Vatican City, Oct 31, 2017 / 10:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Reformation anniversary gives us a renewed impetus to work for reconciliation, said a statement released jointly Tuesday by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation.
“We recognize that while the past cannot be changed, its influence upon us today can be transformed to become a stimulus for growing communion, and a sign of hope for the world to overcome division and fragmentation,” it said Oct. 31.
“Again, it has become clear that what we have in common is far more than that which still divides us.”
The statement was released to mark the end of the year of common commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity is the Roman Curia’s office for ecumenism, while the Lutheran World Federation is the largest communion of Lutheran ecclesial communities. In the US, the Lutheran World Federation includes the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but neither the Missouri nor Wisconsin Synods.
The common commemoration was opened last year with an ecumenical prayer service between Lutherans and Catholics at the Lutheran cathedral in Lund, Sweden during the Pope’s Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2016 visit.
During the service, Catholics and Lutherans read out five joint ecumenical commitments, including the commitment to always begin from a perspective of unity. Pope Francis and Munib Younan, then-president of the Lutheran World Federation and Lutheran bishop of Jordan and the Holy Land, also signed a joint statement.
Quoting the 2016 declaration between Pope Francis and Younan, this year’s statement acknowledged the pain of disunity, particularly that caused by the inability to share in the Eucharist.
“We acknowledge our joint pastoral responsibility to respond to the spiritual thirst and hunger of our people to be one in Christ. We long for this wound in the Body of Christ to be healed. This is the goal of our ecumenical endeavors, which we wish to advance, also by renewing our commitment to theological dialogue,” the statement declared.
The new statement also emphasized the commitment to continue this journey toward unity “guided by God’s Spirit…according to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
With God’s help, we hope to continue to seek “substantial consensus” on issues pertaining to the Church, Eucharist, and ministry, it said. “With deep joy and gratitude we trust ‘that He who has begun a good work in [us] will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ’.”
They gave thanksgiving for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation, as well as the need to ask forgiveness for failures and the ways in which “Christians have wounded the Body of Christ and offended each other” over the past 500 years.
One positive effect of the past year’s common commemoration has been viewing the Reformation with an ecumenical perspective for the first time, it concluded.
“In the face of so many blessings along the way, we raise our hearts in praise of the Triune God for the mercy we receive.”
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Oh please!
Path to unity – convert heretics.
The 1999 “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” was co-signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church.
But, continued divergence on the nature of man and specifically on the meaning of “concupiscence” (versus total depravity) now divides the Catholic Church itself—between the obfuscation of Fiducia Supplicans (blessing irregular “couples,” especially homosexual) and those Catholic domains which explicitly uphold both the “objectively disordered” nature of homosexual tendencies and the immorality of homosexual actions (namely, the apostolic witnessing of continental Africa, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and parts of Argentina, France and Spain, etc.)
In the published “Declaration”, the brief PREFACE reads, in part, “The solemn confirmation of this Joint Declaration on 31 October 1999 in Augsburg, by means of the Official Common Statement with its ANNEX [!], represents an ecumenical event of historical significance.”
NOTE that the integral ANNEX provides clarity on the still remaining distinction between salvation by grace alone, versus the Catholic doctrine of faith & works, that fallen man is not totally depraved, but rather suffers only from concupiscence as the inclination (only)toward sin.
The five-page ANNEX reads in part: “The concept of ‘concupiscence’ is used in different senses on the Catholic and Lutheran sides. In the Lutheran Confessional writings ‘concupiscence’ is understood as the self-seeking desire of the human being, which in light of the law, spiritually understood, is regarded as sin. In the Catholic understanding concupiscence is an inclination, remaining in human beings even after baptism, which comes from sin and presses toward sin [….]” The precisely clarifying ANNEX is excluded from the on-line Lutheran version of the jointly-signed Declaration.
ECUMENICAL UNITY depends firstly upon unity in our doctrinal understanding of the unity of man. And, therefore, the connection between restored interior truth and external actions—and the particularity of moral absolutes as reaffirmed in the neglected Veritatis Splendor (1993).