Germany: Catholics and Protestants celebrate the Peace of Augsburg.
"The Peace of Augsburg, proclaimed on September 25, 1555, made peace possible between the Christian denominations", declared the Protestant bishop Wolfgang Huber, president of the Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany. "We are celebrating the Peace of Augsburg as the beginning of the end of religious violence", he added on the occasion of an ecumenical service celebrated in Augsburg for the 450th anniversary of the treaty between Catholics and the disciples of Luther.
Cardinal Karl Lehmann, bishop of Mainz, considering that there is no alternative to the "way of ecumenism", saw in the treaty of Augsburg a call to the unity of the Church.
The German president Horst Köhler affirmed that "peace can be preserved only if we are ready to live and accept differences". "In Augsburg, it became obvious that peace between religions was a preliminary condition to world peace, and this is even more true today." In 1999, in the same town,the Holy See and the World Lutheran Federation signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.
