Question: Are you familiar with the book, John Paul II, A Tribute, produced by Life? The foreword ...

Question: Are you familiar with the book, John Paul II, A Tribute, produced by Life? The foreword was written by Billy Graham. In it he tells (as he also related on “Larry King Live”) that he was preaching at Cardinal Wojtyla’s cathedral in Krakow, Poland the very night Wojtyla was voted in as the new Pope in Rome. Graham calls the Pope “the most influential moral voice of our time” and commends him for “his compassion for all who suffer and his strong commitment to social justice” and for calling “young people...to commit their lives to Christ....” Comments?

Response: Anyone, Catholic or Protestant, recognizes that by commending the Pope and Roman Catholicism as the true faith (which he has done repeatedly and publicly on many occasions), Billy Graham has implicitly renounced the Protestant Reformation. His embrace of Catholicism implies that the Catholic bishops were actually in biblical agreement with their victims and preached the same gospel as evangelicals preach today. Yet they anathematized and burned Protestants, and Rome honors them for having done so

I am not criticizing Billy Graham for his commendation of the Pope and Catholicism. He is entitled to his opinion. Nor can anyone rationally accuse me of “attacking” him. I am simply pointing out what his staunchest admirers must admit: If Graham is right that the Roman Catholic Church preaches the true gospel that saves souls, all the Reformers were wrong and the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was a huge semantic misunderstanding which for centuries has needlessly divided true Christians. Take your pick: either Graham is right or the Reformers were, but not both of them.

Furthermore, if Catholicism is the true gospel, then what must be said of the hundreds of millions of Roman Catholics who have been convinced over the last 500 years that Rome’s gospel is false, who have believed the true gospel and left the Roman Catholic Church? If Graham is right, they are absolute fools. They should have stayed in the Catholic Church—which is exactly where Graham sends all Roman Catholics who come forward at his crusades.

Far from attacking Billy Graham, I am only reminding us that the Reformation involved serious differences carefully thought out and maintained at great cost by both sides. If Graham is justified in his praise of the Pope, then hundreds of millions of both Catholics and Protestants have been victims of a giant hoax for the last 470 years. Moreover, both the hundreds of thousands of martyrs who died rather than embrace Rome’s false gospel and those who burned them at the stake or drowned them for rejecting Catholicism were all deluded. According to Billy Graham, there was no basic disagreement then nor is there now on anything of importance.

Graham’s good friend, John Paul II, with whom he says he is in essential agreement concerning the gospel, held a commemoration in December 1995 on the 450th anniversary of the opening of Trent, in which he said that all of its Canons and Decrees (including the more than 100 anathemas denouncing evangelical Christians for rejecting Rome’s gospel) continue in full force and effect. The Pope has said he is not prepared to remove any of those anathemas.

Whether John Paul II is truly, as Graham describes him, “the most influential moral voice of our time,” depends upon whether “moral” includes more than opposition to homosexuality, abortion, pornography and the usual targets. If, however, one also considers it immoral to lead one billion astray for eternity by offering them a false gospel, the Pope must be the most immoral person alive.