During his December 16, 2024 audience with a delegation from the World Methodist Council, Francis falsely suggested that Catholics profess the same faith as Methodists:
“Next year, Christians around the world will celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council: Nicaea. This occasion reminds us that we profess the same faith, and thus have the same responsibility of offering signs of hope that bear witness to God’s presence in the world.”
While it is true that Methodists and other Protestants accept the Nicene Creed, it is obviously incorrect to suggest that Catholics and Methodists “profess the same faith.” Pope Leo XIII provided a thorough refutation of Francis’s false claim in his 1896 encyclical on Christian unity, Satis Cognitum:
“But he who dissents even in one point from divinely revealed truth absolutely rejects all faith, since he thereby refuses to honour God as the supreme truth and the formal motive of faith. ‘In many things they are with me, in a few things not with me; but in those few things in which they are not with me the many things in which they are will not profit them’ (S. Augustinus in Psal. liv., n. 19). And this indeed most deservedly; for they, who take from Christian doctrine what they please, lean on their own judgments, not on faith; and not ‘bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ’ (2 Cor. x., 5), they more truly obey themselves than God.”
Thus, anyone who rejects even a single point of divinely revealed truth rejects the entire Faith. Because Methodists (like other Protestants) reject multiple points of divinely revealed truth, they reject the true Faith, relying instead on their own judgments. As such, Methodists obviously do not “profess the same faith” as Catholics.
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