Toward the end of the 20th centuryLutherans in dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church and the pope, cf. Lutheranâ€"Roman Catholic Dialogue, requested the lifting of this excommunication; however, the Vatican's response was that its practice is to lift excommunications only on those still living. Roland Bainton in "Here I Stand after a Quarter of a Century", his preface for the 1978 edition of his Luther biography, concludes: "I am happy that the Church of Rome has allowed some talk of removing the excommunication of Luther. This might well be done. He was never a heretic. He might better be called, as one has phrased it, 'a reluctant rebel.'"
