Word: lutheranism
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...Augustine's House, near Oxford, Mich., is marked by observance of the traditional hours of the divine office. It is a life much like that of any Benedictine priest in the Roman Catholic Church-but Father Kreinheder is not a Catholic. He is the first and only Lutheran monk in U.S. history...
Despite his Romish ways, Father Kreinheder, 57, has a deeply rooted Lutheran faith; his father was a Missouri Synod pastor, and his mother's family founded a Lutheran congregation near Waynesboro, Va., before the American Revolution. After serving as the skipper of a subchaser during World War II, Kreinheder increasingly felt a vocation to the church, but found the opportunities within U.S. Lutheranism too restricted. Then he read (in TIME, Aug. 2, 1948) about the famed French Protestant religious community at Taiz...
...Monastery. "I found what I had been looking for," he recalls, "a place where a Lutheran could become a monk." After briefly testing his vocation at Taizé, Kreinheder gave up his job as a merchandise manager for Detroit's J. L. Hudson department store to study in Sweden for the ministry, and after his ordination in 1956 decided to try organizing a Taizé-style community...
Group Conversions. Kreinheder has a passionate interest in Christian unity. He is the U.S. secretary of the League for Evangelical-Catholic Reunion, founded by members of Die Sammlung (The Gathering), a German Lutheran group that prays and works for the union of their church with Rome. This ecumenicism keeps Kreinheder from joining the Roman Catholic Church, which many Lutherans think he might as well do. "Individual conversions are not going to be the answer to unity," he says. ''When the move is made by a group, then we will have true unity, and that is what...
Luther himself was not opposed to monasteries, Kreinheder argues, and church tradition clearly authorizes marriage and celibacy as valid Christian vocations. Today, however, the Lutheran called to celibacy "has the choice of living his life out in solitude and loneliness as a bachelor, or becoming a Catholic or Anglican monk." Kreinheder blames "my own inexperience and my own inadequacy" for St. Augustine's slow start. "I don't say that I'm the perfect man to start this, but who else? Someone has to begin," he argues...