Pope in Sweden could break ground on inter-communion, bishop says Austen Ivereigh October 21, 2016 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR The Rev. Jens Kruse, pastor of Rome's Evangelical Lutheran Church, with Pope Francis on Nov. 15, 2015. (Credit: CNS.) The English bishop William Kenney is a key figure in the official Catholic-Lutheran dialogue, and will be with Pope Francis in Sweden at the end of the month. He believes unity is a matter of decades away, and it's possible that Francis may use the trip to make a gesture on inter-communion. To describe English bishop William Kenney as an “auxiliary of Birmingham” doesn’t capture the depth and range of his longstanding roles in pan-European church bodies - for two terms, for example, he was president of Caritas Europe, and he played a key role in organizing relief efforts for former Soviet countries following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Next week he will be part of a small, inner core at the joint Catholic-Lutheran commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation for which Francis will be going to Sweden. It’s the first visit by any pope to Scandinavia since John Paul II’s 1989 visit, which Kenney, incidentally, coordinated. A fluent Swedish-speaker who spent 37 years in Sweden, Kenney - who also speaks good German - has long been involved with ecumenical dialogues at the inter-Nordic level, especially in the formal dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans. In 2013 he was appointed by the Holy See as co-chair of the international dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Recently he sat down with Crux in London to talk through the background to the event, the dialogue that’s expected to take place, and what Pope Francis might do or say to take it to a new level. The Anglicans were recently in Rome to celebrate 50 years of relations and ecumenical dialogue. The dialogue with the Lutherans has been going on since the 1960s. How would you compare the two? They’re the two big dialogues that are going on. Both are of the same character, in the sense that not everyone in the Anglican Church is signed up to the Anglican one, and certainly not everyone in the Lutheran Church is signed up to the Lutheran one - there is another Lutheran body, apart from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), but the LWF is biggest. But I would suggest that the Lutheran dialogue is nearer to us than the Anglican one is, even doctrinally. As the dialogues go, it has been quite successful. The dialogue with the Lutherans since the 1960s led to the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The things that we thought caused the Reformation have been taken away- the excommunication of the Lutherans was lifted, the condemnation of the Catholics were lifted. That is the formal Churches’ position now, it is not just a theological proposition. There are those who say this has already achieved unity; it is certainly a major step forward, and it has removed most of the problems of the Reformation. Since then we’ve been trying to find out what it means. It’s like when the Holy Spirit does anything - there’s this huge bomb, and then you try to find out what happened. That’s what we’re in the process of doing at the moment. The current dialogue, for example, is about the effects of baptism. There are serious Lutheran theologians who say that once you recognize baptism, which we do, then the Eucharist follows automatically, and so we should have inter-communion. That needs discussing. Of course, some Lutherans don’t sign up to the declaration, and there are Catholics who don’t sign up to it either, but it is a major step forward. The issues which are still left, sexuality and women priests, are the ones that come up in modern times; they’re not the Reformation issues. The women priests question is complicated, because some of the women priests I meet we have no problem with, because what they consider as priesthood has almost nothing to do with what we consider as priesthood. I have received into the Church former Lutheran women priests who, in all honesty, simply wanted to preach, it had nothing to do with sacramental life. The consensus of the 1999 document on justification stated, if I’ve understood it correctly, that the reasons for the Catholics condemning the Protestant positions and vice-versa no longer hold, and if ever each Church did hold the position that the other said they did, what is now true is that neither Church no longer holds that position. In other words, the Reformation was all a big misunderstanding! That’s a good popular summary, yes. Would Martin Luther have been excommunicated today? The answer is no, he probably wouldn’t. And he did not want to split the Church - he came to that, but it’s not where he began. Of course, you’ll find certain Catholics and certain Lutherans still claiming the other holds those positions, but they are not representative of the mainstream positions of the Churches. The document was approved by Rome, which binds Catholics whether they like it or not; the Lutherans are made up of about 100 churches, and there were about 37 who didn’t, back then, sign up to it. Some have come into line since. When you read ‘From Conflict to Communion,’ the joint document summarizing that dialogue which has been issued to prepare both Churches for the commemoration, it is quite extraordinary how much convergence there is. And that’s why some people say we’re there, or almost there. Of course, Luther would have been very shocked by homosexuality and women’s issues. Ecclesiology remains a key issue. But overall, we’re getting there, and this will inevitably lead to very painful decisions on both sides - about structure, about organizations and things like that. With the document on justification, the central element of Protestant identity was taken away. Suddenly you can no longer define yourself against the other. I think we’re getting to the part of Catholic-Lutheran dialogue where unity will become a practical possibility, within decades. Click here for the rest of the article: https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2016/10/21/pope-sweden-break-ground-inter-communion-bishop-says/