Such a sunny Easter Saturday. Another lovely Nebraska spring was here. So was another soccer season for my son Joshua’s fifth-grade team from his Catholic school. We arrived at the field after an errand at one of Omaha’s Catholic bookstores. That store was bustling that day, with conversations here and there about the nightwatch of the Church going on in Rome. Nothing apparently had changed overseas when we got out of the minivan. But the person so many were thinking about soon became the subject of conversation among parents in the stands—how he was doing, what he meant to us, how much had changed because God had put him there.
The game was over by 2:35 PM (9:35 PM at the Vatican.) One more errand to run. Then, as we turned to the Catholic radio station, the tone of the commentary was different. It sounded like the past tense. As we pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, we heard it. The bell. Tolling slowly. Our Lord had called the pope home.
My hand reached over to my wife’s; they gripped tightly. Memories flooded back from 12 years before, when we and the son in our van—then microscopic inside Joan’s womb—had been close to John Paul II. The stadium. The mountains beyond. The rain. Ninety thousand people, mostly teens and young adults like ourselves, being lifted beyond ourselves by Dana’s marvelous song:
We are one body, one body in Christ,
And we do not stand alone.
We are one body, one body in Christ,
And He came that we might have life …
The roar. Such a roar as the pope circled the stadium in that glass “popemobile.” Flags of so many nations flying. And those words, the words this native Lutheran had never expected to hear:
“Most of you are members of the Catholic Church; but others are from other Christian churches and communities, and I greet each one with sincere friendship. In spite of divisions among Christians, ‘all those justified by faith through baptism are incorporated into Christ…brothers and sisters in the Lord.’”
When John Paul II, opening World Youth Day in Denver, quoted those words from the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism of 1964—the year of my birth—I could no longer be neutral, let alone hostile, toward this pope. He had spoken as Joan had when she came unexpectedly into my life, as the priest who confirmed her and married us had when I challenged him on how salvation is obtained. “Faith in Jesus Christ, which is totally unmerited by us,” he had said.
The seed that God had planted through the cradle Catholic I married had been watered. The adult Christian journey that had begun April 2, 1978, the day of my confirmation in The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), had taken yet another turn. Less than five years after Denver, I became a Catholic.
And now, 27 years to the day after my Lutheran confirmation, the era of John Paul II was over…in the eyes of the secular world. Never in ours. And never in the Kingdom of God.
A cry for truth, a cry for love
“Be not afraid,” the man born Karol Wojtyla said upon his installation as pope and many, many times thereafter. His Polish countrymen heard it and found the strength and courage that crumbled an Iron Curtain and a Berlin Wall as surely as God flattened the walls of Jericho. The world, believers and nonbelievers alike, will remember him always for that.
But even then, John Paul II was speaking primarily to all who believe and are baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity. Don’t be afraid, he said, to proclaim the gospel, to speak the truth in love. He challenged Catholics to speak their timeless, God-given truth in modern ways, just as Vatican II, which he attended from first to last, had desired. And he challenged not only Catholics but also their Christian “separated brethren,” long separated from Rome, to not be afraid to forgive each other, to listen to each other, to seek and live the fullness of God’s truth as so many generations have believed it to be preserved in the Catholic Church.
The ears of many—too many—remain closed. But hundreds of thousands in this country alone have heard and heeded the message every year as they reconciled with Rome. Over my 20 years as an adult member of the Missouri Synod, the message came to me. And the pope was a decisive influence in that. When he quoted Vatican II in Denver, he seemed to be aiming those words right at me. Were it not for John Paul’s ministry and his uncompromising witness, I would not be a Catholic today.
To be honest, that was a miracle in itself. Space doesn’t permit me to detail all the twists and turns in my adult faith journey, of which I have written previously. But openness to the Catholic message doesn’t come easily to “confessional Lutherans,” such as those in the LCMS, who zealously guard the doctrinal stances developed at “ground zero” of the Reformation. Their prime beliefs are summarized easy enough for this discussion. We are totally incapable of earning our way to salvation. We are saved by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), because of Christ alone (solus Christus). The Scriptures are, as stated in Article II of the Missouri Synod’s constitution, “the written Word of God and the only rule and norm of faith and of practice.” The Lutheran Confessions —the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and the key writings of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon and other early Reformers—are “a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God.”
What about the Catholics? In the synod’s view, they unjustly interpose the priesthood, good works and empty rituals between us and God. They wrongly pray to, even worship, Mary and the saints. They define seven sacraments when Christ, as they see it, only instituted two (Baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Above all, the papacy —if not necessarily individual popes—arrogates to itself the power that belongs only to God. Indeed, the LCMS “Brief Statement” of 1932 declared, “the prophecies of the Holy Scriptures concerning the Antichrist have been fulfilled in the Pope of Rome and his dominion.”
It takes a miracle indeed to overcome such hostility, built up between both sides over five centuries and institutionalized by the Missouri Synod at its founding in 1847. Yet that miracle already was brewing at the time when I was born, when Bishop Karol Wojtyla was among those Catholic leaders recasting the Church’s modern witness at Vatican II. It’s that miracle that I wish to focus on at this time. It was in the Decree on Ecumenism that the Council Fathers codified Pope John XXIII’s desire to recover Christian unity. It included not only the words that John Paul II repeated in Denver but also a declaration that “men of both sides were to blame” for the lack of unity and that those outside Catholicism who have been baptized and believe in Christ are in “a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church.” That means we’re all in this together—we all have a duty to seek unity, as Jesus prayed so fervently in the Gospel of John.
It was a blessing to me that this call was embraced by at least a portion of the major U.S. Lutheran church bodies of my childhood—even in the Missouri Synod, where the cause of dialogue was championed by Arthur Carl Piepkorn, a longtime theology professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.
Though he retained doubts about Rome, Piepkorn also believed and taught his students that the Reformation never was intended to split the Church—indeed, that if Rome ever perceived justification as Lutherans did and the other points of difference could be properly resolved, the reason for a separate Lutheran Church would disappear. He embraced Vatican II’s call for dialogue in a sermon in 1965:
Our separation is bad not only because it presents the constant temptation to perpetuate divisions because of some vested interest in the status quo, no matter how laudably we manage to disguise it. Our separation is bad not only because it tends to focus attention on peripheral issues rather than on the central issue of forgiveness of sins by God’s grace for Christ’s sake through faith and on the central task of being the body of Christ in the world. Our separation is bad chiefly because it keeps the body of Christ from functioning as it should. …Let us see in this the real tragedy of our separation and use the opportunities that are now opening to us to fulfill our ministry toone another according to our individual vocations and opportunities.
Through 10 rounds of U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogues—in which Piepkorn was a major player before his 1973 death—that search for common ground has continued and found surprising levels of agreement.
Sadly, the Missouri Synod’s openness toward ecumenism was, by and large, a collateral casualty of a bitter 1970s struggle over Scriptural interpretation and synodical authority that has flared anew in this decade. However, it never fully died out, as witnessed in the very renewal of that LCMS civil war—a renewal touched off by a district president who prayed at an interfaith service after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In any event, the ecumenical seed was planted and watered. I came of age in the LCMS without such a strong tug of anti-Catholicism—and with a healthy measure of openness to God’s will and a burning desire to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission.
Enter John Paul II, though I didn’t perceive the difference he was making until years later in my faith journey. God had other things to teach me first as He steered my life in most unexpected directions. He first gave me a secular vocation— newspaper journalism—instead of an LCMS music teaching career. Then He gave me a cradle Catholic—a Catholic!—to share my life, that secular vocation and a memorable odyssey that taught us to trust totally in Him.
Then God gave me—or, rather, revealed —His chief earthly shepherd by sending me to cover World Youth Day while my wife participated with a group from her parish. At that point, I admired John Paul only as a world statesman. I still was strongly
convinced that the Missouri Synod best preserved the faith Christ had bequeathed to us. There was no reason for me to believe a pope could, or would, affect that judgment. And yet he did.
“We all bear the guilt”
I had received clues already from sitting in Catholic pews with Joan and debating doctrine with her. There was this hint that the Church was re-evaluating Luther, that his teachings might not be quite as un-Catholic as once thought. Now there was what the pope had said about justification at World Youth Day—and the fire for the Lord that the Holy Spirit lit through John Paul at the event’s Saturday night vigil in Cherry Creek State Park, near Denver.
In three impassioned talks, John Paul implored many thousands of young people to spread their faith and promote a culture of life. “I ask you to have the courage to commit yourselves to the truth,” he said. “Have the courage to believe the good news about life which Jesus teaches in the gospel. Open your minds and hearts to the beauty of all that God has made and to His special, personal love for each one of you. Young people of the world, hear His voice! Hear His voice and follow Him!”
This fire that the Holy Spirit lit through the Holy Father in Denver—and every time the pope encountered young people all over the world—is still burning and purifying His Church. So is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, released in English the year
after Denver. It has done so much to bring order to the chaos that followed Vatican II as some sought to appropriate the Church’s quest to speak to a new age for their own ends.
Both of these steps helped purge in me the skepticism about Catholicism that Lutherans are taught to engage from birth. So did Ut Unum Sint, John Paul’s great 1995 encyclical on ecumenism and one of many examples in which the pope sought reconciliation with non-Catholic Christians and implored them to leave the past behind, possibly under a reconfigured papacy.
Their “memory is marked by certain painful recollections,” he wrote. “To the extent that we are responsible for these, I join my Predecessor Paul VI in asking forgiveness.”
And so did the pope’s 1996 trip to Paderborn, Germany, the last of three trips he made to the nation where Lutheranism was born. As on those previous occasions, John Paul confronted the Reformation legacy head-on: Luther’s thinking was characterized by considerable emphasis on the individual, which meant that the awareness of the requirements of society became weaker.
Luther’s original intention in his call for reform in the Church was a call to repentance and renewal to begin in the life of every individual. There are many reasons why these beginnings nevertheless led to division. One is the failure of the Catholic Church and the intrusion of political and economic interest, as well as Luther’s own passion, which drove him far beyond what he originally intended into radical criticism of the Catholic Church, of its way of teaching.
We all bear the guilt. That is why we are called upon to repent and must all allow the Lord to cleanse us over and over.
Finally, there was the most astounding gesture of all toward Luther’s spiritual heirs: the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the fruit of all those years of Lutheran-Catholic dialogues in America and Europe. Built on the concept that both sides on certain issues might be saying the same thing in different ways —a concept expressed both by the early U.S. dialogues and in Ut Unum Sint—this document, concluded on Reformation Day 1999 between the Vatican and the church bodies of the Lutheran World Federation, included such statements as these:
Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.…
Justification takes place “by grace alone,” by faith alone, the person is justified “apart from works” (Romans 3:28). “Grace creates faith not only when faith begins in a person but as long as faith lasts” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae). The working of God’s grace does not exclude human action: God affects everything, the willing and the achievement, therefore, we are called to strive (cf. Philippians 2:12 ff.). “As soon as the Holy Spirit has initiated his work of regeneration and renewal in us through the Word and the holy sacraments, it is certain that we can and must cooperate by the power of the Holy Spirit…” (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, II, 65).
By that time, I had been a Catholic for nearly a year. For God had intervened directly once more. Through Scott and Kimberly Hahn’s moving joint conversion story, Rome Sweet Home, I began to find the Scriptural proofs for Catholic teachings I long had sought. One by one, the bricks of my mighty Lutheran fortress turned to dust.
Lutherans did believe, I had held and now confirmed, that although one indeed cannot be saved without faith in Christ, one also must live out one’s faith—do good works—lest that faith be lost. And Catholics did believe that this living of the faith was impossible without God’s grace. It all begins and ends with God—a “circle of eternal life,” if you will.
Moreover, Catholics didn’t worship Mary and the saints; they asked them to pray for them as fellow members of one timeless Body of Christ. The seven sacraments did have a Biblical basis. The Eucharist was a sacrifice— the one, single sacrifice on Calvary, re-presented in the liturgy. And, in trying to uphold Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist while rejecting the Catholic view of exactly what happened (transubstantiation), Luther had taken a position that was Scripturally unjustified. Most critically, I found that the authority Luther sought to claim, and that the Missouri Synod upheld, was fatally flawed as well. For sola Scriptura is in effect a mere slogan. Both Rome and Missouri have their own versions of a threefold authority structure – not only Scripture, but a Great Tradition that sums up their church’s teachings and guides their interpretation of Scripture (in Missouri’s case, the Lutheran Confessions) and a teaching authority (what Catholics call the magisterium)that protects and transmits that interpretation.
Catholics cite the Scriptures in defending the teaching authority of pope and bishops and the transmission of that teaching authority over time via apostolic succession. I finally asked: Where in Scripture could Luther, and Lutherans, find their authority to cast aside teachings they disagreed with? Nowhere.
I had come to fully perceive the tragedy of the Reformation—a tragedy caused by the very human failings of the Church’s members. In the fullness of God’s time, that message had come to me. And it has come to so many ex-Protestants who now are spreading that message—the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus (one of those former Missouri Synod students of Arthur Carl Piepkorn), Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Marcus Grodi, Jeff Cavins and many, many more.
And God saw fit to use this pope, this man born Karol Wojtyla, to help bring all of us across the Tiber to embrace the fullness of the spiritual treasure Christ left in His Church’s care. Grant us peace John Paul II begged all separated brethren—Oriental and Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, other Protestants—for forgiveness on behalf of the Church.
Alas, most have yet to grant it…and the Missouri Synod and its even more conservative cousins have yet to even officially acknowledge the plea. But the plea lives on, for it comes from God Himself. And whether a church body ever says it’s listening, the plea comes to each of us. It pleads for our conversion from our pride, to let Christ take us, as He took Peter and the apostles, where we do not intend to go. He wishes all who confess His name to enjoy the fullness of His grace, to follow the entirety of His teachings, to benefit from all the many ways He touches us through His Word, His sacraments, His creatures, His world.
Through the horrors of World War II, the oppression of communism, the struggle for freedom and the siren song of the culture of death, John Paul II brought that message to the world as perhaps no pope has since St. Peter himself. He saw himself as “the first
servant of unity,” as he wrote in Ut Unum Sint, and he pursued that unity to his last breath. “How can I not recall so many non-Catholic Christian brothers!” he wrote during the Great Jubilee of 2000 in his will and spiritual testament, revealed upon his death.
Catholics have no doubt that he prays even more fervently in our Lord’s presence for the unity of the people of God he loved so much. And so pray Joan and I and the four children God has given us.
The morning after the Holy Father died, we were preparing for 8 AM Mass. I would accompany on the piano as usual. Our two oldest sons, Jonathan and Joshua, would be servers. Our family was more Catholic than either of us could have imagined when God brought us together…and in Denver. I knew what my instrumental prelude would be: “We Are One Body,” done reflectively instead of exuberantly, with a melodic quote at the end from one of our favorite songs by Michael W. Smith: “Just leave it to Me I’ll lead you home.” Then the radio played a different song by Smith. Suddenly I was compelled to replay it on our stereo. The words burned into my heart. The tears welled up. It seemed God had sent it to forever tie the weekend of the pope’s passing to that rainy day in Denver and the incredible years of John Paul II:
Healing rain, it comes with fire
So let it fall and take us higher
Healing rain, I’m not afraid
To be washed in Heaven’s rain.
Healing rain is falling down,
Healing rain is falling down,
I’m not afraid,
I’m not afraid …
