Pope visits center of Protestantism

‘Christian unity’ a message of love, inclusion: WCC chief

Pope Francis’s visit to Geneva, a center of Protestantism, expresses “Christian unity,” the World Council of Churches chief told AFP, insisting the pontiff’s message of love and inclusion speaks across denominations.

The 81-year-old Argentine will visit the City of Calvin on Thursday at the invitation of the global inter-church organization, which represents some 350 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches with around 500 million believers among them.

“It is a very important decision he made when he accepted the invitation. [It] says that the Roman Catholic Church has the same agenda as these other churches,” said WCC chief Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran pastor.

“It is Christian unity in practice,” he added, in an interview ahead of the pope’s visit to help celebrate the WCC’s 70th anniversary.

The trip, he said, was “a sign of hope that even quite deep conflicts and divisions can be overcome through dialogue, through taking one and other seriously.”

Historically, divisions between the Catholic Church and the Protestant confessions have indeed run deep.

The dissenting movement launched by Martin Luther more than 500 years ago and its strict interpretation engrained in Geneva by John Calvin in the mid-16th century launched centuries of often bloody divisions in Europe.

Over the WCC’s 70 years, “we definitely see a lot of changes towards openness,” Fykse Tveit said, hailing that the time of wars between Christians appears to be over.

He acknowledged though that “it is not difficult to find issues that are still dividing Christians,” pointing to attitudes towards “human sexuality and family life.”

But he said “there is a kind of momentum for being more united, and the pope’s visit is a sign of that.”

All Christians shared a common identity as believers, and should be able to rally around the pope’s messages of love, tolerance, justice and peace, he said. “I think that many Christians, whether they are Catholics or not, see him as a strong voice for what we want to say as Christians today.”