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Thursday, October 3, 2013
Pope Francis cranked up
his charm offensive on the world outside the Vatican on Tuesday, saying in the
second widely shared media interview in two weeks that each person “must choose
to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them” and calling efforts to
convert people to Christianity “solemn nonsense.”
The Vatican’s head seemed intent on distancing himself
from its power, saying church leaders “have often been narcissists” and
“clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity.”
The interview with atheist Italian journalist Eugenio
Scalfari set off another round of debate about what the pope meant: Was he
saying that people can make up their own minds, even if they disagree with
church teachings? Or was this self-described “son of the church” just using
casual language to describe classic church teaching about how people need to
come to Catholic doctrine of their free will?
A top official with the Southern Baptist Convention, the
largest Protestant denomination in the United States, took the unprecedented
step of rebuking Francis, writing that the pope’s interview was “a theological
wreck” and that Francis was dabbling dangerously in relativism.
“What these interviews seem continually to do is what
evangelical theologian Carl Henry warned Protestants of in the 20th century, of
severing the love of God from the holiness of God,” wrote the Rev. Russell
Moore, a past dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and head of the
convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “We must speak with
tenderness and gentleness, but with an authoritative word from God.”pp
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