'Obscure and Senseless'? - Another Look at When Cajetan Met Luther

by Judith Rossall

from LF Winter 2020

It is a tragedy that two of the most outstanding theologians of the sixteenth century encountered one another in a trial of heresy. [1]

In 1517, the master general of the Dominican order, Giacomo de Vio, was made a cardinal. It was a fitting reward for a distinguished career in service of the Roman Church. The new cardinal was a well-respected theologian, and the foremost scholar of his age on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. He had taken over the role of master general after sixty years of weak leadership and made every effort to promote the reform of the order, recalling it to its central mission of preaching and teaching.[2]

The new cardinal soon turned his attention to the open scandal of indulgence selling; and in December of the same year, he completed a treatise that argued for reform of the practice. While still supporting the practice overall, he had some sharp criticisms of the way in which indulgences were sold. In particular, he attempted to limit the circumstances in which indulgences could be offered, and to tie them much more closely to the penitence of the purchaser. Indulgences that are offered for someone already dead and in purgatory, he argued, could only represent the Church’s petition on their behalf, not an authoritative remission of punishment. Further, de Vio condemned outright the sale of indulgences for frivolous purposes, which, he argued, undermined true Christian penance. Much of what the cardinal wrote is noticeably similar to the criticisms included in the ninety-five theses which Martin Luther of Wittenberg University had issued just a few months earlier.[3]

All of which makes it quite surprising that the new cardinal was better known to his contemporaries and therefore to us by the religious name he received on entering the Dominican order (Tommaso, often anglicized to Thomas) and the Latinized version of his birthplace (Gaeta, which in Latin was written Caieta). Thomas Cajetan was the papal legate who examined Luther at the Diet of Augsburg; and who, in Luther’s version of events at least, demanded that he recant. Cajetan failed to listen to Luther’s arguments, which led directly to Luther’s hurried exit and eventual condemnation. Luther dismissed him as “obscure and senseless,”[4] and Protestants have often simply accepted that picture. 

Protestants often fail to appreciate that the key documents used to tell the story of that fatal encounter come mainly from Luther himself and therefore give his perspective. Cajetan did leave notes about the encounter, but they are not available in English and they were never prepared for publication. It is possible, however, to reconstruct at least something of what the encounter may have looked like from Cajetan’s perspective, and to do so throws new light on one of the most fateful interviews of the early Lutheran reformation. In particular, a reconstruction can help us to understand why, when many at the time criticized the use of indulgences, Luther’s arguments so quickly attracted accusations of heresy; and how the argument came to focus on issues of papal authority. In addition, it helps us to question the classic Protestant assumption that somehow there was a single Catholic position which universally condemned everything that Luther had to say. 

We begin, therefore, with some context that is often omitted in Protestant biographies of Luther. To understand the encounter between the two men, we need first to ask about the medieval understanding of heresy, and then to look at some events that involved Cajetan long before he met Luther. 

What Is a Heretic? 

Contrary to the assumptions of many contemporaries, medieval people did not burn each other alive simply over a difference of theological opinion. There were in effect two aspects of heresy that were firmly intertwined in the medieval mind. To be judged a heretic, a person first had to disagree in some way with the teaching of Scripture and/or of the Catholic Church; and second, had to knowingly continue to teach a theological opinion after the church had declared it to be wrong. Both these aspects of heresy raised particular issues for Luther. The common assumption of the day was that the teaching of the Catholic Church provided the definitive interpretation of Scripture, but Luther came to question this line of reasoning and argue that he understood Scripture better than his opponents. Earlier heretics had, of course, made exactly the same claim. 

The second aspect of heresy caused Luther particular problems because he persisted in proclaiming his message after the church had ordered him to silence. He turned to the new medium of print to make the most public of protests. As Steinmetz points out, this refusal to be corrected by a higher authority meant that heretics were perceived as morally defective, not just as people holding to a false idea.[5] It also ensured that heretics were seen as dangerous; the heretic wilfully refused to listen to those placed in authority over them, and in doing so endangered the souls of his followers. Luther’s actions must have seemed heretical to many even as he argued that his teaching was not. It is worth noting from the beginning that Cajetan had a very precise and careful understanding of the nature of heresy—a fact that Luther, in the heat of debate and fear for his own safety, may have failed to appreciate.

Cajetan before 1517

In 1510, the politics of Europe shifted once again and the former alliance between the King of France and Pope Julius ii collapsed. Finding himself under attack, Louis xii of France suddenly remembered that his former ally had reneged on a promise to call a reforming church council; was accused of bribing his way into the papacy; and was generally a better leader on the battlefield than in church. With the connivance of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, he persuaded a group of cardinals to call a church council[6] at Pisa in 1511. In calling a council without the permission of the pope, the cardinals represented the longstanding tradition within Roman Catholicism of conciliarism—the belief that the ultimate authority within the church lies with ecumenical councils, not the papacy. Julius was a deeply unpopular pope, as demonstrated by the biting satire, Julius Excluded from Heaven, which was published shortly after his death. In this work Julius discovers that his key does not actually open the gate to heaven and is forced to explain his life to St. Peter, in the process admitting to a series of crimes and an exceptionally materialistic vision of the role of the pope. When he is refused admission, he threatens to return with an army.[7] The council convened at Pisa was therefore deeply threatening to Julius II; there were good theological arguments that church and papacy were in desperate need of reform, and Julius had reason to fear that the aim of king and emperor was ultimately to depose him. 

The council of Pisa is rarely mentioned today, mainly because Julius successfully undercut it by calling what became the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512. Indeed, some historians argue that conciliarism was a spent force by the early sixteenth century. However, Julius II took the threat posed by the Pisa conciliabulum very seriously. He launched an intense campaign against the council, which included forcing those involved to repent their actions[8] and ensuring that the first five sessions of Lateran V were spent condemning and rejecting the decrees of Pisa. Only when both Julius II and Louis XII died within a couple of years of each other, were their successors, Leo X and François I, able to negotiate peace between France and the papacy. They signed the Concordat of Bologna in 1516,[9] which dealt with many long-standing issues between the papacy and the Kingdom of France. Most importantly for our purposes, François accepted that the pope’s powers were not, in fact, subject to the authority of a church council. Leo conceded in return that the French king had the right to appoint men to such major church benefices as bishoprics and abbacies within his kingdom on his own authority.[10] Many French churchmen objected to the extra power which the concordat gave their King and the University of Paris promptly appealed the agreement—to a future church council. Luther was to point to this precedent on a number of occasions. 

In other words, while historians may argue that conciliarism was never a serious proposition in the sixteenth century, it is highly unlikely that this is how the situation looked to the Roman curia in 1517. The first half of that year was occupied with the eleventh and twelfth sessions of Lateran V, which returned again to the issue of the relationship between pope and council, and declared:  

For it is clearly established that only the contemporary Roman pontiff, as holding authority over all councils, has the full right and power to summon, transfer and dissolve councils.[11]

This tangled history had a critical influence on the views of Luther’s opponents;[12] in fact, it is impossible to understand their actions without appreciating that the context meant that they were particularly alert to anything which might present a danger to the position of the pope. 

Tommaso de Vio Cajetan had been fully involved in all of the discussions in 1511 and the years following. When the dissident cardinals at Pisa attempted to justify their actions, Julius II turned to Cajetan for a theological reply.[13] The Authority of the Pope Compared with the Authority of a Council was published in October 1511. This work argued on the basis of Matthew 16 and John 21 that Christ had instituted the office of the papacy and that the pope is therefore superior over a general council. Cajetan did, however, concede two circumstances in which a council could rightly claim authority over a pope—those being if the pope were heretical, and if the identity of the true pope was unclear. These qualifications ensured that some ultra-papalists within the curia regarded Cajetan as too moderate.[14] Not surprisingly, the members of the Council of Pisa also objected to his theology and referred the work to the University of Paris,[15] which meant that Cajetan continued the debate with the Parisian theologian Jacques Almain.[16] He was also fully involved in the debates at Lateran V, although the final decree quoted above failed to reflect the nuances of his position. In other words, by the time Cajetan met Luther, he had been involved for some time in disputes about the relationship between pope and council and was well aware that not everyone in the Roman Church agreed with his position. When Luther appeared to question papal authority, he was once more raising an issue that Cajetan had already attempted to settle, and that the curia was bound to regard as threatening. 

Initial Response to Luther 

The relatively new cardinal was sent as the papal legate to the imperial Diet of Augsburg in May 1518. He was a last-minute replacement for Cardinal Farnese, who pleaded ill health. It would have been obvious from the beginning that Cajetan’s would not be an easy role.[17] Leo X was intent on uniting Christian rulers against the perceived threat of a Turkish invasion; the diet had been formally convoked to discuss his plan. Cajetan would have known, however, that two other major issues were bound to be raised. Emperor Maximilian i was aging, and the issue of his successor would be highly contentious. Equally, it was highly unlikely that an imperial diet would pass without the presentation of yet another gravamen. The Gravamina nationis germanicae[18] were basically a series of complaints reflecting the German people’s perception that they were being exploited by the Roman Church and had been issued in various forms for at least the previous hundred years.[19] Whoever represented the pope at Augsburg could expect to be the unwilling recipient of another set of complaints. It is unlikely that Cajetan gave much thought to Martin Luther as he set off. In May 1518, Rome was still preparing the initial response to Luther and had ordered the Augustinian order to quieten its troublesome friar. 

While Cajetan was en route to and settling in at Augsburg, Rome’s theological response to Luther was written and delivered to him along with a citation as suspected of heresy. The citation was issued by Girolamo Ghinucci, a canon lawyer, and required Luther to appear in Rome for a hearing within sixty days. The theological response was written by Sylvester Prierias in his role as papal court theologian.  Luther dismissed the latter with contempt, and there is evidence that many on the Catholic side were equally unimpressed by Prierias.[20] Nevertheless, comparing Prierias with Cajetan is enlightening. Prierias opened with four fundamental principles, two of which were:  

3. Whoever does not hold to the teaching of the Roman Church and the pope as an infallible rule of faith, from which even Holy Scripture draws its power and authority, is a heretic. 

4. The Roman Church can establish something with regard to faith and morals not only by words but also by acts. . . . It follows that as he is a heretic who wrongly interprets Scripture, so also he is a heretic who wrongly interprets the teaching and acts of the Church in so far as they relate to faith and morals.

Corollary: Whoever says in regard to indulgences that the Roman Church cannot do what she has actually done is a heretic.[21]

As Luther and many others pointed out, despite being the official theologian of the pope, Prierias was in fact espousing a doctrine which was at the extreme end of Catholic theology.[22] In these opening principles alone, he had both declared that Scripture draws its authority from the pope and had expanded the basic understanding of heresy. According to Prierias, heresy is not just disagreeing with the Church’s interpretation of Scripture, it is also disagreeing with the Church’s actions—thus conveniently defining any questioning of indulgences as heretical. In this way, Prierias proved to his own satisfaction (if to no one else’s) that Luther was a heretic, and he made the accusation freely throughout the rest of the Dialogues. 

Luther received his copy of the Dialogues along with the summons to Rome in early August 1518 and immediately suspected a Dominican conspiracy. Cajetan was of course the former master general of that order. Rather than submitting, Luther wrote to Georg Spalatin, who was secretary to Elector Friedrich, and to the elector himself requesting the latter’s help in having his case heard in Germany.[23] Spalatin and the elector were already in Augsburg attending the Imperial Diet. What Luther did not know was that Maximilian i had also been writing about his case to the Pope. Maximilian had heard that Luther had criticized indulgences and had taught on the power of papal excommunication—probably a reference to a secondhand and inaccurate version of Luther’s sermon on the ban that was circulating at the time.[24] The emperor declared Luther a heretic and urged the pope to act before not only the “unlearned multitude” but also princes were led astray.[25]

Leo X responded to the Emperor immediately. Taking the emperor’s word as all the evidence needed, and ignoring the fact that Luther had been given sixty days to respond to the charge of heresy, he announced that Ghinucci had proven the case. Leo then issued orders to Cajetan to arrest Luther as a notorious heretic, with the emperor’s assistance if necessary.[26] The pope also wrote to Elector Friedrich, asking for his help without actually mentioning that Luther had already been convicted. Instead, he wrote that Luther had been “summoned to make answer” and that Cajetan had been ordered to “do with Luther as seems best.”[27]

Leo’s missive put Cajetan in a delicate position, to say the least. Not only did he need Friedrich’s support on the major issues facing the diet, he also knew that there would soon be an imperial election (Maximilian did in fact die in January 1519) and that Friedrich was one of only seven electors who would select the next Holy Roman Emperor. So, when Friedrich sought out Cajetan with his request that the hearing take place on German soil with German judges, Cajetan had to negotiate. He met with Friedrich and wrote to Rome asking that his brief be amended. There was therefore an exchange of letters between Cajetan and Rome, of which we have only one, Leo’s letter to Cajetan titled Cum nuper.[28] It has been assumed that Cajetan received Cum nuper before meeting Luther and that the letter contained his final orders. Kelly has argued that there were several letters exchanged and that Cum nuper would have reached Cajetan too late.[29] Whenever it actually arrived, Cum nuper makes a vital concession that Cajetan must have requested—it orders Cajetan to examine the case. In other words, Luther’s status reverted from being convicted of heresy to that of an accused with a case to answer. 

In preparation for the meeting, Cajetan made a careful study of the documents written by Luther that were available to him. These were Luther’s explanation of the Ninety-five Theses,[30] which had just been published, and his sermon on penitence. As a result of his studies he eventually produced the Augsburg Treatises.[31] There is not the space here to fully evaluate Cajetan’s own careful analysis—but again a comparison with Prierias is helpful. Where Prierias saw heresy everywhere and even managed to find fault when Luther’s views were perfectly orthodox,[32] Cajetan was measured and careful. He homed in on just two issues, those which he famously raised in the actual interview—Luther’s denial that the pope can dispense a treasury of merits earned by Christ and the saints, and his insistence on the role of faith in the sacraments. Even when dealing with those two issues, the language is careful, “the ordinary understanding of the church is opposed to this view,” Cajetan noted.[33] Significantly, he dealt just once with the issue of papal authority in relation to that of Scripture, and was again much more measured than Prierias. Cajetan noted “the principle that recognizes the letters and decrees of the Roman Pontiff as ranking in authority next to Scripture,”[34] but he did not explore further what this principle actually meant. 

When Luther Met Cajetan

There were no notaries present when Cajetan and Luther finally met. Their absence means that in assessing what may have happened, the historian needs to bear in mind two possibilities. First, that in a crucial and high stakes encounter that appears to have degenerated into a shouting match, both men may have gone further than intended in stating their positions. Second, that Luther’s memory written down several days after the event may not have been wholly accurate. Luther stated on several occasions that Cajetan claimed that the authority of the pope was higher than that of Scripture;[35] if Cajetan did in fact make such a claim, then he went further in oral discussion than he did on paper. 

Cajetan appears to have unimpressed by Luther; Schmidt has shown that his impression became part of the general image of Luther held by the Roman curia. Luther was seen as “excessively overestimating and overrating himself—and therefore ignoring the teaching office of the pope and the councils as well as that of the theological experts.”[36] This is the point at which we need to remember both that this obstinate refusal to listen was a key part of the medieval understanding of heresy, and that the meeting between Cajetan and Luther was not an encounter between equals. Cajetan was a cardinal, representing the teaching authority of the pope himself, while Luther was a friar and a professor at an obscure German university[37] and was accused of heresy. While Luther did demonstrate due humility in, for example, prostrating himself before the cardinal, nevertheless he stubbornly refused to listen to Cajetan’s attempts to explain the teaching of the church.

Luther and his vicar general, Johann Staupitz, were united in their complaint that Luther was not allowed to debate; rather, the cardinal kept insisting that he recant. Christoph von Scheurl, the professor of law at Wittenberg, however, reported a small but crucial difference in his memory of what was said. In his account, Cajetan constantly said to Luther “Recant the two points. We can solve the rest by applying distinctions.” It is entirely possible that this phrasing seemed to Cajetan a very generous response to the trouble that Luther had caused and a very minor recantation, particularly in comparison with Prierias’ ability to see heresy in nearly everything Luther wrote. 

Luther famously left Augsburg without permission and under cover of night. Cajetan was deeply frustrated by Luther’s sudden departure. Luther had requested that his case be referred to Rome and this Cajetan had done, but he also requested and probably drafted a short papal decree making clear the official position on indulgences. This is the decree called Cum postquam. The decree responded to many of the criticisms that Cajetan, Luther, and others had raised. It rejected the more excessive claims of the indulgence sellers; it insisted that indulgences were not a substitute for confession and could be applied only to the penance imposed by the confessor.[38] Cum postquam, however, also carefully defined that what Luther had denied was Catholic teaching, stating the following in regard to the pope.  

in virtue of [his] apostolic authority, granting indulgences both to the living and the deceased, he dispenses the treasure of the merits of Jesus Christ and the saints, granting indulgences in the form of absolution, or conferring them in the form of intercession.[39]

There is evidence, however, that Cajetan, continued to maintain his more careful assessment of Luther’s teaching. Martin Bucer, a Reformed theologian who was later to act as a mediator between Luther and Zwingli, reported to Beatus Rhenanus on July 30, 1519, that Cajetan had met delegates from the Universities of Louvain and Cologne at Coblenz. 

For I have learned from a trustworthy friend, in whom Cajetan confided, that there was almost no page in a book of Luther’s on which they had not written “heresy, heresy” several times. They showed the book thus disfigured to the cardinal, led perhaps by their own prejudice to hope that he would endorse their judgement at once. But when he had examined the book and their dirty notes, he said: ‘We must not strike out too much. There is a very slight difference between some things which you have called heresies and the orthodox view. They are errors, not heresies.’ [40]

Cajetan’s more nuanced position on Luther’s theology did not win out at Rome. As is well known, the death of Maximilian i in January 1519 meant that attempts to deal with Luther were delayed; it was not until January 1520 that proceedings against Luther were reopened. Cajetan played a full part in the commission but appears to have been at odds with the other members, including Johann Eck. Cajetan attempted in vain to argue for a careful distinction between Luther’s careless statements that could disturb the faith of others and those statements which were clearly either erroneous or actually heretical. He was outvoted, however, and so Exsurge Domine, the bull of excommunication, has frequently been criticized for its imprecision in quoting forty different propositions, often taken out of context. 

After Cajetan Met Luther

Tommaso Cajetan was 50 years old when he met Luther at Augsburg, a fact that makes the energy and openness he displayed in the next decades even more remarkable. He returned to working on a commentary on Aquinas’ Summa theologiae; Janz argues, however, that he also went to some lengths in what he wrote to find agreement between Catholic theology and the Reform movement.[41] He played a key role in supporting the election of the reforming Pope Adrian vi, whose sudden death in 1523 must have been a great disappointment to Cajetan personally. Most noticeably, he appears to have been the Catholic theologian who appreciated most fully the implications of Luther’s appeal to Scripture as the sole authority. From 1527 onward he began to publish a series of biblical commentaries that both attended carefully to the literal sense and drew on the best scholarship of the day, which means Cajetan accepted the common critiques of errors in the Vulgate and worked directly from the Greek and Hebrew texts. 

It would be easy to portray this work as simply a response to Luther, but Janz has pointed out that in doing so Cajetan was true to the spirit of Thomas Aquinas, who published commentaries on five books of the Old Testament, Matthew, John, and all the letters of Paul. Nevertheless, this new work does not seem to have been appreciated by his contemporaries. He was censured by the theological faculty of Paris for his reliance on the original languages,[42] and for arguing that the final eleven verses of Mark are not original. While Cajetan continued to serve the Church in senior positions for the rest of his life, it is difficult to avoid the sense that he was an outsider—at least partly because while he remained fully opposed to some of Luther’s teaching, he was more willing than most to concede other issues in an attempt to reestablish Christian unity. 

Tommaso de Vio Cajetan died in August 1534 while working on a commentary on the Prophets. It is impossible to say what might have happened had both Luther and others in the Roman curia listened more carefully to one of the outstanding theologians of his generation. Quite possibly, the Lutheran Reformation’s rupture of the Church would still have happened; it could, however, have been considerably less acrimonious. 

Judith Rossall is tutor at the Queen’s Foundation for Theological Education in Birmingham, England. 

Notes

[1] Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017; Report of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), ¶. 48, p. 29.

[2] A key source for this article is the work of Jared Wicks, particularly his book, Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2011), which provides the best translation of Cajetan's work into English, along with a very helpful introduction to his work.

[3] David Bagchi, “Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and Contemporary Criticism of Indulgences,” in Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Robert Swanson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 331ff. (349).

[4] Martin Luther and others, Luther's Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters, trans. Preserved Smith (Lutheran Publication Society, 1913), vol. i, 120 .

[5] David C Steinmetz, “The Catholic Luther: A Critical Reappraisal,” Theology Today 61.2 (2004): 187–201 ( 188).

[6] This council is often referred to as a conciliabulum because it was regarded as schismatic. 

[7] (attributed to) Desiderius Erasmus, “Julius Excluded from Heaven,” in The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. Robert M Adams (New York and London: WW Norton & Co., 1989), 142–73 <https://fliphtml5.com/xjwn/xuxh/basic> [accessed 11 July 2018].

[8] Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Christopher M. Bellitto, eds., The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 49. 

[9] Bernward Schmidt, “Luther and the Reformation as Perceived in Rome: Methods of Spiritual Reform and Sustaining Catholic Orthodoxy,” in Reformation & Renaissance Review: Journal of the Society for Reformation Studies 21.2 (2019): 127.

[10] Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 199.

[11] “Fifth Lateran Council, 1512-17 A.D.,” Papal Encyclicals OnLine, sec. 11 <https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum18.htm> [accessed 27 July 2020].

[12] Schmidt, "Luther and the Reformation as Perceived in Rome," 128.

[13] Francis Oakley, “Almain and Major: Conciliar Theory on the Eve of the Reformation,” in The American Historical Review 70.3 (1965): 674.

[14] Gerald Christianson, et. al., The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century,  196.

[15] Oakley, "Almain and Major,"  675.

[16] Available in English in J.H. Burns and Thomas Izbicki, eds., Conciliarism and papalism, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Almain died in 1515 and so did not live to reply to Cajetan’s response to his initial critique of the cardinal’s tract.

[17] Wicks suggests that Farnese avoided the task because of the prospect of dealing with an ill-tempered audience.

[18] Also known as the Centum gravamina teutonicae nationis.

[19] Nathan Montover, Luther's Revolution: The Political Dimensions of Martin Luther's Universal Priesthood (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2012), 95.

[20] Carter Lindberg, “Prierias and His Significance for Luther's Development,” in The Sixteenth Century Journal 3.2 (1972): 46.

[21] Sylvester Prierias, cited in Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations Sourcebook (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 31.

[22] Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” The Catholic Historical Review 69.4 (1983): 530n 34. 

[23] Luther's Correspondence, vol. i, 100.

[24] Suzanne Hequet, “The 1518 Proceedings at Augsburg,” Lutheran Quarterly 32.1 (2018): 61.

[25] Luther’s Correspondence, vol. I, 98-99.  

[26] Ibid., 103.

[27] Ibid., 105–6.

[28] English translation available in Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Luther at Augsburg, 1518: New Light on Papal Strategies,” in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70.4 (2019): 821-22.

[29] Ibid., 809f.

[30] Martin Luther, “Explanation of the Ninety-Five Theses,” in Luther's Works, Vol. 31, Career of the Reformer [1517-1520], ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Christopher Boyd Brown (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress 1955), 79–252. 

[31] Available in Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther,” 47–98.

[32] Richard Rex, The Making of Martin Luther (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).

[33] Wicks, Cajetan Responds, 56.

[34] Ibid., 72.

[35] See for example Martin Luther, The Annotated Luther, eds. Hans Joachim Hillerbrand, Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2015), vol. i, 133.

[36] Schmidt, "Luther and the Reformation as Perceived in Rome," 131.

[37] Wittenberg had been founded by Elector Friedrich only in 1502, which made it considerably junior to such older universities as Bologna (founded 1088), Oxford (1096), and Paris (1150). It was renamed after Luther in 1933 and is currently known as Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.

[38] Peter Stanford, Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017).

[39] Leo X, “Cum Postquam” <http://ldysinger.stjohnsem.edu/@texts2/1535_luther/00a_start.htm>.

[40] Luther’s Correspondence, vol. I, 209.

[41] Denis Janz, “Cajetan: A Thomist Reformer?” in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 6.2 (1982): 95.

[42] Ibid.