Pope Francis Meets Evangelical Delegation

Two prominent Fort Worth-based Christian ministers led a delegation of Evangelical Christian leaders to Rome to meet privately with Pope Francis.

James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, and Kenneth Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, met the Roman Pontiff at the Vatican on Tuesday. The meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

Mr. Robison told the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “This meeting was a miracle…. This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”

Mr. Robison said he was impressed by Pope Francis’ humility and courtesy to the visiting delegation of Evangelical Protestant Christian leaders.

In a written statement, Mr. Robison said he believes “the prayers of earnest Christians helped lead to the choice of Pope Francis.” He described Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine Archbishop chosen as Pope, as “a humble man…filled with such love for the poor, downtrodden…”

In addition to Mrs. Betty Robison, the high-profile Protestant delegation included Kenneth Copeland, co-founder of Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Newark, TX; Reverend Geoff Tunnicliff, CEO of the World Evangelical Alliance; Rev. Brian Stiller and Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance; and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto, Canada. Gloria Copeland did not travel to Rome because of a previously scheduled commitment.

The ecumenical meeting in Rome was organized by Episcopal Bishop Tony Palmer. Rev. Palmer is an ordained bishop in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a break-away alliance of charismatic Anglican-Episcopal churches. Bishop Palmer is also the Director of The Ark Community, an international interdenominational Convergent Church online community, and is a member of the Roman Catholic Ecumenical Delegation for Christian Unity and Reconciliation.

Bishop Palmer developed a friendship with Pope Francis when the future Roman Pontiff was a Catholic official in Argentina. Prior to becoming a CEEC bishop, Rev. Palmer was the director of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries’ office in South Africa. He is married to an Italian Roman Catholic woman. He later moved to Italy and began working to reconcile Roman Catholics and Protestants. Kenneth Copeland Ministries was one of Mr. Palmer’s first financial contributors over 10 years ago in support of his ecumenical work in Italy.

Earlier this year, Pope Francis called Bishop Palmer to invite him to his residence in Vatican City. During the meeting, Bishop Palmer suggested that the Pope record a personal greeting on Mr. Palmer’s iPhone to be delivered to Kenneth Copeland. Mr. Copeland showed the Papal video greeting to a conference of Protestant ministers who were meeting at Mr. Copeland’s Eagle Mountain International Church near Fort Worth, TX. In the video, Pope Francis expressed his desire for Christian unity with Protestants.

Later, James Robison telecasted the video on his daily TV program, Life Today. “The pope, in the video, expressed a desire for Protestants and Catholics to become what Jesus prayed for — that Christians would become family and not be divided,” Mr. Robison said the response to the video was very positive, and that Pope Francis asked Bishop Palmer whether a meeting could be arranged with Evangelical Protestants seeking Christian unity in the world.

In his written statement released after the Papal meeting, Mr. Robison said he was “blessed to be part of perhaps an unprecedented moment between evangelicals and the Catholic Pope.” He described the Protestant delegation’s private meeting with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church as “an intimate circle of prayerful discussion and lunch to discuss not only seeing Jesus’ prayer answered, but that every believer would become a bold, joy-filled witnesses for Christ.

In describing the ecumenical gathering as a miracle, Mr. Robison said, “This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”

During the luncheon on Tuesday, Mr. Robison got a high-five from Pope Francis after the Pope and Protestant guests talked about the need for all people to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. According to the Life Today host, the Roman Pontiff did not know what a high-five was until Bishop Palmer explained it to him in Italian. Mr. Robison said, “The Pope made it very clear that he wanted every believer to become Spirit-filled, joy-filled witnesses.”

Mr. Robison said Pope Francis had written recently, “Too many Catholics look like they’ve been to Lent with no Easter. It’s a mistake for them to look like they’ve been to a funeral” as he challenged Catholics to witness and never try to control the Holy Spirit, but yield to Him.

Mr. Robison said he received a divine call from God to seek Christian unity while he was hospitalized several years ago with a serious staph infection following hip surgery. Robison recalled, “[I] was so weak I could not lift a cup of water to my lips…God got my full attention…He spoke to me through Isaiah 58:6-12 and I saw the importance of living in freedom, touching the suffering, the hungry, poor, and downtrodden. I recognized the promise that our prayers would be answered quickly and we would become a free-flowing stream and a well-watered garden, restoring the foundations upon which we must build. During that time God instructed me to focus my attention on Jesus’ prayer and encouraging others to begin fulfilling it through us in our day.”

During that time, he said, he was impressed by a prayer of Jesus in John 17:21, pleading that all Christian believers be one. “We’ve tried to focus on being an answer to Jesus’ prayer,” Robison said. “We want to see Jesus’ prayer for unity answered in our day.”

Aware that the meeting with the Pope will be troublesome among staunch Protestants, Mr. Robison said he and the other visiting Evangelical Christian leaders talked about diversity and their belief that Roman Catholics and Protestants could work together without compromising their beliefs.

“The world is suffering,” said Robison. “We as Christians have too much love to share without fighting one another.”

Mr. Robison said he and other “respected Evangelical leaders and Spirit-filled Catholics began meeting together to pray for God’s will to be done and to bring true believers together in supernatural unity….We have been commanded to love God with all of our heart and our neighbors as ourselves. 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.”

Mr. Robison, whose ministry digs water wells and supplies food for impoverished people in third-world nations, recounted that he was christened as a fatherless boy in an Episcopal Church. As an adult, he joined the Southern Baptist Church. In the 1980s, he became one of the first prominent Southern Baptist ministers to openly proclaim he had received the baptism o

DungeonMaster:

Because the way you understand those things is not the way Catholic Theology understands those things. Icons and images are not worshiped they are venerated and honored. The question regarding the incons/images, sacred art, etc was one dealt with in the 2nd Council of Nicea in 787. Rejection of Icons/images is taken to be an attack on the Incarnation.

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum07.htm

The Catholic Church does not give the Pope one of God’s names. Calling Pope Holy Father is not calling him God. The Pope is not Holy on his own power, it is a sign of respect sense he has been called or dedicated to serve God in a special way. In fact, Saint Peter in his Letter [1 Pet 1:14-15] writes “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be {holy} yourselves in all your conduct since it is written “You shall be holy for I am holy” [Saint Peter again citing OT scripture here from Lev 11:44; Lev 19:2; Lev 20:7]. Saint Paul demonstrates a similar theology as Saint Peter with respect to the use of “holy” when he writes “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, {holy} and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be {transformed} by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” [Romans 12:1-2]

In the Nicene Creed, it speaks of the Church as “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic”, again not Holy because of its members, but because Christ is the head of it which is His Body and he is fully present in her.

As for Mary as “Queen of Heaven”, it is prefigured in the OT as shown in the 2 cites below, one of them Eastern Orthodox, not Catholic. In the OT, the Mother of the King was anointed Queen, not the wife. Jesus thus as the true eternal King, and Mary as Queen of Heaven fits this OT typology perfectly.

http://theorthodoxfaith.com/mary-as-the-queen-of-heaven/

http://www.catholic-convert.com/blog/2012/08/21/mary-queen-of-heaven/

metmom:

That doesn’t change the fact that there were countless Catholic Scientist, many of them Priest. The Father of modern Genetics, Mendel was a Catholic Priest, the father of the Bing Bang theory, Lamatrie was a priest. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan priest.

You only know what polemist, primarily, secular ones, say about Galielo. He got in trouble by going beyond accepted science. In fact, most of the Jesuits, who had telescopes as well and were viewing the same things he was agreed that his theory was “likely correct”. Galielo went beyond science and what got him into trouble was getting into Theology and personal attacks on the Pope.

The issue of Galileo is one that both fundamentalist protestatns [which you seem to be] and agnostic empiricist both use to attack the Church. The reality is that neither ever gets their facts straight. Galileo was promoting the Copernican Theory, which was published before his time and the historical evidence indicates that the two leading astronomers of Galileo’s time were split on the question of the Copernican Theory as Kepler accepted it and Brahe did not (Carroll, History of Christendom Volume 4 “The Cleaving of Christendon” p. 492).

In 1610 Galileo made observations which he claimed supported the Copernican Theory, which he argued was proved by the oceans tides [which was false] as it was Bessel in 1838 who found the evidence that proved the Copernican theory.

The Vatican had long been in favor of Scientific Discovery as evidenced by the Catholic Papal Universities in Rome which supported astronomical research in the 16th century and of course the work of the great Jesuit Mathematician, Father Clavius whose work helped formulate the “Gregorian Calendar.” It was Fr. Clavius and the other Jesuits who made the same observations as Galileo and felt that his discoveries were true, ie. that the Copernican theory was probably true, although the evidence was not there yet to fully support it. So again, the notion that the Catholic Church was “anti Science” is nonsense as at the same time of Galileo, the Pope’s had set up observatories in Rome, staffed by the Jesuits, many of whom were also leading scientist.

As Carroll notes again on page 492 in Volume 4 of his work “The Cleaving of Christendom,” some of the Priests of the Dominican order began stating that mathematicians and supporters of the Copernican theory are nothing short of fomenters of heresy. For the record, the Jesuits and Dominicans were at odds against each other [actually accused each other of heresy, the Jesuits accusing the Dominicans of Calvinism, the Dominicans accusing the Jesuits of Pelagianism] and eventually it was Pope Clement VIII who called a commission to settle the dispute, which he resolved by stating that both sides need to “chill in essence” and both can hold their theological systems as being complimentary to the Catholic Church’s understanding of Grace, Divine Providence and human free will, etc. As Carroll notes (p.492), the Dominican Priest Caccini argued that the passage where Joshua commanded the sun to stand still is incompatible with the Copernican theory.
As Carroll states (pp. 492-493), the critics of the Copernican theory were unprepared to recognize that a universe generally governed by physical laws could still accommodate miracles due to the direct action of God. The sun standing still at Joshua’s command was not an action that could be explained by natural laws, but it did not need to be explained by those laws; the miracle could not be seen as disproving the Copernican theory and Scientific Laws since God can override His laws when it suits His purpose.

In addition, the Dominican Caccini accused Galileo of making “scriptural interpretations.” In response, the future Pope Urban VIII [then Cardinal Barberini] told Galileo that he should not extent his arguments beyond the scientific theories of both Ptolemy and Copernicus and when discussing those theories stay within the limits of both Mathematics and physics. As Pope Urban further noted, the interpretation of scripture is ultimately for the Theologians and the Church.

In a similar fashion, Cardinal Bellarmine stated that the Copernican theory may be true, but was not yet conclusively proved and should not be applied to the interpretation of Sacred Scripture until it was definitively proved (Carroll, p. 493 in Volume 4 of his work) Galileo it seems went beyond the limits suggested by both Cardinal Barberini and Bellarmine and he preached the Copernican theory as Truth [which again, was not fully proved until the 19th century]. The critics of Christianity [Renaissance had started] used this debate to mock Christianity.

In the end, regardless of where the earth is in the center of the Universe, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe that the earth and all creation has been redeemed via the Incarnation of Christ, i.e. the Word became Flesh (cf. John 1:14) for “many deceivers have gone into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh; such is the deceitful one and the antichrist” (cf. 2 John: 7).

Now, back to Galileo, it is true that Pope Paul V asked for a formal decision about the “Copernican Theory” via the Roman Inquisition. However, Cardinal Bellarmine told the Pope that he should not make any statement on this question [again, remember that Cardinal Bellarmine had publicly stated that he though the Copernican theory was probably true]. So what we have is a group of 11 Theologians making a statement about the Copernican Theory [which is a scientific theory, not a theological one] and none of these 11 Theologians was according to Carroll (p. 493) a natural philosopher or mathematician [Perhaps the Pope should have put some of the Jesuits on the panel]. The Eleven member panel of Theologians stated that the Copernican Theory was “false, absurd and heretical”. However, the Roman Inquisition in its formal decree rejected the word “heretical” and took it out and further more, the Pope made no pronouncement. Still, as Carroll again notes, the statement that the Copernican Theory was “false and absurd” was one of the most grievous mistakes in the History of the Catholic Church for the Church was not empowered by Christ to make formal statements about Science. St. Augustine, who lived from 360 AD to 430 AD made that same statement during his time.

So Pope Paul V instructed Cardinal Bellarmine to tell Galileo that he could not teach the Copernican Theory as definitively true, which meant he could teach it as a valid Theory. Carroll then points out (pp. 494-495) that an unsigned document was inserted into Galileo’s file which forbade him from teaching the Copernican System as a Theory. When the controversy arose again in 1632, Galileo testified that he never remembers this document being in the File and Cardinal Bellarmine had gone on record as to what the decree he gave Galileo entailed. Most scholars now conclude that this “unsigned Document” was false and most probably was inserted by a Dominican member of the Inquisition who objected to Galileo, the Copernican System and perhaps the Jesuits who tended to support him.

As Carroll again notes, Galileo was a good Catholic and consented to the decrees of Pope Paul V sent via Cardinal Bellarmine. Nevertheless, the statement the “Copernican system as a scientific theory was false and absurd” was not a smart move, even though the word heretical was correctly taken out of the statement.

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By Rick Wiles | June 27, 2014

Also well known is the Catholic teaching that no one can be saved outside the Catholic Church.