Cardinal Thinks He Would have Been on the Side of the Reformers

Overconfident:  The Curial Cardinal believes of himself that during the Reformation that he would have stood "on the side of the Church reformers".

Kardinal Kurt Koch
© +ecumenix, Flickr, CC-BY-NC

(kreuz.net) The themes of celibacy and women priests don't have the importance that is ascribed to them:  "If the future of the Church depended on these questions, the Protestant churches wouldn't have had these problems."

Cardinal Kurt Koch -- President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity -- stated this today in the online edition of the Dusseldorf newspaper 'Rheinischen Post'.

A Pious Wish

About Fr. Hans Kung -- the apostate theologian and darling of the powerful media bosses -- the Cardinal declared:  "There are theology professors who think they know better about everything."

He continued with a pious wish:

"We must have the expectation of all theologians in the universities, that they conduct their activity of education in union with the faith of the Church."

Will the Church do as a minority, what it did when it was the majority?

The Cardinal admitted that the European alienation from Christendom is far advanced.  Christendom will no longer be the majority in Europe.

He garnished this statement with a shot of calculated optimism:  "But it has often been the minority which formed history?"

The Cardinal assumes on that that the Church must pick up its neglected duties now no one is left.

Not in the Culture -- but in Nature?

The newspaper recalled the observation of the Pope that people in Europe are almost begging for a meaning to life.

The journalistic objection: "Are you not tired of bread and circuses?"

The Cardinal thinks, "that the men are irremediably religious, and in that sense, religion belongs to the nature of man."

It comes out

As to the question on the disastrous year of the Reformation in 2017 the Cardinal tacked: "The Reformation brought positive things."

In any case he was quick to point out about the schism and the bloody confessional wars: "These things can not be celebrated."

The schismatic, alcoholic and skirt chasing Martin Luther (+1546) he described as a "passionate seeker after God": "He had a genial side."

The dialectically:  "Surely, Luther's negative sides are not to be overlooked."

A Reformer? Why not Today?

Then the crucial question:  "Where would you have stood in the 16th century?"

The self-conscious answer of the Cardinal:  "I would have been on the side of the Church reformers."

As an example of a reformer he didn't name Luther, but St. Francis of Assisi (+1226).

The Cardinal left one question still unanswered:  How is it that the Church reformers of the 16th century were always emerging in their personal lives only men of the system?

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