It Would be Really Great if Kaspar Would Just Go Away

Per Ekklesia, he starts out with this:

In an interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Cardinal Walter Kasper encouraged Catholics to read Luther's commentaries on the Bible, and his "hymns full of spiritual power", the German Protestant news agency epd reported.

"One will then discover a Luther who is full of the power of faith, whom one cannot simply make Catholic, whom we find provoking and even alien in many respects, but from whom even Catholics can learn," said Kasper, who has been president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity since 2001.

How about we start with getting Catholics to read, you know, Catholic stuff? We get enough heresy these days without actively searching it out and attempting to "learn" from it. Maybe Levada or somebody can get Kaspar to read Dominus Iesus or a Baltimore Catechism even so that he can "learn" that formal heretics like Luther can't be "full of the power of faith." He can't have the Faith, Your Eminence. He's a heretic. That's what "heretic" means.

As usual, though, Kaspar makes sure that he escalates beyond what we would normally consider the bounds of reason.

In his interview, Cardinal Kasper said he hoped Catholics would "get to know Luther better and not just interpret him from his polemical writings, still less from a few sentences taken out of context". The cardinal said he also hoped Protestantism would return to the faith of Martin Luther, "who would have been deeply averse to all of today's liberal tendencies".

Here's a novel idea, Your Eminence. How about they return to the True Faith? I fail to see how exchanging one heresy for another is really much in the way of progress. This is akin to my telling some shmoe about to drink arsenic that he's better off putting it away and going with cyanide instead.