Kudos to the Three Pillars blog for debunking this Luther quote utilized by Catholic Answers:
Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther would bemoan the religious indifference wrought by the movement he began:
Who among us could have foreseen how much misery, corruption, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude, and wickedness would have resulted from it? Only see how the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants are trampling religion underfoot! I have had no greater or severer subject of assault than my preaching, when the thought arose in me: thou art the sole author of this movement.
This is another of many quotes typically used by Rome's defenders claiming Luther regretted the Reformation. I don't recall seeing the bulk of this particular quote before. The Three Pillars blog was able to determine that Catholic Answers mined it out of either Warren Carroll's The Cleaving of Christendom or Johannes Janssen, History of the German People 6: 276-277. Janssen was a nineteenth century Roman Catholic historian heavily fueled with anti-Luther sentiment. The quote appears to be a hodgepodge of Luther quotes strung together. Catholic Answers haphazardly cut-and-pasted from one of these sources without checking it first.
It looks to me that the first sentence was not documented by Janssen: "Who among us could have foreseen how much misery, corruption, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude, and wickedness would have resulted from it?" I suspect this may be from Luther's comments on John 13 which I covered here. The Three Pillars blog was able to determine the origins of the second and third sentences. Sentence #2 was taken from the Table Talk: "Only see how the nobles, the burghers, and the peasants are trampling religion underfoot!" The last sentence then comes from a completely different page in the Table Talk, "I have had no greater or severer subject of assault than my preaching, when the thought arose in me: thou art the sole author of this movement." Janssen presented a cumulative case of Luther quotes from different places, Catholic Answers appears to have simply assumed it was one quote Luther said.... somewhere!
I greatly appreciate the work on this quote done by Scott Cooper, and will add his post to my series, Did Luther Regret the Reformation? Many of Rome's defenders have notoriously used secondary hostile sources without checking the quotes they're utilizing. I concur with Mr. Cooper:
It’s surprising that a non-profit, extremely popular apologetics empire with an annual budget over $10 million doesn’t have basic editorial standards minimally requiring direct quotes to have a citation. What’s more concerning is this doesn’t appear to be a simple oversight on a web page. Catholic Answers is apparently selling a book with this false quote and the author of the article is “a Lecturer in Church History at the Christendom College Graduate School of Theology.”
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