[Secret Agent Man]

Two things:

1. He pleaded with Rome for years for reform and no reforms occurred.

2. Don’t confuse being a Catholic (subset) with being a Christian. Christianity is larger than Catholicism, or any one particular denomination. The believers before Christ were believers and had no conceptual idea of what “Roman Catholics” are.

[MrChips]

Luther was an insignificant monk in a distant land, whose preaching to the German peasants inspired violence and wide-scale massacres, while his preaching to the German nobility inspired more violence and the confiscation of Church lands and the destruction of Church property. It is wholly understandable that his pleas to Rome fell on deaf ears.

But, yes, of course the world of believers is larger than Catholicism, and the Church, i.e. Catholicism, preaches just that. See Jacques Maritain's "Who is My Neighbor?" for a far more broad-minded perspective than anything I have ever run across from any Protestant author . . . and being a former Protestant, I have read them all.