‘Remember Luther’s original aim’

Martin Luther’s original intent had been to renew and reform the Church, not to divide it, according to Limerick’s Bishop Brendan Leahy, calling for this to be remembered in today’s ecumenical efforts.

Luther saw this as his reformation as based on a return to the original form of Christianity in the sense of the Gospel manifested in the crucified Christ, Dr Leahy said, calling for this year’s commemoration of the Reformation to be marked by the Churches looking to Christ crucified to discover “a style of dialogue that accomplishes so much more than we can manage on our own”.

The bishop’s comments came during a conference in Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College to mark the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation.

Disenchanted

Yale University’s Prof. Carlos Eire, author of – most recently – Reformations: The Early Modern World, was keynote speaker at the conference, speaking on how Luther and his fellow Reformers ‘disenchanted’ the medieval world with their insistence that true miracles had stopped with the last of the apostles, and that ‘miracles’ associated with Catholic saints were diabolical tricks.

Other speakers at the conference included Prof. Marian Lyons, Prof. of History at Maynooth University, who spoke on why the Reformation initially made progress in Ireland but failed to take root, and Dr Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, a monk of Glenstal Abbey, who spoke about Luther’s own Augustinian order in medieval Ireland and the early Reformation.