Franz Posset introduces ‘Catholic sympathisers’ of Luther among the clergy and religious of the diocese of Augsburg in the 1520s. He thereby directs our attention to those members of the humanist movement who felt united with Luther in reformist and pastoral concern but unlike him never formally broke with the Roman Church. Especially in the diocese of Augsburg, headed by the reform-minded bishop Christoph von Stadion, this attitude was not rare. Based on the available older literature, Posset portrays four prestigious ‘Catholic’ friends of Luther. Perhaps the most famous is the Eichstätt and Augsburg canon Bernhard Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden (1459–1523) who secretly forwarded the Obelisci of his Eichstätt co-canon Johann Eck to Luther and therefore was included by Eck in the papal bull Exsurge Domine. Only due to mediation by the duke of Bavaria was he spared excommunication, although he was widely known as a supporter of the Reformation. Another supporter of Luther was the prominent scholar of Hebrew Caspar Amman (c 1450–1524), who since 1485 had served as prior of the convent of the Austin Friars at Lauingen and in 1523 published the first direct translation of the Psalms from Hebrew into German without attracting, however, the attention of the Wittenberg friar. The Augsburg Benedictine monk and polymath Vitus Bild (1481–1529) brought together a rich collection of Reformation pamphlets, but since the mid-1520s had dissociated himself from the more radical supporters of the Reformation. Caspar Haslach (c. 1485–1540 /41), town preacher of Dillingen and later on rector of Bernbeuren, had to answer to the ecclesiastical authorities because of his evangelical sermons in 1522 and seems to have formally renounced Luther while secretly holding on to his former beliefs. All four men collected and read Luther's writings and sought personal or epistolary contact with him, all shared the ideal of ‘evangelical preaching’, and for all of them the Wittenberg Reformer was ‘our Martin’. Posset has brought back to life the multifarious milieu of the humanist and reform-minded followers of Luther in the 1520s. It is, however, not true that this milieu is being maliciously concealed by Protestant researchers in the present ‘post-ecumenical age’ as Posset, himself a Catholic, insinuates. Whether it makes sense to speak of ‘Catholic’ sympathisers of Luther as early as in the 1520s seems questionable: Posset himself complains about the frequent ‘confusion of tongues’. Problematic also is Posset's approach to Luther who according to him did not initially strive for a renovation of the Church but for pastoral reform, an issue on which he was joined by many other contemporary clerics and religious.