The evangelical pope?
Page 3 of 3 -- Domestically, a strategic initiative called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) has both measured and promoted closer contact between representatives of the two Christian movements. Leaders of ECT include the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things; the evangelical author and broadcaster Chuck Colson, who heads a large ministry to prisoners; and distinguished theologians like Avery Cardinal Dulles from the Catholic side and J.I. Packer of Regent College, Vancouver, from the Protestant side.
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From its first joint statement, ''The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium'' (1994), to its most recent, ''The Call to Holiness'' (released in early 2005), participants in ECT have pushed their fellow-religionists to acknowledge broad commonalities of Christian doctrine, spiritual life, and ethical practice. They have also helpfully spotlighted important differenceslike the authority of the pope or the place of Mary in the drama of salvationthat remain to divide the two movements.
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It has been reported that John Paul II was kept abreast of the ECT discussions, and that he approved. Even firmer evidence points to the pope's role as the world's most visible public Christian in making a difference for evangelical attitudes toward Catholics.
Until well after World War II, evangelicals typically suspected Catholics of a certain lack of commitment to American national ideals. After all, as those Protestant leaders feared in 1960, were not Catholics bound to obey the instructions of a foreign leader (the pope), if push ever came to shove?
Evangelicals who paid any attention to John Paul II's speeches, travels, writings, and general positions were forever disabused of such notions. His general leadership in promoting the free exercise of religion, his key role in the Solidarity movement in Poland, his temperate statements on explosive political situations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (including his efforts to minimize strife between Pentecostals and Catholics), his mediation as peacemaker in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and elsewhereall of these actions undercut whatever civic anxiety American Protestants had maintained about the Catholic church.
Still, several qualifications are necessary in thinking about John Paul II and Protestant evangelicals. His own primary interests in inter-religious dialogue were aimed not at evangelicals, but at bringing the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches together, and then in repairing Catholic relations with Jews and Muslims. It was also obvious that, although the pope was a person of evident piety who treasured classical Christian teaching, he could not command the many Catholics who did not share his traditional convictions. In addition, the pope's great stress on Mary as protector of Poland and patron of the Catholic church hardly sat well with evangelicals.
Nevertheless, while no one would mistake John Paul II for an evangelical, he was responsible for a great deal of the normalization of relations that has occurred between the two Christian communities. Evangelicals greatly respected his resistance to Communist tyranny and his efforts on behalf of a ''culture of life.'' They could appreciate the Christ-centered elements of his personal piety, as illustrated by words he prepared for a homily the first Sunday after Easter: ''Lord, who with your death and Resurrection revealed the love of the Father, we believe in you and with faith we repeat to you today: Jesus, I trust in you, have pity on us and on the entire world.''' Evangelicals who have taken time to read the ''Catholic Catechism,'' which the pope shepherded into print, have found a bracing statement of orthodox Christian faith, though of course in a distinctly Catholic dress. Those who have read even some of the pope's many encyclicals recognized one of the 20th century's most astute Christian intellects at work.
With all qualifications noted and all the important points that still divide evangelicals and Catholics fully in view, it is still fair to say that this pope deserves a great deal of credit for opening doors between Catholics and evangelicals that had been mostly closed since the Reformation of the 16th century. To see evangelicals and Catholics making common cause politically represents dramatic change. To see these former antagonists talking to each other once again about prayer, the Bible, and the person of Jesus Christ is of much greater importance for the whole history of Christianity.
Mark Noll, a historian at Wheaton College in Illinois, is the author of ''America's God'' (Oxford) and co-author of the forthcoming ''Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism'' (Baker Books). 
