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The Reformation 37: Luther Meets Rome; It Does Not Go Well.

6/27/2019

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A year after Luther’s inaugural statement of theological grievances in 1517, he was finally summoned to Rome to recant his errors. This would not be the academic colloquium that Luther had demanded in his 95 theses, but rather, something akin to an ecclesiastical trial. His failure to recant before Pope Leo X or his representative could very well cost him his life. A century earlier, the Czech reformer Jan Hus was granted a safe-conduct protection to expound his theology before the Council of Constance, but the pledge was not honored, and Hus was imprisoned, tried, and burned at the stake during the Council in 1415.
 
But Luther was more fortunate in that he enjoyed the protection of Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who put forward a somewhat safer scenario for Luther’s major encounter with Rome. In the fall of 1518, a general meeting [or “diet”] of the Holy Roman Empire was scheduled to take place in Augsburg, a German city in Bavaria. It was well known that one of the most powerful Cardinals in Rome, Thomas Cajetan, would address the assembly, most urgently on matters of financial support for wars against the Turks in eastern Europe. Frederick reasoned that Luther’s personal safety would be best assured in German lands where Cajetan, so to speak, would prosecute away from his home field. Luther’s confrontation would take place under the protection of his friends.
 
It is remarkable that this plan was approved by all parties, some with more reluctance than others. The Emperor Maximilian regarded Luther a trouble-making heretic, but he, like the many German princes, believed that holding the trial in Augsburg was a way of asserting power against the Italians. Resentment against Roman taxes is an undercurrent of the Reformation that should not be overlooked. Frederick the Wise shared the tax resentment, but he also seemed to have some affinity for Luther the person and protected him to the degree his was able.
 
The Diet of Augsburg did not go well for Cardinal Cajetan, whose ecclesiastical hubris may have blinded him to the problems he would face on German soil. The Diet itself addressed the “Turkish tax” issue, with German unanimity that no funds would be forthcoming. Moreover, the full extent of German animus poured forth; one representative protested how “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps.” The Diet used the opportunity to complain about the poor quality of priests being sent to Germany, and the meeting ended with the Diet pleading “Let the Holy Pope stop these abuses.” [Metaxas, 143]
 
Having failed miserably at his first task, Cajetan then turned his attention to Luther. It is my conjecture that, having seen the depths of German resentment toward Vatican practices, Cajetan saw greater urgency in bringing Luther to his knees in submission. Frederick arranged for a private meeting between Luther and Cajetan, but he worried that Cajetan might have Luther kidnapped and spirited in chains to Rome. When Luther arrived in Augsburg, he was not invited to see Cajetan immediately, but met instead with Vatican officials who labored to convince him of the importance of his recanting his arguments from the 95 Theses. Luther, who had longed for the opportunity to bring his reforms to Church life, made it clear that having arrived before the highest authorities of the Church, he was not going away until his arguments had been addressed.
 
Luther’s ire was raised by his treatment from the Cardinal’s representatives, and he was more determined than ever to face off with Cajetan. He was angered that Cajetan’s entourage boiled down the conflict to what they considered a sole issue: disobedience to the pope, Leo X. Luther’s theses, by contrast, were a comprehensive treatment of multiple subjects on the matter of forgiveness, indulgences, religious disposition, and the pure intentions of the Bishop of Rome. He was further annoyed at thinly veiled personal threats, such as his potential loss of the protection provided by Frederick. If anything, his pre-Cajetan briefings had solidified his determination to have it out here and now; he was, at this point in his life, ready to die on principle.
 
Finally, on October 12, 1518, the two men met face to face for the first time. Luther could not know that Cajetan carried no portfolio from Leo to debate Luther’s theses; his one task was obtaining a recant from the Augustinian monk. Cajetan attempted to treat Luther as a wayward son whose mischief was causing more trouble than he realized. But as Luther pressed for specific examples of his errors, Cajetan went beyond his mandate and highlighted this one, that Luther denied the pope’s right to access the merits of Christ and the saints and utilize them for the sale of indulgences. Luther replied, and in doing so he shone the light on the issue probably most to the heart of the Reformation, the power of Sacred Scripture.
 
Luther agreed with Cajetan’s formulation, but then he asked the Cardinal where in the Bible were these privileges of the pope to be found in the first place. [Thus, the central question was posed: what is the ultimate authority by which all earthly religious matters are to be judged.] Luther believed in the collective holiness of the Church, but he could not countenance what the Church was doing with indulgences. Cajetan from the start had badly underestimated Luther’s academic acumen, and with no intention of conducting a long debate, he sprung a surprise on his opponent by producing an obscure 1343 papal bull from Clement VI, an authorization for the practice of indulgences to which Luther objected. He waved it about with repeated cries of “Do you believe this or don’t you?” Cajetan was certain he had thrown his knockout punch.
 
Unfortunately for Cajetan, Luther was familiar with the 1343 document, probably more so than the Cardinal. More to the point, Luther was growing conscious of the influence and direction of his arguments for the future of the Church. He would not give Cajetan a yes-or-no answer, but instead he asked for time to consider a nuanced response. This was not the response Cajetan had hoped for. His mandate from Rome called for the eliciting a yes-or-no on the question of obedience to the pope. Frustrated, the Cardinal waited for several days until Luther resumed their meeting. In this second encounter, Luther pointed out that the 1347 papal bull did not say what the Cardinal claimed it did. Luther later wrote that “Cajetan was all of a sudden confused, and since he did not want to appear confused, he pushed on to other things and shrewdly wanted to bypass this subject.”
 
But as they continued, Luther came to a shocking realization. Metaxas records it this way: “And yet in all of this, Luther’s greatest fears were realized. He saw that the Cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them. The theological foolishness of this, and the disturbing evidence of it, were horrifying to Luther. He saw now what he had deep down feared but desperately hoped could not be true: that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this.” [p. 150]
 
Cajetan’s second point of contention with Luther in this meeting was Luther’s contention that it was one’s faith that produced God’s forgiveness. Luther had begun his reform with the idea that forgiveness and redemption could not be purchased; now he was progressing to more radical examination of the redemptive process within the sacrament of Penance. The Church taught, and still teaches, that forgiveness is rendered by the mediating absolution of the priest. Luther contended “it was the faith that mattered more than the priest’s actions,” [p. 151], basing his argument on Romans 1:17.
 
If Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Luther was now crossing the Tiber…in the opposite direction.
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The Reformation 36: Luther's Friends and Enemies

5/30/2019

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Thanks to wholesale and generally unauthorized publication of Luther’s 95 theses of 1517—which, thanks to the printing press, had reached as far as the attention of Henry VIII in England and Erasmus of Rotterdam within a year—the authorities in Rome became aware of its “German problem” and began to generate a response.  The actual date remains unknown. Technically speaking, the Curia was formally notified of Luther’s writings by his local bishop, Albrecht of Mainz, who sought papal advice when his own university advisors stepped back from the controversial issues in play. But it is very likely that Johannes Tetzel, the Dominican whose indulgence crusade had stirred the ire of Luther in the first place, was reporting circumstances to Rome in a fashion certainly unfavorable to Luther. Tetzel, in fact, had already published his own retort to Luther, arguing that his foe was simply a disobedient cleric.
 
Rome, eventually apprised, took the simple position that Luther must recant his theses, and assigned the response to a Dominican curial official, Sylvester Prierias. His response, which he bragged he had written in three days, is an excellent template of the most unfortunate miscommunication that would mark all of Luther’s subsequent dealings with Rome. Prierias did not address any of Luther’s theological concerns but focused instead upon the simple question of obedience. The Dominican wrote “He who does not accept the Doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome, as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic.” (Metaxas, pp. 133ff)
 
Over three centuries later the council Vatican I (1869-1870) would define the precise workings of papal authority and declare the pope infallible in certain prescribed circumstances. Theologians of the twentieth century would judge Prierias’ working definition of papal authority as “creeping infallibility” or the tendency to regard everything spoken by the pope to be infallible. (The “creeping infallibility” debate evidently continues to this day.) Luther never denied the power of the pope, and early in the Reformation he hoped that the pope himself would hear his case. The Vatican, time and again, would avoid direct discussion of the issues of reform and identify Luther as a disobedient son who needed to bring his thinking into conformity with the office of the papacy.
 
Prierias dashed off his rebuttal to Luther with a summons to appear in Rome in 60 days. Luther found Prierias’ arguments [or better, argument, since obedience seemed to be the only agenda] dumbfounding, almost humorous. He eventually responded to his Dominican opponent, and in doing so, he introduced Scripture into his defense for the first time. “Like an insidious devil you pervert the Scriptures. You say that the Church consists virtually in the pope.” [p. 134] It is easy to look back with the hindsight of history and postulate that history might have evolved differently had a more civil and academic approach been taken by Rome, for in 1518 this was exactly what Luther wanted to do, plead his case before the pope and his academics.
 
Had this controversy occurred two centuries earlier {John Wycliffe) or even one century earlier (Jan Hus), the matter would have been relatively easily solved—Rome would instruct the civil ruler of the place to seize a suspected heretic and deliver him or her to appropriate trial and possible imprisonment or death. But the playing field in 1518 was more complex; Luther concluded his hard correspondence with Prierias with a not-so-subtle reminder: “You make the pope into an emperor in power and violence. The Emperor Maximilian and the Germans will not tolerate this.” [p. 134]
 
Luther, to his good fortune, enjoyed a reasonably good relationship with the most powerful civil ruler in his region, the elector Frederick III of Saxony (1463-1525), known as “Frederick the Wise.” Luther’s story cannot be told without Frederick, who respected Luther as a scholar. It is ironic that Frederick agreed with Luther’s position on indulgences; the elector possessed a large collection of relics (thousands, according to various sources) for which he charged visitors and tourists fees for access, and he believed that the indulgence crusades were cutting into his profit margins.  
 
The papal court, in its dealings with Luther, was careful to tread lightly with Frederick, who with other princes in German lands was growing fatigued of papal taxes, particularly a levy to raise an army to halt the advance of the Turks in Eastern Europe. Moreover, Frederick held a vote in an upcoming congress to elect a new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, an election with vital papal interests, and there was concern in Rome to curry favor with Frederick for his vote. Frederick himself, in his dealings with Luther and Rome, seems to have understood his dilemma (as well as the reasons his university advisors had shied away from going on record, one way or the other.)
 
Under demand to appear in Rome, Luther feared that he would not get a fair hearing, and more to the point that he might be arrested and burned at the stake. On the other hand, he welcomed the opportunity to put forward his belief in the act of dive justification, the preeminence of Scripture, and the need for reform. Metaxas believes that at this juncture of his life Luther came to grips with the idea that he might become a martyr for his reform mission and made spiritual peace in trusting God, ready to accept whatever fate lie ahead in God’s providence.
 
In August 1518 Frederick decided to keep Luther safe in Saxony and successfully lobbied the Emperor Maximilian to cancel the order for Luther to appear in Rome. Luther would be judged in his homeland. Maximilian was not enamored with Luther, but he was favorable to the request on the grounds that it was advisable to remind Italians that there were limits on their power. As it happened, a regional meeting (or “diet”) was scheduled for September 1518 at Augsburg. Cardinal Cajetan would be participating as Vatican representative, and the Emperor Maximilian (no less opposed to Luther) determined that the Augsburg gathering would be an ideal time for Luther to face the Vatican directly for assessment and judgment. He ordered that Luther attend the Diet of Augsburg and address the full force of Church authority for the first time.  
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The Reformation 35: Luther Goes Viral

4/4/2019

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Despite contemporary popular belief to the contrary, Martin Luther was not “spoiling for a fight” when in 1517 he sent his 95 theses to his bishop, Albrecht of Mainz. He was requesting an orderly discussion of many Church practices, notably the sale of indulgences. Albrecht was not pleased to receive the correspondence; as noted in the last post, he himself was compromised by debt which he hoped to repay with a portion of the profits. However, he sympathized with certain of Luther’s points, even more surprising since Albrecht had purchased the bishop’s chair in Mainz, a sin known as simony. While Luther was well informed of the indulgence abuses, it is not clear if he knew that Albrecht had indulged in a purchase of his office. 

While Luther’s passions were driven by concerns for the universal Church, discussion of them began as a local attempt. It took Albrecht some time to respond, primarily because of his conflicted feelings. Luther at the time was a popular and gifted Scripture scholar, head of theological studies at the University of Wittenberg and the vicar general of eleven monasteries in the region. The bishop could hardly ignore the public work and influence of this Augustinian monk, but for conflicting reasons he was confused about how to proceed, and he passed the letter and theses to the theology faculty of the University of Mainz, which also deliberated for quite some time. It would be June of 1518 before true organized discussion took place, and by this time passions had been inflamed such that “debate” suffered at the hands of polemic.
 
[The actual 95 theses conflicted just about everyone who read them. If you have never read them yourself, here is the list of propositions, and ask yourself how you would have responded if you were a catechist or church officer at that time.]
 
In the year following the October 1517 local release, Luther corresponded with friends, passing along copies of the theses. One of its readers, a Humanist and printer Christopher Scheurl, was impressed and set about to reprint the theses in for bulk distribution “without the fussy legality of needing to obtain copyright permissions.” [Metaxas, p. 123f] Translated from Latin into German, more printers in Germany produced volumes that eventually spread to diverse readers and populations throughout Europe. The invention of the printing press less than a century before had made possible a sixteenth century version of “going viral.” From our own time, we know that social media reaches friend, foe, and the indifferent alike. Luther would write to Scheurl later stating that the printer’s taking of matters in his own hand had put Luther at a disadvantage, as the theological issues of the theses had outraced Luther’s opportunity to define them or develop them further. 

By March 1518, Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the greatest of the Renaissance thinkers, had come to possess a copy. Another made its way to [St.] Thomas More, future Chancellor of England at the service of Henry VIII prior to England’s break from Rome. Henry himself read the theses and was angered and disturbed; in 1521 the king was awarded the title “Defender of the Faith” for his writings against Luther. Closer to home, a copy made its way to Johannes Tetzel, the Dominican friar and promoter of the sale of indulgences that had so enraged Luther in the first place. Predictably, Tetzel was enraged. His work was not progressing well. As he and Bishop Albrecht were discovering to their chagrin, the cities of Mainz and Wittenberg had been “played out” by a series of indulgence sales prior to Tetzel’s. In truth, there was a growing popular cynicism in Luther’s region to the degree that the elector Frederick of Saxony refused to permit Tetzel to engage his region for fear of troubling his citizenry. 

But Tetzel discovered another indicator of trouble with the threat of more serious upset of the Church. Observing how Luther’s theses had been promulgated by printed pamphlets, Tetzel decided to fight fire with fire with a rebuttal pamphlet of his own. When he sought printers to contract for the work in Luther’s town of Wittenberg, none would take the offer, an indication that Luther enjoyed the support of the printers’ guild—in fact, university students there burned 800 copies of Tetzel’s work printed elsewhere in a city square public bonfire. Luther correctly ascertained that the act would be blamed upon him; in truth, he was quite unprepared—academically and personally—for what was shaping up as a major confrontation with the Church. 
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Meanwhile, Luther’s bishop Albrecht finally received a report on the theses from the faculty of the University of Mainz, which by now had come to realize what a hot potato it was asked to evaluate. With more than an abundance of caution, the faculty stated that the Wittenberg University faculty was within its rights to discuss and debate the matters of the 95 theses. But as to the questions raised by the theses, it was best to let the pope decide. Albrecht, upon their advice, wrote to Rome [and no doubt Tetzel communicated as well]. The mind and apparatus of the papacy would now begin serious involvement in what we refer to today as the Reformation.
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The Reformation Page 34: "Lock Him Up!"

2/14/2019

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Back in a November post on this stream I summarized Luther’s radical insights into the nature of Scripture, conscience and the Church, an enlightenment focused in time with his famous posting of 95 theses or contentions in 1517. The language of his contentions—provoked by the selling of indulgences as “guarantees of salvation” was brusque, notably thesis 86, “Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?” And, his theological views were radical in multiple senses. Not only did he question absolute Church authority, as in the matter of indulgences, but he placed ultimate determination of salvation in the disposition of the heart, above the claims of canonical jurisprudence. As Eric Metaxas [see home page] puts it well, for Luther “the Christian faith was an affair of the heart and the whole person.” [p. 78] So it is not a ridiculous question to ask why the Church did not “lock him up?”  
 
For all of that, Luther set forth his ideas as matters for academic and ecclesiastical debate, not marching orders to rebel bands. He was not the first to call for radical renewal; the famous monk Hildebrand—later to become Pope [St.] Gregory VII, led a wholesale reform against church ills, including clerical concubinage, in the eleventh century. Around 1200 Francis of Assisi experienced a vision from God in which he is told “Go, Francis, and repair my house which, as you see, is well-nigh in ruins.” Francis’ movement of reform, based upon his rule drawn from the evangelical counsels of Jesus, was never threatened by Rome because Francis cultivated close relationships with cardinals and popes, including the mighty Innocent III.
 
Even in his own day there were other Catholic thinkers who agreed with the general ideas of Luther’s writing and preaching. Probably the most noted of these was the Dutch humanist theologian Desiderius Erasmus [1469-1536]. Erasmus may have been best mind produced by the humanist Renaissance. His scholarship in Church history, particularly the Patristic era or the age of the early Church Fathers, convinced him that Church reform rested upon a return to its ancient wisdom, practice, and spirituality [a method today called Ressourcement, employed by the fathers of Vatican II.] Erasmus was also an unequalled philologer and translator; he discovered errors in the 1100-year-old Latin Vulgate Bible then in use, which Luther would have found very useful as a biblical scholar. Erasmus saw himself in later years as a unifier in the growing divisions of Protestant and Roman Catholic adherents, a position which brought suspicion upon him from both sides, though he always professed loyalty to the Catholic Church and died in the Church.
 
What Luther was calling for was a local academic and community discussion of the issues raised by the sale of indulgences in his region, a discussion we might compare to “peer evaluation.” Universities throughout Europe were Catholic to varying degrees of intensity, and the places where such discussions were normally conducted. Nor would it be unusual to invite the local bishop and even the local prince of the region. The famous Halloween posting on the cathedral door in Wittenberg is a later embellishment of Luther’s presentation of the 95 theses to Bishop Albrecht of Mainz, who had authorized the sale of indulgences in Luther’s region in the first place. Luther explained to the archbishop that the trafficking in indulgences was causing scandal to the faithful, and that Albrecht had the influence to protect the faithful.
 
As Metaxas observes, “…what Luther had no idea about when he wrote and sent this letter—and what his correspondent [Albrecht] had no idea about either—was that Luther had now put his finger on an issue that was but the uppermost excrescence of something else, something that was at least enormous, something with a root system so very deep and exceedingly vast that it stretched to the nethermost blind crevasses of hell itself.” [p. 110] That Luther’s theses would divide all of Christendom was something no one could see in 1517, and certainly not an outcome Luther would have joyfully longed for.
 
Albrecht, unfortunately, had ugly secrets far beyond the indulgence scandal that touched upon the legitimacy of Church governance and authority itself. Albrecht, a very ambitious churchman, much desired the see of Mainz, and after considerable wrangling, Pope Leo offered the title to Albrecht for a price, 23,000 ducats, a “staggering sum” per Metaxas. [For an overview of Pope Leo in this affair, see the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Leo X, particularly the “Conflict with Luther” section.] Albrecht had no significant funds at this time, and thus turned to the wealthy bank, The House of Fugger, for a massive loan request with virtually no collateral. It was Pope Leo himself who provided a solution: Albrecht would authorize an aggressive campaign of the sale of indulgences in his own region, of which he would retain 50% of the proceeds to repay the House of Fugger.
 
Luther, ironically, was taking on greater corruption than he knew. He was incensed that Catholic faithful were being charged for a guarantee of salvation that only God could grant. But worse, and unknown to Luther and the purchasers, 50% of their offering was being siphoned off to pay for the political ambitions of their own episcopal shepherd.
 
One would think that, all things considered, Luther would have been at the very least silenced, or arrested and delivered to the Inquisition. But this did not happen because the governing prince [elector] of Saxony, Frederick, interjected his own agenda and in the process prolonged and gave wider exposure to Luther’s concerns. Luther would not suffer the fate of reformers before him such as Jan Huss and John Wycliffe, for he would have civil protection.
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The Reformation Page 33: What Would Luther Say About The Abuse Crisis?

1/3/2019

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Sad as it is to admit, there are probably a fair number of Catholics in the United States who have come to realize in recent years that the sacraments celebrated in their parishes or communities were presided over by bishops and priests who were later discovered to have molested children and minors. As the American bishops are in retreat this week to pray about the abuse scandal, it seemed appropriate to me that, since I have neglected the Reformation/Luther stream of posts for some time, I might reflect upon a major question that Luther addressed in the sixteenth century and that some Catholics, at least, may have pondered in the twenty-first century: does the faith of the presider affect the validity and effectiveness of the sacrament itself? This was a major concern of Lutheran theology in its sparring with Roman Catholic doctrine.
 
It was the November 8, 2018 post on this stream where I discussed Luther’s spiritual awakening: that the Word of God [Scriptural Revelation] was the provenance of every Christian conscience, that God’s active will to save extended to every man or woman of sincere and searching heart. This revelation of Luther’s comes forth from a Catholic age where “doing” could easily outrun “believing.” The sale of indulgences was offensive to Luther because of its optics as much as its questionable theology, with the appearance that salvation could be purchased in cash without the necessary change of heart. Moreover, the Augustinian reformer questioned whether the Church, as an institution, could “guarantee” salvation; for Luther, imposing middlemen and ritual between the direct revelation of God to the individual soul who opened his Bible and personally embraced the saving power of God.
 
Luther did not intend to destroy the Church but to return it to its pristine holiness in the Renaissance thinking of Ressourcement, i.e., a return to the ancient sources and practices of the early Church.  For Luther the discoveries of ancient Church writings and particularly the new and much improved translations of the Bible gave him much to compare with the contemporary Church in which he lived. The sacraments of the Church itself were of significance. Luther did not believe that biblical justification existed for many of the Catholic sacraments; he identified only two, Baptism and Eucharist, as being directly commanded by Christ. Given his adamant belief on this subject, it is nearly impossible to imagine his remaining in the Roman Catholic Communion, but his theology of sacraments contains a powerful pastoral message worthy of consideration in the Catholic Church’s present moment of trial.
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Luther, to put it directly, believed that all the works of religion—most notably the sacraments—must have an existential reality of experience of God. It is no accident that Luther, among his many achievements, composed a German hymnal of powerful songs which gathered up the full experience of the faithful. One of the most famous of his works is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” There was a window in the 1960’s when the new Catholic English Mass hymnals borrowed very heavily from Lutherans. For whatever reason, the American experience of Catholic song was quickly drained of its Lutheran testosterone and has devolved into cruise ship lounge singing. But I digress…
 
Luther believed, too, that the reception of holy communion should likewise be experienced as a powerful encounter with Jesus Christ. For this reason, he promoted the reception of the Precious Blood for all the faithful, a cause which Catholicism embraced after Vatican II. It will be argued in some texts and catechetical sources that Luther denied Real Presence, or the reality of Christ in the bread and the wine. This is not exactly true. What Luther objected to was the medieval or scholastic use of the term “transubstantiation” to describe what happens at the consecration. Traditional Catholic belief to this day holds that at the words of consecration the reality of the bread is changed into Christ’s living presence while the “externals” such as taste and appearance remain the same. Luther preferred the term “consubstantiation” which implied that the bread itself did not change from bread, but rather that the living Christ was present to each believer in the receiving experience of bread and cup.
 
Another way to put this is that Luther shuddered at any Catholic ritual which looked like human magic, in this case saying words that made the bread something else. In the Latin Mass of Luther’s day, the phrasing for the consecration of the bread is rendered “Hoc est enim corpus meum” or “For this is my body….” It is worth noting that the magician’s phrase, “hocus pocus,” is a play on the Latin words of consecration, as well as a barb at the idea of sinful men working “magic” on altars for sizeable Mass stipends.
 
Luther believed very strongly that the Mass must be “authentic” in terms of faith and intention, and that the priest must believe in what he is doing and bring an authentic Biblical faith to worship. If Luther were alive today, he might surprise us by his reaction to our current difficulties as considerably less widespread compared to his day, because it is hard to imagine the state of clergy in the sixteenth century. It is no accident that in response to the Lutheran Reformation, Roman Catholicism—in the Council of Trent 1543-63-- mandated the existence of diocesan seminaries where future priests could be screened, educated, and spiritually formed.
 
If you Google “Luther and priesthood,” you will come upon long lists of entries entitled “Luther and the Priesthood of the Faithful,” a term which expresses a line of demarcation between Lutheran and Roman Catholic thought on the nature and meaning of priests. For Luther, the primordial ordination sacrament was baptism. In his day Luther despaired of the Western Catholic Church’s leadership and clergy to reform themselves from within, and in his later years he turned to German princes telling them that “they must now be the rulers of the spiritual realm, too.” [Metaxas, p. 186]  
 
There is a curious parallel here between Luther’s assertion that clergy could not police themselves in the 1500’s and the call throughout the United States today that civil law enforcement and states’ attorneys are the only legitimate and trustworthy authorities to purge the priesthood of pedophiles. While there is a considerable argument for this position, based upon decades of frustration in the United States, it is also important to recall that Luther’s thinking also led the way to the extremes of John Calvin’s church-state where police patrolled the aisles and arrested anyone dozing off during the sermon.
 
If I can speak for Luther, I think he would remind us—correctly—that baptism does render us priests in the sense that every one of us is responsible for the holiness of the Church and the integrity of our leadership. One of my Catholic professors, looking back on the Reformation era, described it as the “democratization of the Dark Night of Soul.” That is, all the baptized entered the mysteries of the faith that had previously been the world of clerics and cloisters.
 
In that sense, the baptized Catholic needs to take a loving but critical eye toward oneself and the priests with whom we live and worship. In the United States, for example, honesty and transparency are often in short supply. I am happy to report that my home diocese received the honor of maximum score across the U.S. among all 187 dioceses for available public examination of finances. This enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by the reality that nearly 50% of American dioceses reveal nothing of their finances publicly. Do Catholics in these dioceses simply pay, pray, and obey, and thus are they tacitly accepting the veil of secrecy behind which a good deal of mischief and ungodly deed may be taking place? Luther would lay this responsibility for reform on our heads as a responsibility of baptism. 
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The Reformation Page 32: Luther's Revelation

11/8/2018

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For all of Luther’s personal and spiritual difficulties, the young Augustinian monk was nothing short of a prodigy in the discipline of the sacred sciences, and his Augustinian superior Johannes Staupitz exercised his authority to situate Luther in university placements where he might expand his scholarship and original thought. For two years (1513-1515) Luther lectured at the Wittenberg university about the Psalms, that part of sacred revelation most familiar to a monk, as monasteries prayed all 150 psalms in a perpetual cycle (as would anyone today who prays the full Liturgy of the Hours.) 

In this timeframe Luther came to understand that, as Eric Metaxas puts it, “the only way to read the Word of God properly involved seeing beyond the mere words.” (p. 77) To approach the text without nuance, as some fundamental approaches tend to do, is to limit the power of Scripture to the level of any other written book. Again, Metaxas summarizes this well: “Therefore, one must not merely see what the devil could see, which is to say the words on a page, but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired it, which was in the words and around them, too.”  

Clearly Luther is drawing from his own experience, one that is common even today to any priest or religious bound to the daily recitation of the Hours. As a monk Luther had already recited or sung the Psalms in common with his monastic brothers for some years, but this recitation was obviously bringing him no religious peace of mind, most likely because the common prayer was a duty of monks and approached in routine fashion. As a duty, the recitation of the 150 Psalms that composed the Hours was viewed as an obligation to God, but no one expected to experience God or undergo anything resembling a profound religious experience except, perhaps, over the long run of a lifetime of fidelity. When I was in training and taking up the common praying of the Hours [or praying the “breviary” as it was called then], my superior told a story—most likely apocryphal—about a community of friars reciting the psalms in San Francisco when the great earthquake struck. The local superior supposedly halted the recitation and emotionally ordered the friars to start praying.]  

Luther was putting forward the reality of a dynamic encounter with the written Word of God. His principle here is the power of every Scriptural encounter. The Bible was given to be experienced, not used. He came to regard the thoughtless routine of monastic recitation, for example, as blasphemous in the sense that constant repetition without a profound encounter of the divine would, over time, harden the heart against any future possibilities of being touched by God. He cited how the devil had quoted Scripture flawlessly for his nefarious purposes and he placed much greater emphasis upon the reader of sacred texts to approach the Bible with purity of heart and, equally important, the hope and expectation of being filled with God’s life. 

Luther had history at his back. The medieval Church was not biblically oriented. In fact, history books will make the argument that most Christians were not aware that there was such a thing as the Bible at this juncture, at least until the invention of printing in the 1400’s when a peasant coming through town might actually see one, in the imperfect Latin translation of St. Jerome from 400 A.D. In the early thirteenth century, when Francis of Assisi wished to model his young community after the Gospel, he selected at random texts from the local church’s altar missal, which was as close to the Bible as anyone of that time could come.
 

Luther, in his reflections on the Psalms, was unconsciously pursuing the same route as Francis three centuries earlier, another tortured soul looking for an intense experience of God in a time when the Church was underperforming and in need of renewal. Curiously, Francis’s conversion involved mystical experience, direct inspiration from God, [“Rebuild my House”] that in turn made the Gospel understandable in its command to give up all riches and “come follow me.” The most powerful stirrings of faith and renewal in medieval times came through the experiences of mystics and the communities they inspired. 

Luther’s true conversion moment came in his study and his class notes. Less dramatic than Francis’s, perhaps, but no less real and essential: salvation would come through a living encounter with the Word of God. It is hard to imagine how much hope Luther’s future preaching and writing would bring to a broad swath of Europe. I have posted on this stream at several points that Catholicism in 1500 was divided between those who despaired that any good works could save them, those who sought salvation by any means including monetary, and a growing class of cynics who turned to pagan classics and philosophers as more reliable source of discussion and speculation.  

Luther would say that there is no chaining of the Word of God. He had rediscovered the depth and meaning of Hebrews 4:12, the famous “two-edged sword” biblical analogy. A struggling believer would hear three reasons for newfound optimism: (1) There is no limit to the forgiving power of God’s Word; anyone of pure intention who approached the Word in humility would be justified or saved by faith; (2) The heart of the salvation process rested in conscience, the good intention to live as guided by constant communion with the Word of God, and (3) there was now a clear roadmap for Church reform, conformity of practice to God’s living word. 

I have simplified the Lutheran reformation here, and much discourse, contention, and bloodshed would follow from the implications of Luther’s thought as will be chronicled in future blog posts. But I can make this very personal, too. I read the bulk of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Luther [see home page] during the breaking scandals in the American Catholic Church and the anguishing division in our country during this recently concluded election campaign. When the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre took place, I was stunned that my own Church mumbled along in routine worship like the monks at choir in Luther’s monastery. I have many moments where I ask myself, “What kind of a game are we playing here?” 

I have to say that following Luther’s life story and reflecting on his work has brought me back to reflective sanity. I realized afresh that the Bible is alive, and God is present there to sustain me and give me hope. I believe it was the twentieth-century Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton who observed that for all of us there is the great temptation to go out into the woods and build a one-man chapel. I could never do that as a lifestyle because I cannot pretend to know the mind of God on my own. I remain a Catholic because in my formative years I had the good fortune to learn the Scripture from giants just as Luther’s students had five centuries ago. 
​
But yes, I can still take up the Bible and hold it close to my heart, in times of joy and times of pain, in the knowledge that the Promise of Israel and the Coming of the Christ wrap me up in a world that never ends. And I can move on constructively.  
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The Reformation Page 31: Luther Goes to Rome

10/25/2018

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The phrase “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried,” dates to the Catholic author and man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the same G.K. Chesterton who inspired the delightful Father Brown mysteries currently available on Netflix. Chesterton’s maxim is probably correct, though he might have made an exception for Martin Luther, who “tried” Catholicism with his entire being and found it not just difficult, but impossible to fulfill. I noted in Reformation Post 30 that Luther was beyond scrupulous in his monastic observance, to the point of neuroticism.
 
There is no better example of the pressures of his fears of going to hell than the celebration of his first Mass as an ordained priest in 1506. This Mass, celebrated in his monastery, included in the congregation Luther’s father; the two had not spoken for several years since Luther had spurned his father’s wishes to become a lawyer by entering the Augustinian Order instead. All of Luther’s biographers concur that the monk priest experienced some powerful emotion that immobilized him at the moment of consecration, when he uttered the words that changed the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Given his overwhelming sense of his own unworthiness and his six-hour confessions, the realization of holding God in his own hands not surprisingly created a panic or dissociation, though with the help of his confessor, Staupitz, Luther was able to finish the Mass and enjoy the communal festivities of the day.
 
Luther was doing everything that he believed the Church required of him to save his soul, to the point of going beyond even the austere standard life of monks to extreme works of deprivation, discipline, and exhaustive examination of conscience over his profound sense of guilt and unworthiness. He was not alone in his suffering, for the late middle ages and the early Renaissance was a time of confusion, fear, and even cynicism over the issue of salvation. A very rough division of Luther’s world would look something like this: (1) Catholics who believed that the rites of the faith were sufficient for salvation by way of the Church’s own authority; (2) Catholics who despaired that any good works of faith could save them; and (3) a growing class of cynics and men of letters who questioned the entire structure of a “saving authority” based upon the creation of man.
 
For all his anguish, Luther dedicated himself to his monastic life of teaching and scholarship at his university in Erfurt and other assignments given to him by his order, including a visit to Rome in 1510 for administrative matters regarding his community. If you read anything of Luther in your lifetime, you will draw the conclusion that he was profoundly scandalized by life in the Eternal City and lost faith in the Church. It is true that Leo X, a Medici pope, was a very worldly man with little interests to addressing the need for reform that many Catholics, including Luther, and Leo’s excessive spending fueled the practice of sale of indulgences.
 
But Luther’s experience went further than scandal over corrupt clerics. He was still able to draw a distinction between a saving Church and the corrupt hierarchy who might be disgracing it at any point in history. In fact, the Augustinian monk engaged in several religious activities on behalf of himself and his family while in Rome. While I was in Rome in 2013 I visited the mother Church of Christendom in Luther’s day, St. John Lateran. Then as now, the central relics of the majestic Church remain the [reputed] heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. I must admit to significant doubt about the veracity of this claim, but my faith has never rested upon relics.
 
In Luther’s day, however, this Church of John the Apostle offered many blessings based upon such questionable traditions, particularly for priests. The legend arose that that a priest offering Mass under its roof could obtain his own mother’s salvation. Unfortunately, the church was so packed with tourists and pilgrims that it was impossible for him to do so. As Eric Metaxas writes, “The very idea of it must have been disturbing and confusing; that because of the gabbling crowds, Luther’s dear mother might suffer the horrors of purgatory, or worse. What sense did it all make? But the Church was full of such mysteries, and who was this Martin, a sinful monk, to question any of it?” (Martin Luther, 2017, p. 61)
 
Luther then progressed to the Scala Sancta or “Holy Stairs” where pilgrims might gain relief for suffering souls in Purgatory by climbing the stairs on their knees and offering the prescribed prayers. Luther found himself lamenting that such divine intervention could not be applied to his parents because they were not dead. Years later Luther would recall that at the top of the steps “he suddenly wondered whether all he had just done so obediently would have the effect that the church so authoritatively and specifically and confidently said it would.” (Metaxas, p. 61) It was a moment of truth for the struggling monk, who observed, too, that the clerical life in Rome was in serious decline; a typical Mass could be offered in twelve minutes, and in some churches as little as nine minutes.
 
Luther obviously had much to think about upon his return to Germany, and his position as a scholar gave him the opportunity to reflect upon the Church and the sources of its authority. Like any good humanist of the early Renaissance, he returned to earlier sources. Needless to say, he could find nothing in St. Augustine or any other Church father from the age of the great councils on matters such as indulgences, applications of merits, or the timespan of Masses. He did not deny the reality of the Church nor the need for it, but he came to understand that in its present form the Church was not capable of self-correction, given its unnuanced claim of authority. How did a believer live in a Church that was, in a sense, “overreaching?”
 
If this was true, then by what measure could the Church be reformed? And perhaps more importantly, how could an individual baptized believer reach an assurance of salvation, a realization that God heard his prayers? Where could a believer turn for the ultimate truths of salvation? In post 32 on this stream we will look at Luther’s pastoral and theological breakthrough that would alter the religious experience of the Christian world.  
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After Luther....

10/11/2018

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I will be away for about five more days. In the meantime, today I am leaving a book review of another Protestant Reformer who came to prominence as Luther grew older. Enjoy!

Calvin
By Bruce Gordon

​Reviewed by Thomas J. Burns (2011)


A biography of John Calvin is of necessity a history of his time. The religious landscape of Europe during Calvin's lifetime [1509-1564] was most complex in terms of grassroots pastoral piety, theological exploration, and international relations. And then there is Calvin: his own religious journey, from French Catholic reformer to Protestant patriarch. There is the corpus of Calvin's theological thought and writing, enduring and controversial to this day. And finally, there is the matter of Calvin's ecclesiology: what structural and communal body of belief and practice did he leave his followers. Bruce Gordon has produced an eminently readable and highly manageable general study of these questions in producing a remarkable introduction to John Calvin for the informed reader with at least a basic grasp of Reformation dynamics.

As Robert Bireley has narrated in his fine work, “The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450-1700,” [1999] the spirit of church reform was not the exclusive provenance of Luther. Grassroots outcroppings of lay spirituality emerged side-by-side with wholesale reform of many existing Catholic religious orders to improve the tenor of church life by 1500. It is not surprising, then, that the young Catholic Calvin would by his early adulthood identify himself as an apostle of reform. but as Gordon observes, reformist Catholics in France had nowhere to lay their heads in the face the crown’s opposition to Luther and seminal Protestant uprisings of independence on the continent.

Calvin began his studies in theology but turned instead to law. A true humanist of the time, he immersed himself in the Roman philosopher Seneca. At some point in 1533 the Protestant conviction that the papacy was beyond repair was embraced by Calvin, though at this early time such French converts did not as yet have ecclesiastical bodies to align with. Like many of his mindset, Calvin remained a vocal and prolific voice of change within Catholicism until his writings and other agitations made his life in Catholic France intolerable. In 1534 he moved to a more affable setting in Switzerland.

Switzerland’s Protestant reform was rich in zeal but poor in unity. Each of its major cities hosted major proponents of Protestant reformed theology. The major overarching conflict upon Calvin's arrival was the significant tension between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, with the latter advocating a much more radical abandoning of traditional church life than Luther. Gordon pays close attention to the various points of contestation elaborated by such theological masters as Bucer, Oecolampadius, Melanchthon, Erasmus, and others, and he rightly distinguishes Calvin as a theologian with a long view of the future, and the realization that if Protestant reform was to survive, it must be united.

As Gordon chronicles Calvin's life, it becomes clear that Calvin cannot pull together the Christian church. But it is not for lack of trying. As is often the case with great thinkers of all disciplines, Calvin's most lasting contribution to Christianity was written in his relative youth, his "Institutes of Christian Religion." In this work, revised several times during his lifetime, Calvin outlines what might be called reformist ecclesiology for the first time. He weaves together doctrinal foundations, church structure, and personal piety. It is in this work that we come across his controversial definition of "predestination." Gordon's handling of the question is eminently clear and lucid. Calvin believed in what one might term "a double call." The Institutes sites Old Testament metaphor, noting that while Esau and Jacob are both of the chosen people, Jacob had been chosen before birth for special election. On its face Calvin's theory did not convince me, but it may have made more sense at the time of his writing when all warring Christian parties could claim the blessing of baptism but not all, at least in Calvin's eyes, were worthy of eternal election.

Calvin, of course, is historically identified with the city of Geneva. As a young man with zeal and perhaps restless disregard, he took the pulpit as a layman in the company of close and equally outspoken fellow warriors. Theological and personal conflicts led to his discharge from ministerial duties, but he would be invited back by the city magistrates a few years later. Gordon notes that upon his return Calvin was charged with creating a church order that would satisfy divergent expectations in Geneva. Calvin never "mellowed" strictly speaking, but age brought him a greater sense of his personal charism in the pulpit and his organizational role as leader.

Thus, Calvin's ministerial persona was centered on preaching. While he defended a modified sacramental system, it is very clear that the preaching of the Bible and its moral implications for personal and civil life was the fulcrum of ecclesiology and ministerial identity. Gordon describes Calvin as a highly respected preacher, whose sermons did not hesitate to address matters of public conduct and controversy. One gets the impression that he was greatly revered if not greatly loved in Geneva.

It is equally clear from the text that Calvin, whatever he might say about Catholic orders, functioned as a bishop. He fully embraced a magisterial role for the reformed church throughout Europe. This is evident in his recruitment and support of reform missionaries for work in Catholic France, for example, where many of his missionaries came to ultimate cruel martyrdom. Calvin was criticized for not joining them in France, but he defended himself on the grounds that his life was too important for the life of the church as a whole. [“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep scatter.”] Clearly, Calvin was neither a Congregationalist nor a mystic. Gordon repeatedly underscores Calvin’s identification with St. Paul—theologian and definitely churchman.

Gordon is not sentimental about Calvin, but the thought occurs that the reformed church’s first true shepherd resembles in many aspects the Catholic Ignatius of Loyola. By his straightforward rendering of the story, Gordon has made the case for the tragedy and cost of disunion.
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The Reformation Page 30: Luther's Labors in the Monastery

9/27/2018

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When I was attending my seminary’s reunion September 21-23 up in the Catskill Mountains of New York, one of my classmates, a regular at the Café, said to me: “Are we ever going to get back to Luther?” Over the past two months events in the American Church and elsewhere have stolen the Thursday Reformation stream from its regular focus, and poor Martin Luther has suffered the most neglect. This is most unfortunate, because the strengths and weaknesses of Luther’s vision for the Church throws considerable light on our predicaments in the twenty-first century. Again, my primary source is Martin Luther: The Man who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by Eric Metaxas.
 
[If you would like to meet Metaxas and hear him talk about how he came to write Luther’s biography, click here.]
 
We left Luther at age 21 after he completed his bachelor’s and first master’s degree and preparing for the final leg of his matriculation, the completion of a degree in civil law. The general idea was his eventual assumption of his father’s mining business. Biographers over the centuries have reported at this juncture how Luther was caught in a violent lightning storm and made an immediate vow to St. Ann to enter a monastery were he to live through the storm. But one might ask how came to make such a dramatic vow in these circumstances, given that his future was pretty much laid out before him.
 
If you look back to the August 2 Thursday posting on the blog, you can get a quick refresher on the various academic forces battling each other in 1500. Luther was naturally instructed in “scholasticism,” the philosophical worldview of the Western Catholic Church most famously advocated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholastic thinking brought logic and reason to the understanding of God’s saving plan, and Luther would have been taught the roadmap to Church life and salvation. The internal logic of scholasticism rested upon the authority invested in St. Peter by Christ himself, making the pope both the final arbiter of all that is true and the ultimate guardian of the purity and holiness of the Church.
 
The Scholastic Method did not go unchallenged, however, and Luther would have encountered another school of Catholic thinking, humanism. Humanists found the logical assurances of the Church overreaching, claiming too much. Luther read Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel during his college years, and two of his humanist professors had profound influence upon his thinking in college and for many years thereafter. Humanists were not heretics; they understood that Church scholarship suffered deficiencies. Again, from an earlier post, some Catholic intellectuals introduced the method of Ressourcement, a return to original documents and Church practices. Inevitably the role of Sacred Scripture itself would come into play. Medieval Catholicism preferred a system of logic and reason against the complex and profoundly human narrative of the Bible. Catholicism’s most famous humanist of Luther’s time was Erasmus of Rotterdam [1469-1536], who discovered that even when the Church turned to the Bible in search of “proof texts,” the translations in use at the time were poor and at times faulty Latin translations. Erasmus would translate the Scripture into its original languages, primarily Greek and Hebrew.
 
Luther, a highly sensitive man and deeply sensitive to the high stakes of salvation, found himself at age 21 in a profound quandary. He depended upon the certainties promised by the scholastic description of Church life and salvation—that a worthy confession would save him from hell fire, for example—and the humanist emphasis upon mystery and the untapped powers of the literal Word of God. Few people had access to Scripture, and monks, ironically, were forbidden regular study of Biblical texts except those assigned to the Divine Office of daily prayer. Luther’s growing preoccupation with theology and his own eternal destiny was taking him far afield from his father’s legal career plans. It is little wonder, then, that faced with the first true life and death circumstance of his life, a violent storm, he would spontaneously opt for the life of a monk, where he could pursue his questions further and save his soul in the process.
 
There were four monasteries in Luther’s region, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Franciscans, and the Augustinians. No one knows exactly why Luther chose the Augustinians; the best theory is the reputation of that order for strictness and austerity. He could not bring himself to inform his father of his plans, the latter having spent a small fortune on his son’s education to date. On July 16, 1505, Martin Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, Germany.
 
Luther approached the challenge of monastic living determined to do anything required to achieve perfection and salvation. He would work his way into heaven, driven by a fear of hell fire and a desire to please God by his works. There is great irony that his attitude of salvation through works was condemned by his order’s fifth century icon, St. Augustine himself, in the great saint’s assault against the heresy of Pelagianism, the idea that man can earn grace and salvation by his own efforts. Humanists turned to the method of Ressourcement precisely to uncover such contradictions, but in his early monastic years Luther chose the safer path of guaranteed outcomes.
 
The fly in the ointment, however, was the nagging fear on Luther’s part that despite his efforts, he did not sense a religious peace or tranquility, which led him to press further in his efforts. Along with physical symptoms, he developed a profound case of scrupulosity, spiritual OCD if you will. Metaxas devotes a chapter to Luther’s scrupulous confessions with his confessor Johannes Staupitz. Luther could not bring himself to believe he had made a worthy confession. On one occasion he confessed to Staupitz for six hours, searching for any psychological reluctance of intention that might render his confession ineffective, or worse, blasphemous. As Metaxas puts it, “His struggles usually had to do with his own doubts that he could ever be good, no matter how he tried, that he could ever be worthy of God’s mercy, grace, and salvation.” [p. 48]
 
It was a sorry state to endure, and Luther might have lived in his scrupulous prison until death except for the momentous interventions about to come his way.  
 
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The Pennsylvania Report and Its Implications on Catechetics and Parish Life.

8/23/2018

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For al least the next two weeks I am directing all posting to the Sunday Stream to discuss the recent Pennsylvania report on clerical child abuse, including its implications for catechetics and Church/parish life. You can jump over to Sunday's stream by clicking here.
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