Great reformer

IF THE German monk, Martin Luther, had lived in Old Testament times, he would have been a great prophet. Israelite kings and high priests would have listened to and obeyed him after being denounced by him for hypocritical worship because they lived lives that violated Yahweh’s (Jehovah’s?) Ten Commandments.

But he lived in the 16th century, a time when the Catholic Church under Pope Leo X was selling indulgences and (in case you’re wondering why Protestants are more conversant with the Bible than Catholics) refusing to make the Scriptures available to ordinary faithful. He denounced, like a prophet should, the lack of uprightness in many worldly practices of the Church in his time.

Instead, however, of reforming the Church as petitioned by Luther, Pope Leo X excommunicated him. Consequently, the reformation of Catholicism happened outside of the Catholic Church and in the Church of the Reformation or more familiarly the Protestant Church that Luther founded.

At Pope Francis’s recent visit to Sweden’s tiny Catholic community (Protestants are the majority in that country), he caused consternation among conservative Catholics there, and for sure elsewhere in the world, when he publicly extolled Martin Luther, in effect, as a great reformer. In his own words: “The Church was not a role model, there was corruption, there was worldliness, there was greed, and lust for power. He protested against this. And he was an intelligent man.”

How much of the corruption, of the worldliness, of the greed and of the lust for power still remains in the Catholic hierarchy/clergy of the Philippines today I leave up to my readers to decide on the basis of their own personal experiences and for the hierarchy/clergy to discern and hopefully do something about.

Anyway, in Sweden, as a result of Pope Francis putting Luther’s reform efforts in the proper perspective, Swedish Catholic and Protestant Church high officials will be spending the next twelve months drawing up schemes to coordinate and cooperate in the shared mission of spreading Christ’s Good News of salvation (Kerygma) to Swedes.

It is not your beliefs but your actions that define you. Hence, a hypocrite is a person whose actions belie his beliefs. Luther protested less against dogma or belief than against the lack of uprightness in the way the Catholic Church of his time was practicing its faith. He wanted the Church to be more of a model of Christian living than a bastion of orthodoxy.

Pope Francis now tells us Martin Luther was a great reformer. Would it perhaps be too much to ask that Philippine Catholic and Protestant Church leaders also find ways to cooperate in spreading not dogma that separates but Jesus’ way of life that unites us?