German bishops deny Pope nixed their plan for intercommunion with Protestants

From Life Site-

The German bishops are denying reports that Pope Francis has rejected their plan to give Holy Communion to Protestant spouses of Catholics.

The plan, which was contained in a guide published by the German Episcopal Conference, justified giving Holy Communion to Protestant spouses of Catholics on the grounds that they might otherwise experience “serious spiritual distress.”

Following a request for a review of the material by seven German bishops, the Austrian Catholic news agency Kath.com has reported that the Holy See’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has rejected the guide, and that that the decision was confirmed by Pope Francis himself. Kath.com’s report has been confirmed by the National Catholic Register’s Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin.

More here-

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-bishops-deny-pope-nixed-their-plan-for-intercommunion-with-protestan

also here-

http://evangelicalfocus.com/culture/3434/Doctrinal_controversy_as_German_Catholics_open_Communion_to_individual_Protestants

Martin Luther and Me. Reckoning with Germany’s Dangerous Legacy

From Boston Review-

I am a son of Martin Luther. As was my father. As was his father. But as a German man living through today’s German and European politics, what does it mean to be a son of Martin Luther?

It took me a while, more or less the first forty years of my life, to at least partially comprehend this heritage and to understand who I am: a member of a long line of Lutheran pastors. I had not seen myself like that. I had seen myself, in the narcissism so particular to my generation, as independent, a creation of my own.

And so when I eventually opened the Bible that my father gave me a few months before he died, I was shocked to see and read the year it was printed: 1546, the year Luther died. Opening this book, very heavy and clad in old brown leather with two iron bars at the side, was a like staring into a well. It was deep, it was dark, and I plunged right into it: the texture of the paper, the old German letters that I can read only with effort, the way the pages are adorned with drawings of biblical scenes, and most of all the small notations, some in German and some in Latin, that covered each page. The comments on specific lines or words—thoughts of my forefathers—were mostly illegible and hard to decipher, like a very loud chorus that I was unable to hear. It was my family history in a palimpsest.

More here-

http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/georg-diez-martin-luther-and-me

The skeletal remains interred at a German cathedral likely belong to Charlemagne.

From Strange Remains-

In 1988, a sarcophagus that supposedly belonged to Charlemagne, King of the Franks (abt 747-814), was secretly opened.  According to historical records, Charlemagne died of pneumonia in 814, and his body was placed in a sarcophagus in the Aachen Cathedral in Germany.  On Wednesday, after 26 years(!) of research, German scientists announced that the skeletal remains they recovered from the sarcophagus likely belong to the founder of the Holy Roman Empire.

One of the scientists studying the remains, Professor Frank Rühli, said: “Thanks to the results from 1988 up until today, we can say with great likelihood that we are dealing with the skeleton of Charlemagne.”

More here-

https://strangeremains.com/2014/01/31/the-skeletal-remains-interred-at-a-german-cathedral-likely-belong-to-charlemagne/

Manfred Fischer, pastor of the Berlin Wall

From The Post-Gazette-

As people the world over celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today, it is worth remembering the man who fought to preserve it.

Born in 1948 to a mother who cleaned the houses of American military officers, Manfred Fischer spent his childhood in Frankfurt am Main, in the heart of what would become West Germany. He arrived in Berlin in the late 1960s to find a city divided by the notorious wall that would later become a central character in his life’s work.

After finishing his theological studies in the early 1970s, Pastor Fischer had his pick of a half-dozen parishes. He chose to serve the Church of the Reconciliation, the only one in Berlin bisected by the wall. He tended to his flock as East German guards with shoot-to-kill orders used the church bell tower overhead to dissuade potential escapees.


http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2014/11/09/Manfred-Fischer-pastor-of-the-Berlin-Wall/stories/201411090045

Bishop of bling

From The Economist-

THE faithful of Limburg, a diocese in Hesse, have been protesting in front of their Romanesque cathedral, a few even affixing “95 theses” to its door to make their views of their bishop unmistakable. But the prelate, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, had already gone to Rome, where he awaits a meeting with Pope Francis that will determine his future. The extent of his excesses is such that it is hard to say which detail most rankles Germans, and not only Catholic ones.

For some it is the petty lying. Last year the bishop flew first class to India to look at some do-goody projects. But when Der Spiegel, a news magazine, confronted him, he insisted that he had flown business class, even signing affidavits. On October 10th prosecutors in Hamburg indicted him for perjury.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21588129-episcopal-extravagance-fuels-criticism-state-financed-churches-bishop-bling

Vatican hears about high-spending German bishop

From AP-

The head of Germany's bishops conference warned Monday that the Catholic Church must act quickly to deal with a bishop under fire for lavish spending now that German prosecutors are involved in the case, a tacit acknowledgment that the church's finances were on the line.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch is in Rome this week to brief Pope Francis on the situation in the diocese of Limburg, where Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst has caused an uproar with the 31-million-euro ($42 million) construction of a new bishop's residence complex and related renovations.

More here-

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/oct/14/vatican-hears-about-high-spending-german-bishop/

Many German Christians quit church to avoid tax

From Market Place NPR-

In his chic, modern apartment in the former East Berlin, Stefan Faulstroh wants to know what tea I want so he can select the appropriate water temperature. He’s an engineer. You wouldn’t have guessed. Makes trains. I wouldn’t want to be so crass as to ask how much he earns but judging by the look of his place, it’s quite a lot. Stefan, though, no longer pays the church tax that used to gobble up four percent of his salary.

Was it really the money, I ask. Or was it loss of faith? No, he says, it was the money. “So now do you sometimes sneak into church nevertheless? At Christmas maybe, or Easter?” Yes, he says, as a matter of fact he does. “Does he feel guilty?” He puts the question for me. “Not really.” But sometimes he wonders if he shouldn’t go back and become a church member again. “Obviously, when you die, no priest is going to come to your funeral so that’s a downside but that’s a few years from now.”

Tall, impressively bald and dressed in a striking tweed suit he says he bought in a church bazaar, Pastor Johann Hinrich Claussen, Dean of the Hamburg region, says he keeps an eye out for tax dodgers. Especially wealthy tax dodgers. And gives me a piercing look as if I might be one myself.

The figures, he agrees, are worrying. Christians -- Protestants and Catholics combined -- are leaving their churches at a rate of about 300,000 people a year. That is a shame in itself but it also means a drop in income. So his church is trying to diversify its revenues in order to keep maintaining its churches and paying its ministers, deacons and so on. But, he says, Germany should keep its church tax.

“Social-Democrats and Liberals invented this tax a hundred years ago in order to make the people pay for their church, not only the patrons or the king or the Kaiser,” he says. “It was invented to democratize the church. That’s still an old and I think good idea.”
More here-



http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/many-german-christians-quit-church-avoid-tax

A church hungry for change

From The London Guardian-

Sitting in the rain with 100,000 people at the closing service of the recent Munich Kirchentag, I noticed that my free plastic rainhood was surplus stock from the August 2005 Cologne World Youth Day. Then the sun shone, the crowds cheered, and the pope grinned his most benevolently vulpine grin, amidst talk of a Catholic renaissance in Germany. The showers held off five years ago, but it's all over now.

For Bavarians, Catholicism is a way of life, not a dogmatic package. It's a matter of identity rather than conformity. The Bavarian Catholic church is too firmly embedded to be, as one traditional journalistic cliche has it, rocked by sexual abuse scandals. However what is usually described as a crisis of trust runs though its heart, as 'Blackpool' runs through Blackpool rock. Old certainties are not holding up well, and lay progressives are on the march.

If I wanted to devise an exquisite form of torture for English RC reactionary critics of the second Vatican council, I would force them to sit as I did recently with tens of thousands of Bavarian Catholics, cheering enthusiastically for the ending of compulsory celibacy, women's ordination, and birth control.

At one point I heard Fr Klaus Mertes, the Jesuit theologian who blew the whistle on sexual abuse at the Canisius College in Berlin, crack a joke — if it carries on like this, the only people we will be able to ordain will be women. Laughter spread through the 8,000 in the hall, followed by a rousing round of rugby club applause.

More here-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/25/munich-kirchentag-catholic