Word: lutheranism
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John Paul engaged in diplomacy of an entirely different sort last week, becoming the first Pope to preach in a Lutheran church and the first to join in any Protestant worship in Italy. The place was the severe, white stone Christuskirche (Christ Church), which mainly serves the German diplomatic and business community. A group of Lutherans had approached John Paul when he visited a nearby Catholic parish in 1982 and asked, "Won't you come and visit our church too?" The Pope later raised the subject with the local pastor, Christoph Meyer...
Arriving at the church, the Pope greeted worshipers along the aisles as TV cameras followed his every gesture. There was no applause from the congregation, rather bowing of heads and smiles, the result not of chilliness but of Lutheran formality. Instead of his magisterial miter, the Pope wore a simple white skullcap. Equality was stressed even in such details as the size and placement of each chair...
...neither letter nor homily gave any indication that John Paul is about to foster closer Catholic-Lutheran relations. Explains a Vatican prelate who is very close to John Paul: "This Pope understands there can be no merger of Catholic and Protestant churches for many, many years, and probably many generations." But combined with John Paul's visit to the mother church of Anglicanism at Canterbury in 1982, the Lutheran service was one more step in the long process of reunification...
...were visible in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the official party newspaper Neues Deutschland published an open letter to Party Leader Erich Honecker last October, deploring both the NATO deployment and the threatened "retaliatory" deployment of new Soviet short-range missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the letter, Lutheran clergy and parishioners from a suburb of Dresden declared themselves "horrified by the very thought" of the dual deployment, and urged Honecker to support a Scandinavian call for a European nuclear-free zone. Open criticism of both sides in the missile dispute has become a regular feature of local...
...conciliatory tone of your article on Martin Luther [Oct. 31]. As a result of the Second Vatican Council, some of Luther's insights have now found acceptance in the Roman Catholic Church and have caused the church to experience another but more peaceful reformation. I am a former Lutheran seminarian who is now a confirmed Catholic. I could not have converted without Vatican II's reforming influence...