Pope urges Lutherans not to ‘water down’ faith

POPE’S ADDRESS TO LUTHERANS
BY JOHN THAVIS
VISITING the land of Martin Luther last Friday, Pope Benedict XVI prayed for Christian unity and told Lutheran leaders that secularisation and Christian fundamentalism pose challenges to ecumenism today.
The Pope said in a meeting with 15 representatives of the German Evangelical Church Council: “God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever remote past. Are we to yield to more pressure of secularisation and become modern by watering down the faith?” The meeting in the central German city of Erfurt, followed by a joint prayer service, was the ecumenical highlight of the Pope’s visit. He stopped to pray in Erfurt Cathedral, where Luther was ordained a Catholic priest in 1507, and then met Lutheran leaders in the former Augustinian friary where Luther lived until 1511.
The Pope listened as a mixed Catholic-Lutheran choir sang hymns in the vaulted chapter house of the former friary, which has become a memorial to Luther, the founder of the Reformation.
Before the Pope’s arrival in Germany there had been speculation that he would make a crucial ecumenical announcement or concession. But during the prayer service in the church of the ancient monastery, the Pope said this conjecture was a “political misreading of faith and of ecumenism”.
Progress in Christian unity was not like negotiating a treaty, he said. Ecumenism will advance when Christians enter more deeply into their shared faith and profess it more openly in society, he said. The Pope’s talks did not examine major ecumenical issues that have been taken up by Catholics and Lutherans in recent years. Instead, he focused on the common need to witness the Christian faith in a broken world.
The key issue today was the issue of God, just as in Luther’s time, he said. But while Luther struggled with how to receive God’s grace, that question appeared less crucial to modern society, he said. “For who is actually concerned about this today, even among Christians?” he said.
Most Christians today presume that God will mercifully overlook their small failings, the Pope said.
“But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage?” he said. In the face of the drug trade, poverty, hunger and violence in the name of religion, Christians should conclude that “evil is no small matter”, he said.
“Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, [evil] could not be so powerful,” he added.
This witness of the faith should take concrete form in defence of the human being “from conception to death – from issues of prenatal diagnosis to the question of euthanasia”, he argued. That is especially important at a time of ethical erosion, he said. The Pope said this common witness had been made more difficult by the rise of fundamentalist groups that were spreading with “overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways”, leaving mainstream Christian denominations at a loss.
“This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us – for better and for worse?” he said.
Germany’s Lutheran leaders had requested the encounter with the Pope, and Vatican officials said he was more than happy to make it the main event of his second day in Germany. Pope Benedict has long appreciated Luther’s writings and occasionally cites him in his talks.
The ecumenical service featured a reading of Psalm 146 from Luther’s translation of the Bible, in what Vatican officials said was a papal sign of respect. It began: “Praise the Lord, my soul; I will praise the Lord all my life, sing praise to my God while I live.” Luther entered the Erfurt friary in 1505 against the wishes of his father, who foresaw a career in law for his son. By the time he left Erfurt nearly seven years later, Luther was already questioning Catholic teaching about how sin is forgiven and grace is received – a divergence that would lead to his break with Rome and the start of the Reformation in 1517.
The Pope said that despite the split, Christian churches still had much that united them. He said the error of the Reformation period was that “for the most part we could only see what divided us”.
Rev Nikolaus Schneider, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, welcomed the Pope in a talk that also emphasised areas of agreement. At the same time he said that many Germans, especially those in interdenominational marriages, would like to “partake more freely in Eucharistic fellowship”.
His words touched on a sensitive issue for Lutherans. The Catholic Church teaches that the Eucharist is generally to be shared only by those who fully profess the same faith and share Catholic beliefs about the sacraments.
Seated in the front row were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Lutheran, and German President Christian Wulff, a Catholic married to a Lutheran.
Mr Schneider said that in the runup to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation Catholics and Lutherans should consider if Luther could be a bridge for both churches. He said Luther’s theological approach of seeking God despite uncertainty had never been more relevant.
“It is time to heal the memories of the mutual injuries in the Reformation period,” he said.