Protestants apologise for iconoclasm

The German Protestant Church (EKD) has apologised for the widespread destruction of religious images in the Reformation, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

“The Protestant Church rejects the destruction of images, which for a long time now have been an expression of Protestant piety,” Bishop Petra Bosse-Huber told a meeting of delegates from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the EKD. The clerics met in Hamburg to discuss the word “image” from Protestant and Orthodox points of view. Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch, and EKD chairman Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm sent greetings.