Franklin Graham Honors a Blaspheming Pope and Prays for His Replacement

Yesterday, we reported on Christianity Today's fawning, incense-swinging eulogy for Pope Francis—a puff piece so stuffed with sentimentality it could've doubled as a Hallmark card for the College of Cardinals. But just when you thought the Evangelical establishment couldn't stoop lower in its genuflection before Rome, Franklin Graham showed up with the proverbial rosary beads in one hand and a tweet in the other.

"Pope Francis passed away this morning," Graham wrote, with all the solemnity of a bishop addressing his own flock. He spoke kindly of the pontiff's final days, praised his meetings, admired his Holy Week appearances, and casually dropped that he'd "had the opportunity to meet and talk with him" during a preaching trip to Naples last year.

How sweet. How cordial. How catastrophically compromising.

But here’s the question that screams through the incense cloud… when Franklin Graham shook the hand of the man who claims to sit as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the head of an institution that bows before statues, prays to dead saints, venerates Mary as co-redemptrix, and condemns the doctrine of justification by faith alone—did he call him to repent? Did he look into the eyes of the man clad in white, seated atop a golden throne of spiritual delusion, and say, "Sir, you preach a false gospel, and unless you repent, you too will perish"?

Of course not. Because in this sanitized, stage-managed, big-tent evangelicalism, truth is impolite, rebuke is out of fashion, and Roman Catholicism is no longer a satanic counterfeit but a respected partner in ecumenical bridge-building.