Vatican Dispatch | Baptists and the Pope

On Sunday, May 18, Pope Leo XIV was formally inaugurated in a Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The whole church, including and beyond the Catholic Church, participated in the inauguration of his ministry.

Ecumenical guests included leaders of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Churches of the East such as the Coptic Church and the Syrian Orthodox Church, the World Council of Churches, and the Christian world communions from the Anglican Communion to the World Pentecostal Fellowship.

The global Baptist community was represented at the Mass, as Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Elijah Brown was among the leaders of Christian world communions who participated. Brown’s presence in St. Peter’s Square for this occasion was a sign of substantial ecumenical progress in the relationship between Baptists and the Bishop of Rome (the pope).

By the time the Bishop of Rome finished the homily, he had implicitly recognized the global Baptist community in a subtle but theologically significant way that could open up the possibility of further ecumenical progress.

Baptist Responses to Pope Leo XIV’s Election

Other Baptists had already recognized the significance of the pope’s election beyond the Catholic Church. Some leaders of Baptist communions and organizations released statements responding to the news of Cardinal Robert Prevost’s election as Pope Leo XIV.

Less than four hours after the new pope was presented to the public on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8, Paul Baxley, Executive Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, issued this statement:

Today I invite all Cooperative Baptists to join Christians all over the world in praying for Pope Leo XIV as he begins his leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.

Let us pray that the Holy Spirit guides him, and the Church he leads, to even greater faithfulness for the sake of Christ and the world. Let us join with him, our brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church, and with Christians from every denomination and every land in experiencing and extending the peace of the Risen Christ, offering compassion to those who suffer, and advocating for a just and peaceful end to the conflicts that plague our world.

Just before his death and resurrection, Jesus prayed that all of his followers in every time and place would be one. While there is certainly difference and distinction in the body of Christ, and certainly between Baptists and Catholics, we can be one in our participation in the mission of Christ, in the work of bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed.

As the new Pope declared today: “We are disciples of Christ. Christ goes before us. The world needs His light. Humanity needs Him as the bridge to be reached by God and His love.”

Also on May 8, National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. President Boise Kimber released a letter offering congratulations and prayer:

It is with heartfelt joy and deep admiration that I extend my warmest congratulations on the historic election of Pope Leo XIV, the [267th] Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the first American to ascend to the papacy. This moment marks a significant chapter not only in the history of the Catholic Church but also in the broader landscape of global Christianity.

His elevation is a powerful testament to the universality of the Church and a beacon of hope for believers across the world. In a time of profound social, moral, and spiritual complexity, his leadership promises a renewed voice of compassion, justice, and reconciliation. May his service be marked by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, the humility of Christ, and the courage to speak truth in love.

I celebrate this milestone with Pope Leo XIV and pray for his strength, protection, and success in the sacred responsibility entrusted to him. May God continue to use him as an instrument of peace and a shepherd of God’s people across all nations.

BWA General Secretary Brown sent a letter dated May 12 addressed to Pope Leo XIV, but it has yet to be released publicly.

Thus far, the statements and letters from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., and the Baptist World Alliance are the only responses from Baptist ecclesial communions of which I am aware.

While not an ecclesial communion, on May 8, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) posted a statement on social media from Executive Director Amanda Tyler. The BJC is an organization dedicated to advancing historic Baptist commitments to protecting religious liberty and defending the separation of church and state.

The statement honored “the significance of today’s papal election for the Catholic Church and its global community.” It also underscored Christianity’s global nature in contrast to nationalism, seemingly guarding against any triumphalist response of Christians in the United States to the election of a pope from their country.

Some Baptist pastors issued statements representing the membership of the churches they serve. Ryon Price, Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, devoted his weekly letter after the papal election to expressing his appreciation for ecumenical encounters with Catholic friends. He also honored the ministry of Pope Francis and expressed his hopes and prayers for the ministry of Pope Leo.

Many more Baptist denominational groups issued public statements in response to the news of the death of Pope Francis on April 21. Among them was one from BWA General Secretary Brown, who issued a statement on the BWA Facebook page. 

A photograph of the members of the joint commission for the Baptist-Catholic international ecumenical dialogue with Pope Francis at a private audience during the final meeting of Phase III of the dialogue in Rome in December 2022 accompanied the statement. While the comments under the post expressed many positive affirmations of this statement, they also contained numerous vitriolic denunciations of the BWA statement in the comment thread, accusing the BWA, among other things, of consorting with the Antichrist.

Evolving Baptist Perspectives on the Papacy

Unfortunately, identifying the pope with the Antichrist is not a recent novel development in the Baptist tradition.

An early Baptist confession of faith, the Second London Confession (1670/1688/1689), identified the pope as the Antichrist (26.4). Dispensationalist eschatologies that later became popular with some Baptists sometimes identified the pope as a leader of a false worldwide religion supposedly prophesied by the Book of Revelation.

The discredited approach to Baptist historiography known as “Landmarkism” regarded Baptists as the only true expression of the church of Jesus Christ through the centuries. Landmarkism was especially averse to acknowledging any sort of legitimacy of either the office of the pope or the Catholic Church.

Many Southern Baptist missionaries to Latin American countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were influenced by Landmarkist perspectives. This helped shape the strong anti-Catholic perspectives that have marked some expressions of Baptist life in Latin America.

When some Latin American Baptist union leaders reacted strongly against the Baptist World Alliance’s approval of the report of a first-phase international ecumenical dialogue between the BWA and the Catholic Church that took place 1984-1988, an uncharacteristic hiatus in the dialogue ensued that lasted until 2006. The dialogue later resumed with Phase II (2006-2010) and then Phase III (2017-2022).

The report from Phase II of the Baptist-Catholic dialogue included a substantial section that addressed Baptist and Catholic perspectives on “The Ministry of Oversight and Unity in the Life of the Church.” It noted that “for their part, most contemporary Baptists wish to disassociate themselves from harsh names applied to the papacy by their ancestors in very different circumstances” (sec. 201), thus disavowing the “Antichrist” language applied to the papacy earlier in the Baptist tradition.

The report also included a Baptist affirmation of positive contributions of the office of the pope that benefit Baptists and other non-Catholic Christians. It pointed out that,

“The witness of recent popes to many truths and values of the Gospel which are also cherished by the Baptist community has prompted many Baptist church leaders and scholars to re-evaluate long-cultivated views of the papacy….Many Baptists can acknowledge some practical advantages to having a voice that can speak at times for the whole of the Christian community. This can serve a prophetic function, especially by drawing upon Scripture and proclaiming in our day the perennial truths of Christian faith. The usefulness of such teaching for catechesis and social solidarity extends more broadly than to the Catholic Church alone, so showing features of a ministry of unity (sec. 203).”

 “A Certain, Though Imperfect, Communion”

I was thinking about this evolution in Baptist perspectives on the papacy while seated in the Paul VI Audience Hall adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, awaiting our journalists’ audience with Pope Leo XIV last Monday morning. I was there with fellow Good Faith Media contributor Grace Ji-Sun Kim, a Presbyterian theologian. While waiting for the new pope to arrive, we discussed our understandings of the significance of the papacy from the perspectives of our respective ecclesial communions.

I told Grace that as a Baptist, I belong to a non-hierarchical denomination in which the highest level of the church is the local congregation as the decision-making body within the body of Christ. We don’t have a pope, but the pope is nonetheless significant for Baptists. No other figure in worldwide Christianity has the opportunity to be a spokesperson, a voice on behalf of the church—speaking for the church and speaking truth to the world prophetically.

I also applied to Baptists what the documents of the Second Vatican Council—in particular, its “Decree on Ecumenism” (Unitatis Redintegratio)—say about us. We are “separated brothers and sisters” in a “certain, though imperfect, communion” with the Bishop of Rome. 

So, the Catholic Church believes Grace and I and other non-Catholic Christians are in communion with the Bishop of Rome. It’s an imperfect communion, but it’s a certain communion. 

And I want to live into that. In some sense, Leo also functions as my bishop, even my pope, even though we don’t have the same formal ecclesiastical structures.

“Sister Christian Churches”

It’s one thing for me, as an individual Baptist ecumenical theologian, to offer a qualified recognition of the office of the papacy. But it’s something far more significant for the pope to do what I suggested at the beginning of this article that Pope Leo XIV did in his inaugural mass homily—namely, to implicitly offer a theologically significant recognition of the status of Baptist communities of followers of Jesus Christ.

The whole homily encouraged me with the promise of this new pontificate, with Leo’s emphasis on continuity with Pope Francis’ ministry, a synodal vision for the church as a community that walks together “on the path of God’s love,” and his call for the church to eschew worldly ways of wielding power and instead ” love as Jesus loved.”

But I was particularly moved by this paragraph of the homily:

In this our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: in the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of good will, in order to build a new world where peace reigns!

As an ecumenist, I was, of course, attracted to the ecumenical vision expressed here of a synodal path that listens to Christ’s offer of love and leads to becoming one family. “In the one Christ, we are one”—this is a reiteration of Leo’s papal motto drawn from Augustine as the ecclesial and ecumenical goal of his papacy. 

And I appreciated the insistence on a unity that does not erase diversity: “We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity which does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people.”

But this specific language brought tears of gratitude to my eyes: “This is the path to follow together, among ourselves but also with our sister Christian churches….”

“Sister churches.” Leo’s use of “churches” here may not seem remarkable. But that is definitely not the term Catholic ecclesiology has previously applied to Baptist congregations or those of most non-Catholic denominations. 

Even in Vatican II’s more ecumenically open perspectives, “church” is a term reserved only for the Catholic Church and the ecclesiologically similar Eastern Orthodox churches. Other traditions are called not “churches” but rather “ecclesial communities.” 

They do partake of important qualities of “churches,” and thus they are “ecclesial.” But they are not “churches” in the way the Catholic Church understands church. Thus, they are “communities” rather than “churches.”

In 2000, a document issued by the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith titled Dominus Iesous noted that these non-Catholic (and non-Orthodox) churches are not churches “in the proper sense.” While this may legitimately be understood more as an internal word to Catholics clarifying the distinctively Catholic understanding of what church is (“in the sense that is proper to us”), Protestant churches widely received it as a denial of their status as church.

Judging from his public addresses thus far, Pope Leo XIV is not a pope who employs superfluous words or uses them carelessly. I believe it is possible that just as he sent a clear signal to those who had ears to hear when he employed the single word “synodal” in his initial address upon his election as pope, so Leo this Sunday was sending a clear signal to the non-Catholic and non-Orthodox ecumenical guests seated before him and to the ecclesial communions they represented with his deliberate use of “churches.”

I believe the pope may have been communicating to BWA General Secretary Brown and the members of the Baptist World Alliance, whom he represented, that our churches are indeed churches and not merely ecclesial communities. Just to make sure I wasn’t basing this on an English mistranslation of the Italian in which Leo delivered the homily, I checked the Italian text—which, it turns out, says precisely the same thing but in Italian: “con le Chiese cristiane sorelle,” “with the sister Christian churches.”

On the other hand, the published text of Leo’s remarks delivered this morning (Monday) to the “representatives of other Churches and Ecclesial Communities, as well as of other religions” who had participated in yesterday’s inaugural Mass, with Brown again among them, employs the standard Catholic terminology differentiating between “churches” that embody the Catholic Church’s distinctive understanding of what it means to be fully church and “ecclesial communities” that embody essential aspects of this understanding of church, but less than fully so.

Yet, Sunday’s homily omitted the “ecclesial communities” language, leaving only “sister Christian churches” and “other religious paths” as the categories referring to the guests to whom Leo directed these remarks. This seems deliberate and potentially of great significance.

An Experience of Renewal

From the death of Pope Francis to my presence in Rome during the preparations for the conclave, the conclave itself, the election of Pope Leo XIV, and the first days of his papacy, I have had a deep experience of personal spiritual renewal. It has rekindled my desire to become more fully catholic—but not Catholic—in the sense of living more fully into the fullness of the church that is “whole” (the Greek word katholikē literally means “according to the whole”).

Leo’s life and message thus far have encouraged me to seek to follow Jesus Christ more faithfully as a Baptist along with other members of the whole church, including the Catholic Church and its papal leader, on the synodal path that leads toward the “new world where peace reigns.” The experience has also given me a new commitment to my vocation as a Baptist ecumenical theologian.

In the midst of circumstances in the world that tempt me toward hopelessness, I find myself daring to hope God is doing a new thing in Pope Leo XIV that will lead the whole church to participate more fully in God’s renewal of all creation. I hope my readers will join me in seeking to heed the summons that concludes his inaugural homily: “Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another.”