Jubilee of division: only 20% of Germans support unification of Catholic and Protestant Churches

20% of German Protestants said they favoured reunification, while 18% said they did not. Seventeen per cent said they could not or did not want to respond, and 45% responded: 'I do not care.'

Of those who identified as Roman Catholic, 66% supported the creation of one united Christian institution. However, most members (59%) of the state Protestant church (EKD) opposed such a move.

New efforts have been made to encourage unity between Protestant and Catholics in Germany. Last year, the highest authorities of both Churches signed a document in which they pledged to make the 500th anniversary of the Reformation an ecumenical year in which Protestants and Catholics would 'confess Jesus Christ together'. However, the efforts of the Vatican and leadership of the Lutheran Church in Germany haven’t brought noticeable results so far.
A year ago, in January 2016, a booklet entitled "Common Prayer" was published. It contains the general liturgical guidance on the ecumenical service to mark the anniversary – the rite of ecumenical service, texts of prayers, hymns, as well as topics for sermons on this day.

This step was preceded by lengthy negotiations between the Holy See, on the one side, and the Lutheran World Federation and the leadership of the Evangelical Church of Germany, on the other side.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the representatives of the Catholic Church of Germany initially opposed the idea of a joint celebration of the "Reformationsjubiläum" - the anniversary of the Reformation. However, after 2013 the parties reached an agreement and published a report entitled "From conflict - to communion," German Catholics said they intended to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with the Lutherans, while noting that the division of Protestantism and Catholicism, which occurred at the beginning of the XVI century, was not a separate controversial historical event but the beginning of a joint 500-year-old path of the two Christian denominations.

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