WASHINGTON (ABP) — The dynamic bishop from Krakow who became one of the 20th century's most towering figures departed earthly life April 2, but his legacy — including the special esteem in which many American evangelical Protestants held him — lives on.
Perhaps the most prominent evidence of Pope John Paul II's unique place in the hearts of evangelicals came from America's most prominent evangelical, President Bush. “The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd, the world has lost a champion of human freedom, and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home,” Bush said in a statement he issued shortly after Vatican officials announced the pontiff's death.
Bush has frequently made references to the “culture of life,” a phrase coined by John Paul II in his many writings on life-ethics issues. Bush has used the phrase mainly to discuss abortion rights, stem-cell research and euthanasia. He cited the term repeatedly in discussing the recent dispute over Terri Schiavo, the incapacitated Florida woman who died March 31.
Indeed, many prominent evangelicals cited the pope's commitment to a pro-life ethic in reflections on his legacy.
“His passion brought leadership on many cultural issues, including traditional marriage and the protection of unborn children. He also took a strong stance against embryonic stem-cell research and human cloning,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, in a statement on John Paul II's death. “The pope must be recognized for his prolific writings, his gift for language, and his outspoken affirmation of life that we enjoy from our Creator, from conception to natural death.”
Baptist evangelist Billy Graham called the pope “unquestionably the most influential voice for morality and peace in the world during the last 100 years. … [H]e was respected by men and women from every conceivable background across the world. He was truly one of those rare individuals whose legacy will endure long after he has gone.”
Such effusive praise for a pope stands in stark contrast to the views expressed by evangelicals toward Catholicism — and the papacy in particular — in the years prior to John Paul II's election in 1978. For example, many conservative and fundamentalist Protestants led opposition to the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960 because of Kennedy's Catholicism.
According to experts on the Catholic tradition, John Paul II's views on life-ethics issues, his visibility and his attempts to reach across religious barriers all contributed to the new attitudes toward him.
“I think this pope particularly had a clear concern to join in dialogue with people of other faiths, and we see that” in his actions, such as visiting synagogues and mosques and meeting with religious leaders wherever he went, said Joe Favazza, an ex-Catholic priest and professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.
Favazza also cited the pontiff's legendary charisma in explaining his good relations with many evangelical leaders.
“He could look you right in the eye, and he could be very personal with you, and you had to deal with this presence. And I think that's exactly what happened with a lot of the evangelical leaders,” he said. “I think he was a man of great integrity, a man who both 'talked the talk' and 'walked the walk.' And I think that had a great effect on a lot of people who believed the Catholic Church prior to 1978 had less faith than rituals.”
Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, reflected on the first of his two meetings with the pope. “While it would be difficult to imagine two people talking together with a theological divide as wide as the ocean and still finding much in common, this is exactly what transpired,” he said in an April 2 news release.
Frank Ruff, a Catholic priest in Kentucky who has served two stints as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' official liaison to the Southern Baptist Convention, said the pope's very personal appeal won over many conservative skeptics.
“When [evangelicals] saw him, they saw somebody that they understood to be a holy man,” said Ruff, who pastors two small-town Catholic parishes in Kentucky. “It's hard for many evangelicals to say Catholics can be saved. But when they saw him, they saw somebody who was saved. They could say, 'There's a man who's living the gospel, who's in communication with God.'”
Nonetheless, both Ruff and Favazza noted, for all of evangelicals' embracing of John Paul II and his rhetoric on abortion and euthanasia, the pope had a more strenuous standard in mind when he talked about the “culture of life.”
“I think Bush and others in some ways tried to position themselves as friends of the pope or sympathetic to the pope by pushing these buttons, but John Paul's vision of the 'culture of life' extended beyond abortion to capital punishment, and from individual morality to corporate morality,” Favazza said.
Ruff elaborated: “You know, if your economic system is such that the poor don't have access to health insurance and good health care, that's not a 'culture of life,' that's a culture of death.”
In another example of how John Paul II's view of the “culture of life” conflicted with other evangelical views, the pope expressed strong disagreement over the Iraq war in his last visit with Bush. And many evangelicals and other conservatives have also differed with the pope's teachings on capital punishment, contraception and economic issues.
Commentators have also praised John Paul II for his role in helping bring an end to communist rule in Eastern Europe. In particular, they laud the pontiff for providing momentum to the “Solidarity” movement that ultimately brought an end to Soviet domination over his native Poland in the early 1980s.
Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Denton Lotz, himself heavily involved in the struggle against Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe, praised John Paul's role. “His strong defense of democracy and the Solidarity movement strengthened not only the Polish people in their resolve against the dictatorship of Marxist ideology, but gave courage to all Eastern Europeans in their struggle and eventual defeat of communism,” Lotz said in an April 4 statement.
Al Mohler, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, agreed. “Evangelical Christians should honor the courage of this man and his historic role in bringing communist tyranny to an end — at least within the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe,” he wrote, in an April 4 column published by the Southern Baptist Convention's press service.
However, John Paul II in later years also strongly criticized the excesses of unrestrained capitalism.
More moderate evangelical leaders have praised John Paul II for his commitment to the poor. “His words and his actions — indeed, his very life — exemplified the authority of religion to resist captivity to politics and to transcend the interests of narrow nationalism in order to build a global community in which people live with … freedom from intolerance, prejudice and poverty,” said Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who is president of the Interfaith Alliance, in a statement released April 4.
Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches, called the pontiff “a leading voice for the poor and disenfranchised throughout the world,” according to the American Baptist News Service.
One issue on which evangelicals and the pope were in close agreement was in the area of religious liberty. John Paul II's advocacy on the issue included personal confrontations with some of the world's most oppressive dictators.
Both Favazza and Ruff noted that the pontiff was one of the leading proponents for the strong statement on religious liberty adopted by the Second Vatican Council in 1962-63. Then, during his papacy, Favazza said, he “took the next step with that and said, first of all, we're going to challenge those leaders who need to be challenged [for violations of their people's religious freedom] and also admit there are times that the Catholic Church itself has transgressed this.”
For example, John Paul II famously apologized for the Crusades and issued a statement stating that the Catholic Church did not place any blame on the Jewish people for Christ's death.
“He advanced, I guess, the tradition on religious liberty that was well articulated in the Second Vatican Council,” Favazza said.
Ruff said that religious freedom was one area in which Catholics such as John Paul II had learned from evangelicals, and especially Baptists. “We're very grateful to the evangelical insistence on it in our country and the benefits that we received from it, and our theologians learned from that and reflected on it,” he said. “But that's very much the result of some good Baptist work at the time of the writing of the Constitution.”
On his trips to the United States, John Paul II praised the nation's founding documents for recognizing human dignity by guaranteeing rights and freedoms.
Despite all the areas of agreement, some conservative evangelicals did note that fundamental differences between Protestants and Catholics remain, particularly over the role of the papacy itself.
“In the end, evangelicals should be thankful for the personal virtues Pope John Paul II demonstrated, and for his advocacy on behalf of life, liberty and human dignity. Yet we cannot ignore the institution of the papacy itself, nor the complex of doctrines, truth claims and false doctrines that John Paul II taught, defended and promulgated,” Mohler wrote, singling out the pope's teachings on salvation and his devotion to particular Catholic doctrines about Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom the pope labeled “co-redemptrix” with Christ.
But Favazza said that fact in itself was significant — that John Paul II could maintain strict devotion to distinctive Catholic positions while still reaching out to many who had previously been very alienated from the papacy.
“As much as he was concerned with dialogue and relations with other denominations, he was still very clear about the boundaries of the Catholic faith,” Favazza said. “So, he will be remembered for many things, but compromise will not be one of them.”