The Reformation Revisited

By Richard N. Ostling

Luther's Germany offers the Pope his most demanding tour yet

A monsignor looked at the cold downpour that greeted Pope John Paul II upon his arrival at the Cologne airport Nov. 15 and said lightheartedly, "Luther's revenge at last." The chill was more than meteorological. The land of Martin Luther offered John Paul the coolest reception he has had so far.

He won over his audiences, nonetheless, with sermons in fluent German and his personal warmth. He joshed a boy about skipping school to greet him, and prayed that kidnapers would release an eleven-year-old girl being held for ransom near Karlsruhe. The size of the crowds was modest only by John Paul's usual standards. More than half a million braved stiff breezes for a youth Mass at Munich's Oktoberfest grounds.

One reason for the initial chill was history. He was, after all, touring the homeland of the Protestant Reformation. The West German population is about equally divided between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and includes more than a third of the world's 70 million Lutherans. But a good deal of the edginess was due to some undiplomatic doings by German Catholics. Before the papal visit, the hierarchy passed out 40,000 copies of a booklet in which Historian Remigius Baumer flailed away at the heresies of Martin Luther, referring to his "sadistic" writings, "excessive anger and polemicism" and deploring his marriage to an ex-nun, which was described as "a sacrilegious wedding, stained by fornication." Before the visit, too, the German bishops had intruded in the national elections with a heavyhanded pastoral letter that criticized not only liberalized laws on abortion and divorce but things like the ballooning national debt.

Liberal Catholics are also angry with John Paul's Vatican for declaring that Father Hans Kueng no longer be considered a "Catholic theologian." This order forced Kueng's official removal last April from the Catholic theology faculty at the University of Tuebingen, where he still teaches as a free-floating professor. Kueng was in the U.S. and Britain during John Paul's visit. The Pope never mentioned him by name, but in a meeting with theologians he defended the duty of church authorities to preserve divine truth. Elsewhere he ridiculed the idea of people shopping, "self-service," for their beliefs.

Kueng, Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Heinrich Boll and 133 other prominent Europeans publicly petitioned Rome to ease up in its objections to married priests, birth control, divorce and mixed marriage (47% of German Catholics now marry outside their faith). Here and there on the tour picketers protested about abortion and birth control, or held such placards as Frauen zum Altar (women to the altar). At the Pope's last stop, Barbara Engl, speaking for Munich's Catholic youth league, attacked the church for constant "prohibitions" on "friendship, sexuality and partnership."

John Paul did not yield much on basic is sues. But his conservative line on Catholic doctrine was balanced by disarming messages to West Germany's Jews and to Muslim immigrant workers ("You belong also to a grand line of pilgrims who from the time of Abraham have always sought to find the true God"). Most notable was his conciliatory approach to Protestants.

This year is the 450th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, an early and central creed of Lutheranism. Lutherans presented it as a statement of their doctrinal agreements and disagreements with Rome at an unsuccessful conference called by the Emperor Charles V, in the hope of reuniting Western Christendom.

With considerably more grace than Baumer, John Paul cited the 450th anni versary and told a gathering of Lutheran leaders that Catholics must take their share of the blame for Luther's great schism: "We must do what unites. We owe that to God and the world." But when Lutheran Bishop Eduard Lohse pressed bluntly for joint Communion, John Paul said that full doctrinal agreement must come first.

The Pope's tour was a step forward, however. It followed a substantive break through. Earlier this year Lutheran and Catholic negotiators stated that despite differences on many practices, the content of the Augsburg Confession "in large measure . . . can be regarded as an expression of the common faith." The principal doctrinal dispute that produced the Reformation was faith vs. good works in salvation.

On that subject, the negotiators offered a remarkable joint statement: "It is solely by grace and by faith in Christ's saving work, and not because of any merit in us, that we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit who . . . calls us to good works." That is just about what Luther was trying to say when he split the church asunder. --

by Lee Griggs/Munich and Wilton Wynn with the Pope

With reporting by Lee Griggs, Wilton Wynn

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