500 Years of Protestantism

In 2017 there will be various activities to observe the 500th anniversary of the event commonly taken as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Planning has already begun. I have just received an invitation to participate in the 2017 German Protestant Church Assembly, the huge biennial Kirchentag, which will in that year meet in Berlin. In a German periodical there just appeared a large advertisement for 2017 tours by bus or train through Lutherland, the states of Saxony and Thuringia where the Reformation began. In the issue of July 8, 2015, The Christian Century published two articles by well-known Protestant theologians urging that the anniversary should be observed in a spirit of repentance rather than in the usual feisty celebration. The assumption here is that the big schism in Western Christendom constitutes a grave sin for which both Protestants and Catholics bear common responsibility. There has been some discussion of making the 2017 Kirchentag a joint Protestant-Catholic confession of guilt; as of this writing, no decision has been made on this (the Saxon state tourist board would of course be delighted). A beginning was already made in 2010, when the Lutheran World Federation apologized to the Mennonite World Conference for the bloody persecution, applauded by Luther himself, of the Anabaptists (from which the Mennonites are an offspring). More recently Pope Francis I apologized to the Waldensians (a tiny proto-Protestant group, mostly surviving in northern Italy) for the savage persecution their ancestors suffered between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. I have no doubt that Pope Francis would be happy to extend the apology to larger Protestant groups north of the Alps. In the meantime, just a few days ago, he apologized to the indigenous peoples of the Americas for their oppression by the conquistadores of Catholic Spain.