As noted, the Catholic church and the German Free (Lutheran) Church have come to a concordant on the doctrine of the means of salvation. My point is not to degrade Luther; I fully realize that he is not regarded as infallible by any Protestant, and so any Protestant can disavow anything Luther has said or done without damaging their creed.
My only point is to clarify what the Catholic Church was and was not condemning. The Church reasonably understood Luther to mean certain things. One might think he would deny such matters. Or even watch his tongue after the horrific bloodshed of the German Peasant’s War was reasonably attributable to the peasants taking at face value his statements on the invalidity of church power... and then the nobility slaughtering them by the millions because they took literally his claims that peasants were born to be cannon fodder.
It’s beside the point I’m making if he didn’t mean these things, and I understand that modern Lutherans are neither fools nor liars for claiming he didn’t. BUt if you’re saying that the Catholic Church cannot hold salvation by grace because that’s what the reformers believed in and the reformers fought with the Catholic church, then it’s important to clarify that the Catholic church’s problem was not with the modern understanding of salvation by faith alone, but with these other statements which Luther did, in fact, make.
Did Luther make statements contrary to those that offended Rome? Absolutely! He would hardly be the first politician to speak out of both sides of his mouth, or to change his mind. One moment, he was calling the Turks the hand of God and condemning those who resist them. The next he was condemning them as worthy of certain death. But wait, the Turks could tie up the Catholic princes in Germany? Let’s here it for Mohammed!!! Cried all the Lutheran princes!
Then while you accuse Luther of being unclear, you should have made it clear that "Catholics reject sola fide" due to it meaning a faith that does not effect works, as if it was a faith that does not produce "things that accompany salvation." (Heb. 6:9) but which was is not the historical view, and should not be made today 500 years after the Reformation.
My only point is to clarify what the Catholic Church was and was not condemning
You stated why RC rejected sola fide as if this was the current reason. Then you invoked what Leo said in 1520 and a statement Luther said in 1521. Of more relevance would be Trent, but which dealt with more than Luther, and their condemnation of Luther and the Reformation was many decades after the Reformation began.
Yet its censure of sola fide is subject to interpretation. As one of your notable apologists (Akin) states in explaining why Trent's condemnation of sola fide may not apply to Protestants today,
"the canon was directed at what Lutherans of the time said, but not at what they meant by what they said, so the doctrinal formula was condemned as defective rather than the doctrine itself, or (5) the canon was never directed at Lutherans to begin with but was directed at something else." (http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/SOLAFIDE.HTM
Similarly, another RCA (Armstrong) stated,
The canon only condemns “sola fide” if it is used “so as to understand that nothing else [besides intellectual assent] is required” to attain justification. Thus Trent is only condemning one interpretation of the sola fide formula and not the formula itself.
Armstrong also quotes (by way of Akin) "The Condemnations of the Reformation Era—Do They Still Divide?" - a document of special importance for the Joint Declaration on Justification - which states,
We may follow Cardinal Willebrand and say: In Luther’s sense the word faith by no means intends to exclude either works or love or even hope. We may quite justly say that Luther’s concept of faith, if we take it in its fullest sense, surely means nothing other than what we in the Catholic Church term love (1970, at the General Assembly of the World Lutheran Federation in Evian). (p. 52)
A Protestant researcher, James R. Payton, Jr. author of , "Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings," objectively understands (from a review) that Reformation was not a monolithic, unified movement, but a diverse and hotly contested multiplicity of reform movements." But overall "the reformers did not teach that salvation consists in faith without works, much less in a single-event act of “faith, but rather a life dedicated to God. " (Also, "The reformers did not teach that the Bible is literally “the only book” Christians need, but that scripture is best read in an informed manner, drawing upon both general learning and knowledge of the church’s tradition, particularly its early tradition.")
Your own Peter Kreeft stats, One of the tragic ironies of Christian history is that the deepest split in the history of the Church...— this split between Protestant and Catholic originated in a misunderstanding. And to this day many Catholics and many Protestants still do not realize that fact. (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0027.html)
In addition, ancient understanding of justification finds differing interpretations, and that at the time of Trent theology saw more variation in views than were allowed after it.
Jaroslav Pelikan, (then) Lutheran scholar in the history of Christianity (with honorary degrees from 42 universities), contended,
"Existing side by side in pre-Reformation theology were several ways of interpreting the righteousness of God and the act of justification. They ranged from strongly moralistic views that seemed to equate justification with moral renewal to ultra-forensic views, which saw justification as a 'nude imputation' that seemed possible apart from Christ, by an arbitrary decree of God. Between these extremes were many combinations; and though certain views predominated in late nominalism, it is not possible even there to speak of a single doctrine of justification." (Obedient Rebels: Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle in Luther’s Reformation, p. 52 )
"Every major tenet of the Reformation had considerable support in the catholic tradition. That was eminently true of the central Reformation teaching of justification by faith alone…..Rome’s reactions [to the Protestant reformers] were the doctrinal decrees of the Council of Trent and the Roman Catechism based upon those decrees. In these decrees, the Council of Trent selected and elevated to official status the notion of justification by faith plus works, which was only one of the doctrines of justification in the medieval theologians and ancient fathers. When the reformers attacked this notion in the name of the doctrine of justification by faith alone – a doctrine also attested to by some medieval theologians and ancient fathers – Rome reacted by canonizing one trend in preference to all the others. What had previously been permitted also (justification by faith alone), now became forbidden. In condemning the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent condemned part of its own catholic tradition.” — The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959), 49, 51-52 )
The problem as i see it is that, per usual, there was overreaction on both sides, in which Reformers emphasized that unmerited grace appropriated thru faith, not on the basis of works/merit, but with their protests seeming to foster the idea that such faith need not be the kind that effects works, and or that God does not recompense the faith of believers in the light of their works, due to His promises in grace to reward the "obedience of faith, " even though the rewardees actually deserve damnation.
Rome reacted to this by emphasizing merit, and so that believers have "by those very works which have been done in God...truly merited eternal life." (Canon 32) Thus in RC soteriology souls merit the graces needed for attaining eternal life, truly meriting eternal life by the good works that he performs by the grace of God. Salvation by merit under unmerited grace.
Salvation begin by being formally justified by one's interior holiness, usually via baptism in recognition of proxy faith, and usually ends with becoming good enough to enter glory via purgatory.
It was and is not my intent to get into the lengthy theological distinctions here, though whats important to me is that souls come to Christ as per my tag line, and die with the same faith in the Lord Jesus to save them by His blood.
But my original point was that Catholic rejection of sola fide is wrong if based on the premise that it teaches mere intellectual faith saves, or in any way being a kind of faith that does not effect obedience toward of Object of faith, the risen Lord Jesus.