Vatican, Lutheran body recall 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's excommunication (Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity)

“We cannot undo the history of separation, but it can become part of our history of reconciliation,” Cardinal Kurt Koch (president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and Rev. Martin Junge (general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation) in the foreword to a new Italian translation of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999).