Allusion has already been made in Blackfriars (January, 1933, p. 10) to a remarkable movement for reunion among a small but learned and influential group of Lutheran pastors and laymen in Germany. Dr. Karl Thieme and his associates have since been reconciled with the Catholic Church. The documents connected with the events which led to their taking this step have recently been published—significantly by a Protestant firm in Switzerland. These documents are of the greatest interest, not only as indicative of some present tendencies in Continental Protestantism and as showing yet another of the manifold roads to Rome, but also as suggesting possibilities and hopes of a corporate reunion in a not remote future which may go far towards healing the divisions precipitated by the Reformation.

The decision to ‘return home’ to the Catholic Church was announced and explained in the last number of the Evangelical quarterly Religiöse Besinnung towards the end of 1933. In an article entitled Una Sancta Catholica, Dr. Thieme deplored the spirit of compromise in contemporary Christianity to which, he maintained, the German Evangelical Church had, owing especially to the activities of the ‘German Christians,’ completely and formally succumbed. The Evangelical tradition of Luther had, owing to a variety of causes, been completely destroyed in such wise that it could not be resuscitated. The pure Word of God could no longer be preached except under the protection of the successors of the apostles, the bishops of the Catholic Church.