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Pope says ban on Luther no longer in effect

By ULLA PLON   |   June 6, 1989

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- Pope John Paul II told Danish Lutheran bishops Tuesday that Rome's excommunication of Martin Luther 468 years ago expired with the death of the father of the Reformation and thus should not be an obstacle to dialogue between Catholics and Protestants.

'According to Roman Catholic doctrine, any excommunication expires with the person's death. It only applies during a person's lifetime,' the pope said, speaking in German, the native tongue of the 16th-century theologian.

'There is a need for a new evaluation of the questions raised by Luther and his teaching,' the pontiff told a Danish ecumenical meeting in Roskilde, 30 miles west of Copenhagen. 'Such a re-evaluation has begun from the Catholic side.'

Praising Luther for his profound faith, John Paul said some of Luther's teachings on reform and renewal have long been accepted by the Catholic church.

The Catholic Church condemned Luther's religious writings in 1520 and excommunicated him the following year. Luther, who had accused church leaders of being corrupt and straying from Bibical teachings, became the founder of the Protestant movement in Germany.

The excommunication of Luther remains a point of contention between Catholics and Protestants to this day. Before the pope's speech, Copenhagen's Lutheran bishop, Ole Bertelsen, said in a speech that 'the Catholic condemnation of evangelic doctrine has not been annulled.'

The ecumenical meeting took place immediately after a service at Roskilde's Royal Cathedral. The pope attended the service but was not permitted to speek.

The papal visit had raised controversy in Denmark, where the pope has been accused of being too conservative and stifling the ecumenical movement between christian churches.

Lutheran Bishop Bertil Wiberg said the pontiff was not invited to address the church service for fear his remarks 'could confuse the Danish population.'

'The Danes are little prepared for such an event and have little knowledge of the differences between the Lutheran Danish church and the papacy,' Wiberg said. 'They might even think he was pope for them.'

Earlier Tuesday Pope John Paul II unleashed a bitter attack on abortion and extramarital sex in his first mass during a three-day visit to Denmark -- a country where half of all marriages end in divorce and one-third of all pregnancies are terminated by abortion.

The pontiff decried the 'widespread indifference to the things of God, materialism that values 'having' over 'being' and a readiness to disregard human life or manipulate it without reference to the inviolable dignity and rights of every human from conception until natural death.'

'Sin wounds even the most fundamental of loving relationships, that of marriage, by making us think that it is too difficult, if not impossible, to be bound to one person faithfully for life,' he said.

It was the first time during his five-nation Nordic tour that the pope broached the issues of sex and abortion in a region where attitudes to both are permissive.

On Wednesday, the pope is expected to celebrate mass at St. Ansgar Church in central Copenhagen followed by a meeting with representatives of Denmark's Ecumenical Society.

In the afternoon he was to fly to Jutland, 200 miles west of Copenhagen, to celebrate an outdoor mass at the old ruins of the medieval monastery at Oem. He is expected to travel to Sweden Thursday for the final leg of his five-nation tour.