Per the Associated Press:
Pope Benedict XVI called divisions among Christians a “scandal to the world” at a joint ceremony Thursday with the spiritual leader of the Orthodox Christian church, which split from Catholicism nearly 1,000 years ago.
Reaching out to the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians is a centerpiece of Benedict’s papacy. He has set the difficult goal of full unity between the two ancient branches of Christianity, which divided over disputes including the extent of papal authority.
“The divisions which exist among Christians are a scandal to the world,” the pope said after joining Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to mark the feast day of St. Andrew, who preached across Asia Minor and who is believed to have ordained the first bishop of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
Were it not for those divisions, especially via the Protestant Reformation, the Church might still be inclined to wars of imperialism, political intrigues, corruption, and ad hoc superstitions that degraded the Church in Luther’s day.
Following the Reformation and aided by Gutenberg’s great invention, the freedom of being able to read the Bible in one’s own language and to start interpreting it individually led to other, great flowerings of freedoms in the West ? culminating in the American tradition of religious pluralism, enshrined as the very first freedom in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.
It’s this kind of division, this reformation, and its concomitant recognition for the need to protect religious liberty that is so desperately needed in the Islamic world.
