From Conflict to Communion

The Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity has recently released a comprehensive report entitled “From Conflict to Communion:  Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017":

In 2017, Lutheran and Catholic Christians will commemorate together the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. Lutherans and Catholics today enjoy a growth in mutual understanding, cooperation and respect. They have come to acknowledge that more unites than divides them:  above all, common faith in the Triune God and the revelation in Jesus Christ, as well as recognition of the basic truths of the doctrine of justification...

What happened in the past cannot be changed but what is remembered of the past and how it is remembered can, with the passage of time, indeed change. Remembrance makes the past present. While the past itself is unalterable, the presence of the past in the present is alterable. In view of 2017, the point is not to tell a different history, but to tell that history differently.

The report gives an overview of the history of Lutheran-Catholic relations and identifies five ecumenical imperatives:

1. Catholics and Lutherans should always begin from the perspective of unity and not from the point of view of division in order to strengthen what is held in common even though the differences are more easily seen and experienced
2. Lutherans and Catholics must let themselves continuously be transformed by the encounter with the other and by the mutual witness of faith
3. Catholics and Lutherans should again commit themselves to seek visible unity, to elaborate together what this means in concrete steps, and to strive repeatedly toward this goal
4. Lutherans and Catholics should jointly rediscover the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ for our time
5. Catholics and Lutherans should witness together to the mercy of God in proclamation and service to the world

Click here to view the report