Word: wittenberg
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Reverent gayety at Augsburg, Bavarian city on the River Lech, last week celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. Martin Luther, who all his adult life suffered with nervous headaches and sometimes with hallucinations, in 1517 posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg. They were an effective protest against "abuses" of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther as a heretic. Emperor Charles V outlawed him. Had he been arrested and convicted for his heresies, he would have been burned at the stake. German princelings, many of their subjects...
...Archbishop recalled that when Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg he had no intention of separating from Rome but that later "Rome expelled him from fellowship with the worldly Papal power." Queried the Archbishop: "Would the Rome of today with its sense also of spiritual values have done the same...
...Wittenberg, such a seat would be historically most fitting. But in Scandinavia more than in Germany has Lutheranism flowered. The Archbishop could not help but think and hope thai Upsala, his home and the seat of Sweden's archbishopric, might some day be chosen as capital of Lutheranism. There, where once stood a glittering heathen temple, now stands as fine a Lutheran Cathedral as there is in the world, just west of where students in white velvet caps bordered in black stroll through the halls of the Oxford, the Heidelberg, the Sorbonne of Scandinavia, Upsala University...
...everyone knows, Luther at one time occupied the chair of philosophy of the University of Wittenberg; he was a master and a doctor; he was a writer and thinker of great political and religious consequence...
Such a view was not surprising among followers of the Saintly German peasant whose ecclesiastical reveries, nailed on a church door at Wittenberg four centuries ago, divided all Germany (and many another country later) into Protestant and Catholic political parties...