History often erupts in quiet yet random ways.
On Reformation Day morning, 1999, I had a few free hours on this, the final day of a 10-day Italy tour, so I hailed a cab which raced me to the Vatican for one last look. I climbed stairs to the top of the basilica dome. And I descended more stairs to the basement grottoes. There I stumbled upon the traditional site of St. Peter’s tomb — bones and all. I was humbled and impressed. But when I turned around and saw a newer tomb, I trembled in awe. It was the casket of Pope John XXIII.
John XXIII served the papacy for less than five years, but in that brief tenure he reshaped world Christianity arguably more than anybody in the 20th century. Calling and setting the agenda for the Second Vatican Council — whose completion he did not live long enough to gavel to adjournment — he took the ecumenical movement to places unimagined. First and foremost, the Council reclassified Protestants as “separated brethren” after having dubbed them “infidels” for nearly five centuries.
The builder and buster generations among us Presbyterians remember the days when both groups not only distrusted the other but also forbade intermarrying. In those days we each believed the other to be condemned to hell.
But post-Vatican II, we Protestants study the scholarship of Raymond Brown and Luke Timothy Johnson, while Catholics read Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright. Both the movements of liturgical renewal and emergent worship draw from the well dug by Catholic forebears. Lectionary study groups help priests and ministers prepare better sermons, and ecumenical community centers feed the hungry.
However, more changes are needed still. Most churches still practice blatant gender discrimination. Churches of all stripes too often line up on the wrong side of segregation, discrimination, exploitation and injustice. The Vatican itself has renewed old rivalries by openly recruiting disaffected Anglicans back into the fold. And the post-911 era has unleashed some of the worst religious prejudice between the three major monotheistic religious groups since the Crusades.
And, overall, the unrelenting pattern of fracturing Christian fellowships has been discrediting the Christ whose love commandments supposedly stand at the center of Christian moral teaching.
Will the new Pope, whose self-chosen name hearkens to the humble servanthood of the man of Assisi, advance the initiatives of John XXIII? Will he extend the “catholicity of the church” to the next level? Might he leverage his unrivaled clout on the world stage to make him one we could nickname John XXIV?
History erupted when I visited the Vatican grottoes. You see, on that very day, about 600 miles north of Rome, Catholic Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, Pope John Paul II’s emissary, and Bishop Christian Krause and the Rev. Ishmael Noko, the two top leaders of the Lutheran World Federation, signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The Augsburg Accord, adopted in that hotbed of Lutheranism, declared that justification does come via grace through faith (thank you, Martin Luther) while also declaring that such faith does lead to the exercise of good works (thank you, Rome).
The document also rescinded 500 years of anathemas both bodies had declared upon one another. And it affirmed their common fellowship in Christ.
In the process, the positive gains of Luther’s initiatives were realized as never before, and the negative consequences of such initiatives were redressed and resolved in a way unimaginable perhaps even to John XXIII.
In 2000 John XXIII was beatified and his body was moved from the grottoes to the altar of St. Jerome. But Peter’s tomb remains.
Just prior to his inaugural mass, Pope Francis walked down those stairs to the grotto to see the Petrine burial site, taking with him the top 
leaders of the Eastern Orthodox churches who separated from Rome five centuries earlier than did we Protestants. They were attending for the first time ever the installation of the Bishop of Rome, and in this way they together were giving witness and raising worship to the Lord of reconciliation as never before.
May this be a sign of things to come.
