This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 28 July 2014, Pope Francis traveled to Caserta, Italy, to visit the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation, a Pentecostal congregation, becoming the first pope to visit a Pentecostal church.
Francis went at the invitation of the church's pastor, Giovanni Traettino, a friend he had known since working with him in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s to build relationships between charismatic Catholics and Pentecostal Protestants, a friendship that reached back nearly two decades before the Caserta visit itself.
Addressing about 350 worshippers, Francis apologized for the Catholic Church's role in the persecution of Pentecostals under Italy's Fascist government, when Pentecostal worship was banned outright. He said that among those who persecuted and denounced Pentecostals, treating them almost as though they were people trying to ruin the race, there were also Catholics.
Francis told the congregation that he had come to see his brothers, naming the relationship in kinship terms rather than describing the visit as a formal ecumenical gesture alone.
What the Caserta visit changed for Pentecostalism's standing was placing a sitting pope inside a Pentecostal congregation for the first time in either tradition's history, pairing that visit with a direct papal apology for a persecution the Catholic Church had taken part in under Fascist Italy.