Hmmm, I don’t think this is unusual at all.
You just have to ask yourself, "why would Tony Bennett perform a duet with Lady Gaga?"
To be told that the stuff in Genesis didn’t really happen?
“Why?”
It sounds like it was mostly to be friendly and show goodwill.
“...It is no secret that the Holy Father has his supporters in radical organizations such as the Council for a Parliament of the World Religions. He is also regularly praised for his extensive experience in interreligious relations in Argentina.
And then there is this strangely underreported connection between Pope Francis and a global organization called the United Religions Initiative (URI)—which, according to their website, “envisions a world at peace, sustained by engaged and interconnected communities committed to respect for diversity, nonviolent resolution of conflict and social, political, economic and environmental justice.”
Pope Francis, while still Cardinal Bergoglio, was reportedly a friend and supporter of the San Francisco-based URI, which has regional offices in 83 countries and seems to have as its ultimate objective the establishment of what conspiracy theorists used to call the One World Religion, whereby Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, Bahá’is, Sikhs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, New Agers, Wiccans, representatives of aboriginal religions, etc., would set aside all doctrinal differences or claims of religious supremacy in order to engender universal peaceful coexistence.
According to an article written by Lee Penn in the December 1998 issue of the New Oxford Review, The United Religions Initiative, A Bridge Back to Gnosticism, the URI hopes to enroll “60 million people in what it describes as ‘a Worldwide Movement to create the United Religions as a lived reality locally and regionally, all over the world.’”
In 2007, URI celebrated its 10th anniversary in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And guess who was there. “Little did we know,” writes an enthusiastic Maria Eugenia Crespo of URI in Argentina that “one of our esteemed participants and friends, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, would be named Pope just five years later! Felicitations, Papa Francis!”...”
“[Cardinal Arinze] “said that a United Religions would give the appearance of syncretism and it would water down our need to evangelize. It would force authentic religions to be on equal footing with spurious religions.”
http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2924