POPE FRANCIS/RELIGION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump’s evangelical advisory board is asking Pope Francis for meetings with him and other high-level Vatican officials to discuss ‘efforts to divide evangelicals and Catholics.’
The request, which was first reported in Time, comes a few weeks after two of Francis’s closest allies published an extremely critical article about the shared political activism of conservative evangelicals and Catholics, saying it has ‘an ideology of conquest.’
The piece attracted wide attention because of the connection that the authors — an Italian Catholic priest and an Argentine Presbyterian pastor — have to the pope and because of its range: It disparaged everything from conservative evangelicalism and prosperity gospel to the popular idea that the United States is blessed by God. It was published mid-July in the influential Rome-based Jesuit publication La Civilta Cattolica.
It was the latest in a series of rocky back-and-forths between Trump’s circle and the pope’s, over issues including a U.S.-Mexico wall and climate change.”
-Michelle Boorstein, “Trump’s evangelical advisers want a meeting with Pope Francis over controversial article,” The Washington Post online, Aug. 7, 2017 10:14pm