Interesting interview granted by the Bishop of Regensburg (and chairman of the Ecumenical Office of the German Episcopal Conference), Gerhard Ludwig Müller, on Easter Tuesday - and that, as far as it can be seen, has not been made available in English.
The general tone is one that is to be much appreciated: the great problem of the "Ecumenical dialogue" (the one that followed the Council's Unitatis Redintegratio decree) is that both Protestants and Catholics have been in a framework designed by Protestants and favored by Protestants, as if the "modern 'church'" founded by Luther and his cohorts were the goal, as if Protestantism had a 500-year head start on what the Church should look like - while Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox are still "stuck in the Middle Ages".
In the end, the most controversial words of the interview, which, for the German media, were these:
It is time that those on the Protestant side of the argument completely dissociate themselves from Luther's view that the pope is the Antichrist. Because that was not intended for the Pope as an individual Christian. [It meant that] The Catholic Church was to be considered thus in her self-image. This can not be dismissed as a time-related controversy. We need to move on from the shadows of our denominational perspective on the Church's history.
The words of the bishop have been heavily criticized - including by Catholics (of course) who view them as somewhat quaint. No Protestant says that today! Sorry, we know that Protestantism is not in the best shape in the nation of Luther and Melanchton, but it does not matter: plenty of Protestants around the world (go ask the dozens of millions of new Evangelicals in Latin America) do hold Luther's view of the Holy Roman and Apostolic See faithfully.
It really remains to be seen if the bishop meant what he said about Luther - in our view, he just wanted to point out the huge hypocrisy of Ecumenical "dialogue", in which only Catholics need to be subdued while we all reach for that final ecumenical nirvana: a Protestantized United Church. That will not happen: after 50 years of failures, the Anglican Ordinariates, created by a German Pope, are a palpable sign of the only path to true Ecumenism. [Image: Bull 'Exsurge Domine', 1520]
