Religious Fight

Kathryn Jean Lopez

IT was supposed to be a match made in heaven. In September 1995 the Christian Coalition started a new arm called the Catholic Alliance, a form of outreach meant to add to the quarter of a million Catholics who were already members of the one-and-a-half-million-member Christian Coalition. The timing seemed providential. In the wake of Pope John Paul II’s call for ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint, Catholic and evangelical leaders had just issued the unprecedented statement “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium”—defining their shared goals in an increasingly secular culture.