really Jesus or only pieces of bread remains a serious and divisive question, and a difference that epitomizes all the others. That two men share a close friendship with Jesus does not mean they will agree. One friend may be quite wrong about what Jesus wants. He may not be listening very well.
But Evangelicals and Cathoilcs see more and more that they are friends, not just allies but friends, and that counts for a lot in this world. I would never in a million years high five the pope. But I’m pleased that James Robison felt he could, and in fact that he felt he must.
David Mills, former executive editor of First Things, is a writer and author of Discovering Mary. His webblog can be found at www.patheos.com/blogs/davidmills.
Down to earth...can relate to all people from all walks.
The problem isn't that they "seem" to contradict, they do.
Would you have given St Athanasius the same "advice"?
Translation: Act like a wimp. Keep your head down. Ignore or conceal wrongdoing for fear of "scandal". Pay, pray and obey.
This is the same attitude that led to the clergy pervert cover-up.
What virtue is there in ignoring liturgical abuses such as persons giving homilies who are prohibited by Church law from doing so, or much worse, ignoring spiritual abuses such as a priest preaching homoheresy in his homily or laity who corrupt the CCD programs with false ideologies?
False teaching and corruption must always be opposed. The salvation of souls depends on it.
I think THIS is the issue. If anyone can be saved, then why bother?
The problem isn't that they "seem" to contradict, they do.
This excerpt from Mortalium Animos seems particularly apropos to this thread:
"...For which reason, since charity is based on a complete and sincere faith, the disciples of Christ must be united principally by the bond of one faith. Who then can conceive a Christian Federation, the members of which retain each his own opinions and private judgment, even in matters which concern the object of faith, even though they be repugnant to the opinions of the rest? And in what manner, We ask, can men who follow contrary opinions, belong to one and the same Federation of the faithful? For example, those who affirm, and those who deny that sacred Tradition is a true fount of divine Revelation; those who hold that an ecclesiastical hierarchy, made up of bishops, priests and ministers, has been divinely constituted, and those who assert that it has been brought in little by little in accordance with the conditions of the time; those who adore Christ really present in the Most Holy Eucharist through that marvelous conversion of the bread and wine, which is called transubstantiation, and those who affirm that Christ is present only by faith or by the signification and virtue of the Sacrament; those who in the Eucharist recognize the nature both of a sacrament and of a sacrifice, and those who say that it is nothing more than the memorial or commemoration of the Lord's Supper; those who believe it to be good and useful to invoke by prayer the Saints reigning with Christ, especially Mary the Mother of God, and to venerate their images, and those who urge that such a veneration is not to be made use of, for it is contrary to the honor due to Jesus Christ, "the one mediator of God and men."[19] How so great a variety of opinions can make the way clear to effect the unity of the Church We know not; that unity can only arise from one teaching authority, one law of belief and one faith of Christians. But We do know that from this it is an easy step to the neglect of religion or indifferentism and to modernism, as they call it..."
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19280106_mortalium-animos_en.html
Agree.
You have a very inept translator.
Don't think so. Nor do I see the value in contrasting extreme caricatures to support a conclusion that is clearly based upon the author's personal assumptions rather than reality.
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