2017 has seen Pope Francis visit Sweden to mark the 500th
anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation. He both traced the
positive aspects to Martin Luther’s religious thought and personality, praising
him as a great Reformer, as well as warning Catholics of the present day of the
dangers five centuries ago that contributed to the split, and that threaten the
peace and future reconciliation in the present time: worldliness, corruption,
greed, lust for power in the Church rather than the Church’s life of grace, the
simplicity of “faith alone” in the power of God, and absolute hope and trust in
the love of Christ for sinners, his forgiveness and our redemption.
Since all these virtues can be recognised in the lives of
spiritual Catholics we know, and saints we venerate, and all the vices likewise
penetrate all sides of humanity’s condition in the world, not just one Church
or another, the large unanswered question is: why was it necessary to divide
the Church in order to pursue the good and drive out the bad? What conviction,
what principle is so inviolable that it stands above the Church’s unity in
faith?
Advocates of the benefits of the Reformation have in recent
years said that the breach was the result of a misunderstanding. At our events
ten years ago to commemorate the martyrs on both sides, seeing that they were
faithful unto death and paradoxically reached union with Christ in His
sacrifice as they indicated the concrete possibility of our reconciliation in
the world, one Anglican speaker remarked that Thomas Bilney, the first to lose
his life under Henry VIII for Reformation ideas -and a heroic figure to the
Protestants who came after him - would not have turned a hair at Vatican II,
with his suggestions of reading the Bible in Church in English and the
correction of abuses in spiritual matters (for unimpeachably Catholic reasons).
Recently, the Catholic journalist Peter Stanford wrote a book that imagines how
Martin Luther would have looked to us if he had emerged today. The case he
proposes is that the perspective of today’s Catholic Church would have been
able to address his concerns and embrace him through dialogue within the Church,
welcome the spiritual renewal Luther wanted, correct Church governance and sponsor
other good developments in the Church’s life. It would also re-balance his more
extreme views, without disruption to communion. What if? Vatican II indeed
called for the People of God to discover the Scriptures for themselves,
expanding the amount read in the Liturgy, and permitting their proclamation in
the vernacular. Under Pope St John Paul an agreement was reached between
Catholics and Lutherans (since assented to by Methodists and Anglicans) on our
justification by faith: that it is on account of the gift from God of faith in
Christ that we are made righteous, not by good works - these are the essential
fruits of faith and righteousness, for goodness in thought, word and deed are indispensable
if our faith is real, thorough-going and authentic. The future Pope Benedict
oversaw this agreement to overcome the great argument that stirred the
Reformation movement; he later turned on a group of Protestant theologians from
Germany and said, “If you had been truly Lutheran, we would have been one by
now.”
Yet Luther went further than the desire for spiritual
renewal, reform to governance, and better participation of the people in
worship and sacrament to their daily conversion. He re-cast the Eucharist so
that it appeared the same way as before, but concealed the loss of the Roman
Canon (which was never heard by the people), and so removed the Eucharistic
sacrifice and the core purpose of priesthood. There is an echo in England among
Catholic recusants who still say, “Protestants think that our forebears died
for the Pope; we know they died for the Mass.” Luther rejected not only the
activities of the papacy of its day, but the need for a universal pastor
cementing, ensuring and providing for the Church’s unity altogether. He
envisaged the universal Church on earth to be an association of local churches,
differently reformed and reshaped with a united confession of faith, rather
than as a visible, organic whole. Yet his common confession could not be
agreed. Identifying Catholic bishops as temporal lords, he viewed the
episcopate as not essential for apostolic succession, but merely beneficial for
pastoral organisation and the better preaching of the Gospel. He also found
that, because his Reformation movement relied on protection and nurture from
princes who used it to flex their independent muscles from the authority of the
Catholic Emperor, he needed to back Philip of Hesse, and emboldened him to
marry again, even though his wife yet lived. The Reformers Bucer and
Melanchthon concurred. The assault on
the bond of matrimony was famously emulated in England by Cranmer and directly
led to the martyrdoms of the Carthusians and Thomas More.
To summarise: even if there were great misunderstandings on
points of belief and the interpretation of the Scriptures, there was a
deliberate intention to alter the fundamental faith and order of the one Church
across time and place; and this translated into practice and thus into division
with pain and suffering on all sides.
It is sad to reflect that this division could have been
avoided because reformation was already a vital movement of spiritual renewal within
the Catholic Church. The popular Devotio
Moderna, the Imitation of Christ, the piety concerning the passion of
Christ and His redemption, the reform of the Carmelite Order with St Teresa of
Avila and St John of the Cross, the emergence of St Ignatius Loyala and the
Society of Jesus all bear witness. They rest on earlier renewal movements in
the Church which are still potent to this day as well: the Franciscan and
Dominican preaching friars. And it is often claimed in English history
perspective that the Reformation took hold here to correct corruption and
abuse, and recover the Church’s pristine purity. Yet those who were at the
forefront of pastoral, spiritual, and theological renewal in the life and
mission of English Church people in the1530s, well aware of the breach that had
arisen in Germany and now the Low Countries and France, were the Carthusians,
the Brigettines and the Franciscans who were among the first to lose their
lives under Henry VIII. He shut down a Catholic renewal because a reinvigorated
Church, articulate with its own Catholic mind, could challenge dependency on
royal power and policy. When the Carthusians in London met in chapter to weigh
the consequences of their decision to oppose Henry’s marriage outside the law
of Christ, the account describes what can only be described as a charismatic
renewal as the Holy Spirit came upon them. They knew they faced their deaths. One
wonders what might have happened to England and its Church had the renewal been
allowed to proceed. Eamon Duffy, in his book Fires of Faith, describes how, under Henry’s daughter, Mary I,
England becomes the laboratory for implementing the reforms emerging from the
Council of Trent. The lessons of the Protestant Reformation had been observed,
and here was to be a proper reform in continuity with the common faith of the
Church, clarified, freshly re-proclaimed, with integrity. No turning the clock back, but a fully
Catholic reformation of the Church, its preaching and teaching, the celebration
of the sacraments and the presentation above all of the Mass. But the rupture
had already happened, and with Mary’s death her popular movement died too.
The instinct against rupture and recovering a lost
continuity within the one Church of Christ – one flock under one shepherd – was
what caused the League’s founders to draw attention to the scandal and violence
of schism and its consequences: in England, two provinces of the Latin Church
were detached, and every evangelistic, sacramental and pastoral effort was
needed to repair the breach. This was not only to reveal once more the
essential unity of the Body of Christ in the world, but also to give a
convincing account of the hope the lies within us. The gospel of reconciliation
in Christ is hardly compelling when Christians themselves are unreconciled. Yet
it looks more and more difficult to imagine how the Anglican Communion and the
Catholic Church, nowadays with more pronounced differences on faith and order,
can find the path of reunion. But we now call that “instinct against rupture”
ecumenism, and we press on, because this is integral to Catholicity.
Thus Lund in Sweden was chosen for the meeting between the
Pope and the leaders of the Lutheran and other reformation Churches for two
reasons. First, it was in 1952 at Lund that the Faith & Order Conference of
the World Council of Churches adopted the principle that Churches should act
together in all matters, except those in which deep differences of conviction
compel them to act separately. Subsequently, the Catholic Church has supported
this at the local level and with the encouragement of the successors of Peter.
Secondly, Sweden is a country in which Catholics faced civil restrictions on
work and freedom of religion into the 1970s; so it is a country where
rapprochement and reconciliation – the dialogue of love – has been hard won in
very recent memory. It encourages us not to dwell on the failures of the past
that we have been formed by, or to believe that the cause of Christian unity
has become futile. Still less does it permit us to become further estranged
from other Christians, seeing that the events of so long ago seem to explain
why we still walk on divergent pathways. Instead, as Swedish Lutherans and
Catholics found, the Spirit continues to come upon us, and surprise us with his
power to bring us closer in Christ. The great Metropolitan Kallistos Ware often
says that unity when it comes can only be achieved by a miracle; but that does
not mean we are to be passive – ours is the task is to take down what barriers
we can, because these are usually ones that we have erected. The miracle will
come when we have faithfully done this good work by God’s grace.
So, marking the 500th anniversary of the
beginning of the Lutheran Reformation is a time to face honestly what happened,
to thank God for any good and saving gift that emerged, to lament the divisions
and the harm they have visited upon the Church and the world, but above all to
love and long for the unity of Christ’s people, “that they may be one”, as
indivisibly as the Father and the Son are one. As Catholics, our instinct is
not to add to division and polarisation, but always to work for healing and
reconciliation. MW
