Agreeing to Disagree With Franklin Graham

The name Billy Graham first appeared in these pages in the issue of May 4, 1957, under the byline of Gustave Weigel, S.J. The essay was simply titled, “What to Think of Billy Graham.” Hard as it is to imagine today, just what Catholics should think about the dashing, charismatic preacher from North Carolina was, at the time, a pressing question. “Billy Graham,” Father Weigel wrote, “is something more than the name of a man. It is the label of a phenomenon.” By 1957 Billy Graham was already a global force; a preacher with such boundless energy and rhetorical power that, in the words of one biographer, he ranks alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II as “the most creatively influential Christians of the twentieth century.”