I’m very happy to talk about Pope Francis and ecumenism. There’s a lot that can be said on this subject. It’s interesting, because he hasn’t given much explicit teaching on this subject; there’s no one document of a number of pages from Francis on ecumenism, but he’s doing things all the time that are significant for unity, and there’s many gems and things that he’s saying that are very important for this work of reconciliation.
We are probably aware of some of these things he’s done that have grabbed headlines; for example, when he sent a message to the Kenneth Copeland conference of several hundred ministers/pastors in January last year, 2014.
That was a huge surprise to many people, because if the Pope was going to send a message to evangelical or Pentecostal pastors, which never happened before, you wouldn’t have expected it to be sent to a Kenneth Copeland conference. |