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Good article, with my usual caveat that "Catholic" means The Church as we ALL, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, "Eastern Catholics" and Latins can and do define it in the Creed.
"Protestantism is based on the allegation that the Catholic Church became corrupt shortly after 312 AD. That’s when the emperor Constantine converted and made Christianity the state religion. It is alleged that pagan converts came into the Church bringing with them many of their pagan beliefs and practices. According to Protestant historians the pagan practices that were brought into the Church became the distinctive doctrines of Catholicism. Thus the Catholic Church was born and true Christianity was lost until the Reformation. But history tells us a different story."
I don't know that this paragraph is accurate. I think it might be more genuine to say that Protestants believe(d) that the Catholic Church was corrupted over time, leading to the Reformation. The 1200 years between Constantine and Luther is a period of many movements, changes, tendancies and events in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church at the time of Luther was not something that today's Catholics would be happy with either. There were real, actual, serious problems, and they didn't appear overnight with Constantine. The Reformation didn't just happen because some people went loco 500 years ago. The Counter-Reformation was apparently a non-event to this author.
As is all to common, this author sets up a Protestant straw-man, and proceeds to pound it. Not to say that Protestants don't do the same thing when making the contra-argument.
I'm not aware of any Protestant hypothesis that states Hell prevailed against the church that Jesus founded...There was however, tremendous persecution thru-out the Dark Ages for Jesus' church as Foxes Book of Martyrs does attest to...
RM:
Objection. This thread is protected by being ID'd as a Caucus, but even a cursory reading of shows that is a anti-Protestant polemic rather than a RC devotion.
Furthermore many of the posts are a discussion of alleged Protestant error.
I move this thread be opened to general discussion.
I will go back into lurk and while I await your ruling
Well, NYer, I've now read 59 posts on this thread. The reaction of some of the Protestants to it is exactly why I have in the past remarked about the use of the term "Catholic" on these threads when the subject is the theology of The Church, especially if one is going to discuss the Fathers. It ALWAYS leads to some attack on the Roman Church when an otherwise interesting and potentially valuable discussion of patristics, from an era long before the Reformation and having little or nothing to do with the excesses of the Medieval Latin Church against which the Protestants revolted, could have occurred.
Interestingly, that is what Dante (who was Catholic) felt as well. He has several popes in hell in his book. As it is, when you bring a huge amounts of pagans into a different religion, they are bound to integrate some of their customs into the new faith. Nothing wrong with it.
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How many times have we wanted to discuss the Early Church Fathers?
This is your chance!
This is quite laughable when one considers the many admonitions Paul gave the early churches in the New Testament.
The Early Church Fathers on The Church (Catholic Caucus)
Early Church Fathers on (Oral) Tradition - Catholic/Orthodox Caucus
Reading all posts with interest.