Pope

Bahá’u’lláh told the Pope that He, Bahá’u’lláh, was the Father Who had been promised by Christ, the Son. The very One the Pope was awaiting; the One in Whose Name the Pontiff held his position.

There has been only a century of silence from the church. But the seeds were sown, and let us see what took place a hundred years later . . .

In the exact year and exact month of the one hundredth anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh's Declaration to the world proclaiming that the sacred promise in all the holy Books had been fulfilled. Pope John XXIII issued His Encyclical Letter which "received world wide acclaim."

The praise was justified. Not only did the Encylical deal with the problems facing the world, but Pope John himself was a true lover of his fellow man, a saintly human being. In that Encyclical, the Supreme Pontiff spoke of the following subjects:

World peace

A world community

Search after truth

Universal education

Equality between men and women

The oneness of mankind

The oneness of God

The harmony of science and religion

Disarmament

A warning concerning atomic energy

A spiritual solution to the economic problem

Do these ideas sound familiar?

They are one and all principles of the Bahá’í Faith.

They are Teachings and Counsels which Bahá’u’lláh gave to the kings and religious leaders of the world over a century before the Pontiff finally spoke out, exactly one hundred years afterward. How powerfully those words of Bahá’u’lláh, spoken so long ago, to a Pope in Rome, now ring through the halls of history after a century: "0 Supreme Pontiff! Incline thine ear unto that which the Fashioner of moldering bones counselleth thee."

Pope John XXIII, because of his sincere love of humanity, and his wise guidance to a troubled world, received the Nobel Prize for peace. He was admired and lauded in all parts of the world by both public and press.

Yet, he had no more than echoed, faintly at that, and only after one hundred years, the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. He had done no more than to share with mankind ideals which had been denied to the world for a century by the leaders of men, both religious and secular.

Bahá’í Computer and Communication Association, Prophecy Fulfilled, p. 14