Pope Francis and Protestants

By Mark Tooley, Op-ed contributor Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Pope Francis looks on during his weekly general audience on September 20, 2023, at St Peter's square in The Vatican. | TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images

Conservative Protestants, some of whom came from traditions traditionally anti-Catholic, admired Pope John Paul II in the 1980s and 1990s and, later Pope Benedict. Some even converted. Conservative Protestants admired their clear articulation of traditional Christian doctrine and ethics. JPII was a leader in helping to roll back the Iron Curtain, starting with his native Poland. While much of Mainline U.S. Protestantism was liberalized and emasculated, and much of conservative Protestantism lacked a strong intellectual tradition and compelling public witness, Catholicism under those popes seemed resolute and imposing.

Under Pope Francis, this perspective has changed. He is of course perceived as a liberal Pope who is adapting the church to Western social preferences. His new statement on blessing same-sex couples does not change Catholic teaching about marriage and chastity (sex only between husband and wife). But it does create confusion in public perception. His moving the church away from Just War teaching, definitive rejection of capital punishment even in theory, and his 2015 Laudato Si’ encyclical’s environmentalist and economically statist themes have solidified his progressive reputation with conservative critics.

Many U.S. conservative Catholics, who are typically cultural allies to conservative Protestants, increasingly disdain the Pope. Protestants are surprised to hear Catholic friends speak about schism, question Francis’s legitimacy as pontiff, or even pray for his earthly departure. Many Protestants, in their caricature of Catholics, have imagined that the papacy, with its “infallible” authority on faith and morals, is sacrosanct and immune from critique.

Some Protestants, during the JPII and Benedict years, at times inwardly bristled at triumphalist conservative Catholics who cited the reliability of their magisterium versus Protestant perambulations. At times, it seemed to some Protestants that there was an air of spiritual superiority from some conservative Catholics, for whom the planets seemed to align. Still, conservative Protestants could rejoice with conservative Catholics that under JPII and Benedict, liberal trends in the U.S. Catholic Church had reversed. Progressive priests of the 1960s and 1970s were replaced by new generations of more conservative priests. This trend paralleled a Protestant shift as Evangelicals demographically replaced declining, liberal Mainline Protestantism.

The collapse of U.S. Mainline Protestantism also included a collapse in Protestant confidence, intellectual life, and public influence. Modern Evangelicalism lacked the institutions and traditions of centuries-old Mainline groups. They typically could not compete directly with vigorous Catholic intellectual life. And so rising Evangelicalism often relied on Catholic intellectual resources to make needed public arguments.

This vision was incarnated in Lutheran pastor turned Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, the public intellectual who co-founded IRD in 1981 and founded First Things magazine a decade later. Neuhaus, among others, believed that Catholic arguments, rooted in natural law, could supply the intellectual armor needed by evangelicals. Catholic thinkers would provide the intellectual leadership for the more numerous evangelical spearcarriers. With evangelicals, Catholics could potentially create a political majority for social conservatism. It was a more sophisticated version of Jerry Falwell’s late 1970s Moral Majority, which sought politically to coalesce traditionalists of all religious traditions, but especially evangelicals and Catholics.

These arguments and assumptions shaped much of IRD’s history across 40 years. We rightly celebrated increased collaboration between Protestants and Catholics, and the decline of old prejudices that previously had divided them. Pope Francis has disrupted this narrative. Will parts of Western Catholicism now shift towards the liberalism of Mainline Protestantism? Is it now fair to compare Francis to an Episcopal Church bishop?

No, that comparison is not fair. The Catholic Church remains rooted in its historic teachings in ways not true for much of Mainline Protestantism. Catholicism’s centuries of history, and its universality, prevent its full accommodation to contemporary Western culture. But the spirit behind much of the Francis pontificate has persuaded many conservative Protestants that the Catholic Church is no longer a reliable guide and partner on key moral issues that had been true under the two previous popes.

It would be unfortunate, if in reaction to Francis, historic anti-Catholic prejudice reemerged among many conservative American Protestants. Even at its worse, Catholicism offers a treasury of ethical and spiritual resources that are indispensable to global Christianity. Protestantism, least of all U.S. evangelicalism, cannot alone offer what is needed spiritually and ethically in our world today. And half of global Christianity is Roman Catholic. The leadership of those hundreds of millions will always be very important for global Christianity and for the world as a whole.

But it’s also true that Protestants, if they were ever tempted so, cannot expect that the Catholic Church, unlike Protestantism, is monolithically immune to cultural trends. Although its institutional unity of course continues under its bishops and pontiff, Catholicism is increasingly divided like Protestants between north and south. Francis pursues the preferences of European Catholicism, supported by some Americans and Latins. Africa and other areas of the non-West firmly reject that direction. The Global South church for Catholics, as for Protestants, grows, while the Western church declines. It seems unlikely, under this trend, that the aspirations of progressive Western Catholics, who have money but not so many people, can be fulfilled long-term.

There is also a lesson here about the human condition, from which no branch of Christianity is ever immune. No human institution, not even churches dedicated to God, can escape venality and egotism, cupidity, or decay. No human institution, not even what is ordained by God, can be idealized this side of the Eschaton. Reinhold Niebuhr, an Augustinian who stressed human sinfulness, lamented that Augustine had overly idealized the church.

Protestants obviously have a different understanding of church and authority than do Catholics. Both can trust that the Holy Spirit will always ensure the Gospel’s propagation. And neither should exaggerate the moral reliability of their ecclesial structures or leaders. Even sanctified saints at their best can be confused and, at times, highly unreliable. At best, and with time, the collective’s wisdom will providentially overcome the mistakes of the particular.

Neither Catholics nor Protestants can adopt any attitude of superiority over the other or against other groups. Instead, we can only stand at the Cross, giving thanks for mercy, and praying for guidance.

Originally published at Juicy Ecumenism.

Mark Tooley became president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) in 2009. He joined IRD in 1994 to found its United Methodist committee (UMAction). He is also editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence.