Erfurt, Germany, Sep 23, 2011 / 10:55 am
At Martin Luther’s former monastery, Pope Benedict XVI warned against the general presumption that personal sins are of little consequence to God and spoke about current challenges to Christian unity.
“Insofar as people today believe in an after-life and a divine judgment at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings,” the Pope said at a meeting with the German Evangelical Church Council, gathered in the eastern German city of Erfurt.
“But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage?”
The Pope gave four examples of sin - the drug trade, corruption, violence and economic exploitation – and concluded “no, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the center of our lives, it could not be so powerful.”
The meeting with the Lutheran contingent took place at the former Augustinian monastery in Erfurt on Sept. 23, the second day of the Pope’s state visit to his homeland. The historic building was home to the Catholic priest turned Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, between 1505 and 1511.