Liberal leaders urge followers to push for progressive successor to Francis

American progressive Christians are mourning the loss of Pope Francis, whom they considered one of their own and an inspiration.

A piece in the New York Times on Thursday highlighted various left-leaning Christian leaders, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who saw him as a “powerful counterweight to a rising conservative Christian power.”

Bishop Sean W. Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, viewed Pope Francis as a leader against forces on the American right.

“Pope Francis stood in contrast to a brand of Christianity that has increasing power in the United States. It is mixed with nationalism and, according to Bishop Rowe, is ‘not only fundamentally not Christian’ but ‘also dangerous,'” The Times reported.

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Now, with the pope gone, new leaders must emerge.

“We have to begin to step up and communicate this message in ways that are winsome and compelling,” Rowe said. “Politics are certainly co-opting Christian language and the Christian story. It is now ours to take that back.”

The piece also quotes the liberal Jesuit Fr. James Martin, who contrasted Pope Francis’ recent trip to Regina Coeli prison in Rome on Holy Thursday to meet with inmates, with a photo of Rep. Riley Moore, R-W. Va., at the Terrorist Confinement Center in El Salvador where Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held.

Garcia is an illegal immigrant and suspected MS-13 gang member who lived in Maryland before the Trump administration deported him to the Terrorist Confinement Center.

The New York Times piece says, “Mr. Moore, who is Catholic, smiled for a photograph in front of a cell containing several prisoners, giving two thumbs up to the camera.”

Martin said, “The two pictures could not be more different, the two different paths in Christianity. One says we accompany people, no matter who they are, and the other says we turn our backs on them and mock them.”

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Now, “their values feel particularly vulnerable” and the progressive Christian leaders highlighted by the New York Times are questioning what the future will look like.

“Whatever happens in the rest of my lifetime or yours, some of us have to keep a candle burning,” Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, told The Times.

Budde was the bishop who challenged Trump the day after his inauguration at a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, asking Trump, in “the name of our God … to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and [transgender] children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”