Well,
you may read it in its entirety and decide for yourself.
Originally, the Diet was a chance for the Lutherans to prove they were Catholic, have some discussion where or if they erred, and end the controversy.
But the Papal Delegates didn’t want Lutheran ideas getting public recognition, so they convinced the Emperor to have it read privately. So the Lutheran representative agreed, but read it so loudly that it was heard across the street. Copies were made and Augsburg was passed around Europe.
The Emperor gave the Papal Delegates a week to respond. They took over a month, and wrote almost 300 pages of invectives mostly aimed at Luther as a person. It was considered so bad, even by other supporters of the Pope, that the Emperor sliced out the personal attacks and extraneous bits until it was less embarrassing. The end result was 12 pages. It is the
Roman Catholic Confutation, and shows where the Papal Delagates agreed and disagreed.
It was still such a weak response that the Papal Delegates only wanted to share it if the Lutherans agreed to three conditions ahead of time:
- The the Lutherans only respond by voice.
- That the Lutherans publish nothing about it, nor publicize it in any way.
- That the Lutherans agree ahead of time to unconditionally accept the Confutation on every point.
Obviously, the Lutherans refused the impossible terms due to the third request. But they convinced the Emperor to read it anyway, which the Papal party agreed to— but only in private, and afterward all copies would be shredded and burned. It would’ve been lost to history, but a Lutheran scribe named Camerarius secretly took word-for-Word notes, which allowed the Lutherans to respond in the
Defense of the Augsburg Confession, which explains it in depth.
The Augsburg Confession has an interesting place in history. It defines what it means to be Lutheran, and yet some Roman Catholic scholars muse that it can be considered a Catholic/catholic document — a young Cardinal Ratzinger among them!
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