‘From conflict to communion’: Lutheran World Federation meets with Pope

By Joseph Tulloch

Pope Leo met on Thursday morning with a delegation from the Lutheran World Federation, expressing his appreciation for the way Catholic-Lutheran relations have “matured both spiritually and theologically over the decades”.

Among those in attendance was the Rev Dr Anne Burghardt, the Federation’s General Secretary and an ordained pastor in the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church.

After the meeting, she stopped by for an interview in Vatican News’ offices, discussing Catholic-Lutheran relations, synodality, and the upcoming 500th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, a foundational Lutheran text.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for style and brevity

Q: How did your meeting with the Pope go?

A: It was a very cordial atmosphere. It’s always a pleasure to come to visit the Vatican. Sometimes we tend to forget how much ecumenical movement has achieved, but nowadays it really feels like coming to visit sisters and brothers in Christ.

We’re now moving towards celebrating 500 years of Augsburg Confession, which the Pope mentioned in his speech, expressing his hope for the ecumenical potential of this process. For me personally, it was the second time meeting Pope Leo, because I was able to come to his inauguration. But for most of our delegation it was the first time meeting him, and we perceived him as very attentive, very present, very thoughtful and very open.

In his speech to you, Pope Leo mentioned the ongoing Lutheran-Catholic dialogue process. What can you tell me about that?

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We have had a bilateral dialogue with Catholic Church since 1967. It started right after the Second Vatican Council. And in the current phase, we are looking into ways to come up with a joint understanding or joint statement on the Augsburg Confession, which is a confession that has real relevance for Lutheran churches across the world.

Although it is often seen as a confessional document, its content has a highly ecumenical potential in terms of bringing different Churches together around some of the main questions of our faith: How do we understand God? How do we how do we understand Jesus Christ? How do we understand justification, and how we understand the Church?

One of the big concerns of the Catholic Church at the moment is the ongoing synodal process. I know you’ve spoken before about its ecumenical significance …

We were very grateful that that Catholic Church also invited ecumenical guests to participate in the synod. Our assistant general secretary for ecumenical relations attended the second synod session and came back with very positive impressions about how inclusively the whole process had been set up, how lay people had also been given voice.

In a way, the fact of lay participation is not new for Lutherans. This has been our practise for centuries – to include lay voices in in church governing bodies. But it is very good to see this opening also in the Catholic Church. We, on the other hand, probably need to move in the other direction, to make sure that that our member churches are more aware of being members of one communion, where they are of course all autonomous, but at the same time in, as we call it, ‘altar and pulpit’ fellowship with one another. In that sense, it is very interesting to see these two processes unfolding side by side. 

You gave the Pope two gifts. What were they and why?

One of them was the so-called Lund Cross. Back in 2016, we commemorated the 500 year anniversary of the Reformation together with the Catholic Church and with Pope Francis. The joint commemoration took place in October in 2016 in Lund, in Sweden, in the cathedral. The special Lund cross was designed for that event, and we gave a replica to Pope Leo today in hope that we will continue on this journey from conflict to communion.

The other gift was a ceramic bowl, with the symbol of a pomegranate and also a dove as a symbol of peace. It was made by the students of vocational training centre in East Jerusalem, where our Augusta Victoria Hospital serves Palestinian patients and offers cancer care, which almost none of the other hospitals do for Palestinians in this region.