In 1981, an unlikely meeting took place.
Billy Graham, a well known and talented Evangelical leader and preacher, had been invited to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II. The event wasn't publicized: Graham wanted to avoid the controversy meeting with the Catholic pontiff would bring.
The two chatted for awhile and exchanged gifts. Nearly at the point where Graham's scheduled time with the pope was drawing to a close, there was a pause.
Suddenly, the pope reached over to Graham with both arms, took hold of his coat lapels, and brought him close. He looked into Graham's eyes urgently and said, "Listen Graham. We are brothers."
More and more, it seems as if those words are being realized.
American Catholics and Evangelicals have found themselves next to one another more and more often in the past few years. 40 Days for Life, the largest religious pro-life activism organization on record, was begun by a Catholic and an Evangelical, and continues to have both Catholic and Evangelical leaders and participants. Well known Christian music songs, many of which are included in regular Sunday worship in Evangelical churches, include songs by Catholic artists like Matt Maher. The Babylon Bee, a popular Evangelical Christian satire site, takes good natured jabs at both Protestant and Catholic stories.
Perhaps the most striking example of this ecumenical harmony, at least recently, is The Messengers Chosen episode. The episode frames the events of the Nativity as the recollections of an aged Mother Mary passing on the Magnificat to the gospel writer Luke. She's spoken of highly and treated with deep respect and deference by the other disciples around her.
This is a team of Evangelical writers writing an episode about how beautiful and important the Magnificat is and depicting Mother Mary as an important and respected member in the early Church.
Now, to be clear, they clearly aren't embracing Catholic teaching on her in it's entirety. Many Catholics had a bit of a meltdown over the fact that she had labor pains in the episode (as an aside: there's actually a difference of opinion within Catholic theologian circles on whether she would have had labor pains or not).
But there was a time not so long ago where any praise of Mary or anything that focused on her as an important character beyond the infancy narratives would have been completely unheard of for fear of sounding too Catholic, or giving any credence to the Catholic position. According to Rome Sweet Home, the conversion memoir of Scott and Kimberly Hahn, even that was sometimes disputed or minimized,
"After my talk, the pastors' wives gave a performance of What Child is This? substituting "the babe, the son of God" for "the babe, the son of Mary" because they wanted to avoid giving too much glory to Mary. What a case in point to illustrate my talk!"
Based on these factors, I think it's safe to say that the landscape is much more ecumenical than it was twenty years ago. Part of this is due to the pro-life movement, part of it is due to a secular culture becoming gradually more and more hostile to the basic Christian understanding of family structure that Evangelical and Catholics share, but I also have some hope that this may be a sign of something deeper. That somehow, some way, an old rift is healing.
I find it interesting that two of the branches of Christianity arguably furthest apart in styles of worship have found themselves closest together in matters of morality and evangelization.
Evangelicals, particularly those that are Baptist or non-denominational, favor Sunday services focused on a centralized sermon and music, while Catholics have an extremely ritualized Sunday mass that could be done without music or preaching of any kind. For Evangelicals, Church is meant to be a gathering place for believers looking for community and support, and Church attendance is seen as highly desirable but not essential. For Catholics, the Mass is seen as the highest form of prayer we can offer, and regular attendance is seen as integral to communion with God and the "source and summit" of Christian life.
Yet Protestant Christians with similar understandings of liturgical structure and importance (many with a form of belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist) such as Lutherans, Episcopalians and Methodists, aren't usually the ones "in the trenches" with Catholics (at least, with Catholics working in evangelization or issues of the family). Many of these denominations have even gone so far as to embrace doctrine contrary to traditional Christian teaching on issues like same sex marriage and abortion, even while holding onto such common elements of worship as an altar and prayers prayed in unison as a congregation.
Liturgy on its own has not preserved orthodoxy on how we are called to live as Christians. The form of worship has not, on its own, preserved a sense of how we are to live and conduct ourselves. It even seems on occasion, as if those Christians most like Catholics in structure of prayer differ most widely with them on what we can and cannot permit while living as Christians.
I'm not entirely sure why this is. The best reason I can come up with, and the one I hope to be true, is that both try to center a personal relationship with Christ. Catholics speak of encountering Christ in the Eucharist, Evangelicals in the Word. I wonder if that's the commonality there. All Christians have in common the Bible, but these two areas of Christian expression have in common an emphasis on meeting with Christ and seeking a personal connection with Him.
This is not to minimize the areas of difference we have. In addition to our understandings of how we are to worship, Evangelicals and Catholics differ on whether birth control is permissible (though there are more and more evangelicals coming into line with Catholic teaching on this in practice), and on things like whether Baptism is necessary for salvation, whether we're all predestined or have true free will, or whether we're allowed to believe in evolution. And there are definitely members of both Evangelical and Catholic congregations that openly suspect, distrust, and demonize the other. A quick overview of the comments on nearly any Catholic or Christian social media account very quickly gives ample evidence of that.
But in the past few years, both groups seem more and more willing to explore and celebrate what we have in common, and to work together on those things. American Christianity is no longer strictly dived along Catholic and Protestant lines. That gives me a lot of hope for unity.
"That they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.". - John 17:21
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