Posted on 04/09/2013 7:53:00 AM PDT by marshmallow
The head of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Dr Nikolaus Schneider, has said he is hopeful for future Christian unity after meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican.
Dr Schneider had been scheduled to meet Pope Benedict XVI during an early April trip to Rome. Instead, he spent about 30 minutes with Pope Francis on Monday in the papal library in the Apostolic Palace.
“I hope a Pope who shows himself so close to the poor and the suffering also shows his understanding of couples who share everything except Communion,” he told reporters. In Germany where tens of thousands of Catholics are married to Protestants, broader permission to receive Communion in each others’ churches is something many people have been seeking for years.
The Lutheran pastor praised the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger for his important contributions to the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran theological agreement on justification, the dispute at the heart of the Protestant Reformation; and he described as “historic” Pope Benedict’s decision in 2011 to visit the former Augustinian monastery where Luther lived until 1511.
But he said the German-born Pope also “offended” Protestants when, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he insisted in 2000 that Protestant communities were not “churches in the proper sense” because they have not preserved apostolic succession among their bishops, nor a traditional understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
However, it is fundamentally different from the beliefs of Lutherans on the Eucharist. And this was the root cause of the Prussian Union wherein the King of Prussia (I think it was pre-Kaiser times) forced together the Calvinists and Lutherans into one Church
It was also why many Germans came here.
I believe that would be correct.
That is correct.
Many Lutherans make many claims but there is no connection with them and Apostolic Succession; that is, they are all laymen, even their ministers.
If the Lutheran spouse converts to the one, true Faith, then they will be able to share Holy Communion.
Done and done.
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