Germany Catholics wary about major Luther festivities

[rug]

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS | Wed Oct 31, 2012 12:25pm EDT

PARIS (Reuters) - It's rare to be invited to an event five years off and even rarer to bicker about its details, but Germany's Catholic Church finds itself in that delicate situation thanks to an overture from its Protestant neighbors.

German Protestants are planning jubilee celebrations in 2017 to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's launching of the Reformation, a major event in the history of Christianity, of Europe and of the German nation, language and culture.

The Protestants have invited the Catholics to join in, a gesture in harmony with the good relations the two halves of German Christianity enjoy and the closeness many believers feel across the denominational divide.

But even after five centuries, being asked to commemorate a divorce that split western Christianity and led to many bloody religious wars is still hard for some Catholics to swallow.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/31/us-germany-religion-luther-idUSBRE89U14W20121031

Here is the Joint Declaration issued thrteen years ago.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html

[mykpart]

1. In my Catholic grade school in the 1950s,

the Reformation was referred to in our history books as The Protestant Revolt. Martin Luther was described as mentally disturbed and was said to have a "scrupulous conscience." I was grown before I realized that to Protestants he was considered the greatest evangelist of all time. Even though Vatican II made some of the changes recommended by Luther and even though we now sing some of his hymns at Mass, and even though I'm pretty laid back about Protestants and even consider myself "saved," I don't really know that I want to actually celebrate the launching of the Reformation. I think it is sad that it happened.

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2. If nothing else, Martin was a brave man who helped reshaped Christianity

Martin spoke out during a time when the church's preferred method of dealing with people who disagreed with it involved setting them on fire or torturing them until they recanted. It would have been far easier for him to have remained silent and continued in a cushy teaching job in Wittenburg. But he took the harder path and helped opened Christianity to new ways of worshiping Christ.