Bishops blocked Luther U-turn

By VivIANE FlimITT IN ROME POPE JOHN PAUL 11 backed down at the last minute from cancelling the excommunication order of archProtestant Martin Luther, due to protests from German Catholic bishops.
In revelations from Germany published the very week of the Pope's threeday visit to the country, the German news magazine Focus claims that the Pope felt such a gesture "inopportune" in the interests of Christian unity.
The magazine also stresses that the German Episcopate urged the Pontiff to think again on the grounds that, while ecumenical talks continue between the Vatican and German Lutheranism, the gesture would be "premature".
An appeal to the Pope to lift the 1521 excommunication order on Luther, who died 450 years ago this year, has been lodged by the leading German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schorlemmer.
Schorlemmer also asked John Paul to visit "the tomb of the reformer who wrought a division in the Church because of guilt on both sides".
The papal gesture, it is thought, would have been a follow-up on developments over a year ago in Lutheran. Catholic dialogue.
A joint ecumenical commission concluded after several years of study that One of the main theological obstacles to unity between Catholicism and Protestantism the Protestant tenet of "justification by faith alone" could be overcome.
The joint commission had been formed on the Pope's request during his first visit to Germany in 1980.
At the conclusion of the commission's studies the Pope agreed that it had discovered that "much more of the common Christian inheritance had remained than we thought".
During his visit this weekend to Berlin and Paderborn, John Paul II will meet with representatives of Protestant churches, both Lutheran and Reform, and delegates from Germany's Council of Christian Churches.