Munich, Germany - During Pope Benedict's visit to Bavaria last week, he spent six days amongst crowds of cheering Catholics, many of them fellow Bavarians deeply attached to the region's traditional pious Catholicism.
It was easy to overlook the fact that only about 15 percent of German Catholics attend mass regularly and even Bavaria is not as Catholic as it looked on television. The turnout at some events was lower than expected.
But the biggest oversight was the image of shared communion among all Christians. The Protestants allow all Christians to take the Eucharist but the Catholics don't and this has become one of Germany's most pressing religious issues with growing impatience with the Vatican for not finding a solution.
"We want this division at the Lord's table to end," said Joerg Beyer, spokesman of the Ecumenical Network, a group that represents mixed Catholic-Protestant couples. "How credible can Christians be if couples have to ask on Sunday 'which church are your going to today?"'
Communion, the receiving of bread and wine as the Apostles got it from Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, is a central ritual in many Christian churches. When some Christians are not allowed to join in, they say it's like being invited to a dinner table and then not being allowed to eat.
The Catholic Church refuses to distribute communion to other Christians because they do not share the belief that the priest, in consecrating the bread and wine, has transformed them into the actual body and blood of Christ.
GROWING CALLS FOR REFORM
This discord creates problems mostly in countries with large populations of both Catholics and Protestants, such as Britain and the United States, but nowhere as much as in Germany - the land where the Protestant Reformation began.
The German population is fairly equally split one-third Catholic, one-third Protestant (mostly Lutheran) and one-third unaffiliated or other religions.
"So the probability of meeting and marrying someone from another church was quite high," Beyer said. In fact, about one-third of all Christian marriages are Catholic-Protestant unions. If they go to church together, the Protestant is barred from receiving communion in the Catholic church and the Catholic is not supposed to do so in the Protestant Church.
So the communion issue is important for those couples with Protestants urging the Catholics to change their rule. According to a recent opinion poll, three-quarters of German Catholics want to see this too.
Reform is so widely supported that politicians have got into the act, even though they have no say in the matter. Germany's President Horst Koehler and Chancellor Angela Merkel, both Protestants, and Bavaria's Catholic Premier Edmund Stoiber all raised it with Benedict during his visit -- to no avail.
When the Pope spoke about ecumenism, he ignored the communion issue and instead offered an alternative view of Christian unity in which all churches would work together to speak with one voice on main ethical questions.
"He doesn't accept the criticism and he doesn't take it on board," said Karl-Josef Kuschel, a Catholic theology professor at Tuebingen University. "He thinks the churches have to unite first, then they can share the Eucharist. His critics want to allow shared communion as a first step toward an eventual unity of churches."
One of the confusing aspects of this debate is that the Pope, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, publicly gave communion to a Protestant monk Brother Roger Schutz.
The Vatican said the Pope could make an exception as he knew Brother Roger shared the Catholic view of the Eucharist.
Johannes Friedrich, the Lutheran bishop of Bavaria who attended an ecumenical prayer service with Benedict, said after the visit that he was disappointed in the lack of any progress but he refused to give up hope.
"Ecumenism takes time," he said. "We cannot overcome in 50 years the difference that have grown over 500 years."