10 Reasons I'm Not a Protestant

Religious liberalism and the cultural revolution

I’ll keep this under 1000 words because it could otherwise easily be a book.

1. Since God can’t lie or make a mistake, Revelation gives us infallible knowledge of revealed truth. And since God can’t leave Revelation to an uncertain fate, it requires a promulgating body. But that promulgating body must also be infallible; otherwise, it couldn’t transmit Revelation or demand the same submission of the intellect as the truth it teaches does.

2. Accordingly, Christ established a Church, presided over by one Head, to propagate revealed truth through the world until the end of time. And He promised His Church not only His presence but the help of the Holy Ghost to guarantee infallibility. Indeed, because Christ’s Church cannot possibly teach error and thereby lead souls to hell, infallibility is logically necessary.

3. All Protestant sects, however, admit they can teach error. In fact, Protestants have no safeguard against error at all, and there is strictly speaking no such thing as the Protestant faith. That is why no two Protestant sects among the 39,000+ agree on everything. In many Protestant churches, you can listen to a female “priest” tell you that abortion is morally acceptable. And although other Protestant sects disagree, the most they can do, by their own admission, is offer another opinion.

4. Christ promised that His Church wouldn’t fail, but the Reformers said that it did fail, thereby making Christ out to be a liar. And Protestantism wasn’t really a reformation of the Church but rather a rejection of it. Christ said that His Church would be a like a net containing both good and bad fish. But the reformers, instead of removing the bad fish, tried to build a new net. Yet as Christ said, “If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen." (Matt. 18:17.)

5. The Catholic Church, founded by Christ, carries out the mission He gave her. But all other churches originated in men arrogating to themselves the authority to decide doctrine and set up their own churches. Christianity, however, means submitting to what Christ taught in its totality, not making a private religion based on a personally approved selection of His teaching. ‘To reject but one article of Faith taught by the Church," said Aquinas, ‘is enough to destroy Faith, as one mortal sin is enough to destroy Charity.'

6. If a Catholic priest today broke his vows to God, claimed to be inspired by the devil, ran away with a nun, started a new church and declared that reason is of the devil while also saying that ‘whoever teaches otherwise than I teach is a child of hell,’ people would think he was insane. Yet that’s exactly what Luther did. St. Jerome said that heretics are rarely chaste men, and Luther said ‘to be continent and chaste is not in me.’ He also admitted his teachings made people morally worse: "It is clear how much more greedy, cruel, immodest, shameless, and wicked the people now are than they were under the Papacy."

7. Men who’ve spent their entire lives studying the Gospels — learning Hebrew, Syrian, Arabic, Greek, and Latin — say that many passages are hard to understand. As St. Peter says, Scripture contains many passages "hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." (2 Pet. 3:16) In fact, the thousands of different Protestant churches exist because each denies that the others really know what Scripture means. And since they rely only on their own fallible judgement anyway, they can never be sure of Christian doctrine derived from Scripture either.

8. The Catholic Church existed before a word of the New Testament was written. Her members wrote it, and the Church also decided what books should be in the Bible. Indeed, without an infallible Church, that can’t possibly be known since Scripture contains no contents page. And to claim that the Gospels are the only rule of faith is absurd because that means that before they were written there was no Christian rule of faith at all.

9. Protestantism claims that the Holy Spirit teaches each individual separately. Were that truly the case, however, all who read Scripture would come to the same conclusion; instead, they come to contradictory interpretations. And it’s blasphemy to say the Holy Sprit either contradicts Himself or lies to men. The truth is that the Holy Spirit doesn’t teach each individual separately, and Protestantism is the product of the principle of private interpretation, not (as is usually claimed) the producer of it. As Joseph Clayton says in ‘Luther and His Work', Protestants have reached ‘a wasteland littered with abandoned hopes and discarded creeds.’

10. Whereas the world fears the Catholic Church, it doesn’t fear Protestantism. This is especially true regarding sexual morality. Wilhelm Reich of the Frankfurt School was one of the principal architects of the sexual revolution, and he said that ‘the sexual process has always been the core of the cultural process.’ Long before Protestantism conceded the critical ground of contraception and divorce, the writing was already on the wall because of the rejection of priestly celibacy. If celibacy is so “unnatural” for priests, it’s also “unnatural” for unmarried people.

A final note

Pope Pius IX called Protestantism in all its forms "the great revolt against God.” That’s because Protestantism tries to substitute human for divine authority. Faith isn’t fundamentally about feeling a certain way when we read Scripture. It’s actually about submitting our intellect and will to the divine authority of Christ’s Church.

By contrast, Protestantism is ultimately religious liberalism. As Saint Augustine said, ‘You who believe what you please, and reject what you please, believe yourselves or your own fancy rather than the Gospel.’