Let's see, the Roman Catholic church as about 1,600 years old when the revolters decided to go their own way and deny the true church of Christ....and now they refer to the RCC as a "cult"
does each protestant "denomination" (and there are hundreds of them) each qualify as a cultette?....maybe, when you want to be something that you're not ....you could call yourself a trans-christian...
If you were validly baptized, you are a Catholic. There is no other way to describe the effects of Baptism. You may have left the church looking for whatever, but there is NO TRUTH outside of the Catholic church...NONE.
Oh, we see people all the time, trying, to no avail, to justify some perverted form of what they refer to as Christianity, but it is ALWAYS in error, or at best, incomplete.....This search for truth outside the true church has been going on for centuries, will go on forever, and will NEVER, be successful.
Christ promised that His church would last until the end of time so it must exist now, an must have existed since He made the promise, otherwise He is a liar.....There is only one church on Earth that fits that description, and that is the Catholic church.............PERIOD
Impossible, as the church of Rome is largely invisible in the NT. For the NT church manifestly did not teach perpetual ensured magisterial infallibility, which is unseen and unnecessary in the life of the church, as is her separate class of believers distinctively titled "priests ," offering up "real" human flesh and blood as a sacrifice for sin, and literally consuming this to obtain spiritual life, around which act all else revolves, and looking to Peter as the first of a line of exalted infallible popes reigning over the church from Rome (which even Catholic scholarship provides testimony against), and a separate class of believers distinctively titled "saints," and praying to created beings in Heaven, and being formally justified by ones own sanctification/holiness, and thus enduring postmortem purifying torments in order to become good enough to enter Heaven, and saying rote prayers to obtain early release from it, and requiring clerical celibacy as the norm, among other things.
the revolters decided to go their own way
Actually, Scripture requires revolting from error and from those who depart from the faith, while you must treat liberal RCs as brethren in life and in death since your leadership does, which as an RC you are to follow, not interpret contrary to their judgment.
Meanwhile, Rome largely departed from the NT church, though retaining enough Truth that some souls could find Christ, and so the body of Christ endured, but division from this deformation certainly did not begin in the 16th century, but was preceded by earlier ones, and a period in which,
the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology")
but there is NO TRUTH outside of the Catholic church...NONE
Wow. That is a more radical claim than Scripture or even your own church cult makes. So if there is NO TRUTH outside of the Catholic church, with none, including salvific Truth that is at least shared by others, then Truth began with Rome. And your logic must be that being the unique instruments and stewards of Truth means all must submit to it. Or do you want to correct yourself?
Christ promised that His church would last until the end of time so it must exist now
Which it does and always have as the body of Christ, which is the only true church since it alone 100% consists of only true believers, while the visible church, is an admixture of true and false believers, in which both tares and wheat express themselves.
What utter nonsense. You have very little understanding of scripture. The Teacher from Nazareth was and is a Torah Observant Jew. Always will be, forever. He walked and talked the Torah that HaShem gave to Moshe (Moses) on Sinai. He said that it was eternal and that whoever kept the mitzvot (commandments) and taught others to do so would be great in the Kingdom of Heaven. Yeshua knew of no “church”. He created a movement across biblical Israel that brought the light of Torah to the nations. What is called the “Church” is a European/.Roman/ Greek collection of revived cultural icons with another name. It is idolatry.