Another Lutheran pastor heads to Catholic Church

In August, The Layman Online published a story about a warning by Carl E. Braaten, one of the nation's leading Lutheran theologians, to the president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

In the article, "Leading Lutheran scholar: ELCA's liberal drift causing 'brain drain' from denomination," Braaten lamented the exodus of Lutheran scholars and ministers from the mainline Lutheran denomination to the Roman Catholic Church. He expressed his dismay over the direction the ELCA in strong words, including "heresy," "pious piffle," and "empty body." He warned that the denomination was on a "trajectory that leads to rank antinomianism."

Braattan said his departed colleagues were "convinced that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become just another liberal protestant denomination. Hence, they have decided that they can no longer be a part of that. Especially, they say, they are not willing to raise their children in a church that they believe has lost its moorings in the great tradition of evangelical (small e) and catholic (small c) orthodoxy (small o), which was at the heart of Luther's reformatory teaching and the Lutheran Confessional Writings. They are saying that the Roman Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed. Can this possibly be true?"

More...from The Layman Online