its easy to be a Protestant....easy....you just do what you feel....
like Unitarians...make your own rules up as you go...
I'm not a good, practicing Catholic but at least at one time we had values and rules and moral authority...
If the Catholic church has fallen into a rudderless entity, the protestants have fallen further, much further..
That was before your church taught evolution and historical criticism.
You are welcome to visit and hear the Gospel that gives salvation and assurance of salvation.
You make a very broad generalization that is false.
Just how many non-roman churches have you visited in the past 10 years?
I KNOW you haven't been to every non-Catholic Christian church, so your generalization is sadly wrong. Those churches that believe in Jesus Christ and teach the Bible as the Word of God do NOT ignore God's commandments and the "rules" that are universal for ALL believers. All genuine Christians desire to live God honoring lives that bring glory to HIM.
I pray you see the evangelical spirit.
How are all those cocaine fueled homosexual orgies the pedo priests are engaging in at the Vatican working out for you?
How ironic that Catholics take the moral uphogh ground with leadershiplike that?
Rules? Big deal. They dont mean much when nobody follows them and nobody enforces them.
When the Catholic chrich stops serving communion to pro abortion pro homosexual marriage politicians like Kerry, Pelosi, and Kennedy, then you all would be n a position to point fingers at others moral failings.
Thus; you guys are STILL superior.
Got it.
Then your definition of Protestant is so loose that it is effectively meaningless, yet that it actually a necessary recourse of Catholics, in the light of their own amalgamated church of diverse beliefs, from Ted Kennedy RCs to cultic traditionalists.
Yet the most fundamental aspect of the Reformation is the authority of Scripture, and despite divisions among the tribes, Bible Christians testify to being the most unified in basic beliefs, versus those whom Rome manifestly considers members in life and in death.
I'm not a good, practicing Catholic but at least at one time we had values and rules and moral authority...
And at one time, prior to the needed Reformation, Referring to the schism of the 14th and 15th centuries, Cardinal Ratzinger observed,
"For nearly half a century, 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.
"It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, Principles of Catholic Theology, trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/)
You mean requirements and expectations unseen in the the only wholly inspired substantive authoritative record of what the NT church believed (including how they understood the OT and gospels), such as,
1. Looking to Peter as the first of a line of popes in an office of perpetual ensured (if conditional) infallibility?
2. Believing in a gospel of final salvation by actually becoming good enough to be with God via RC Purgatory, or a separate class of believers called saints who uniquely directly go to Heaven at death?
3. Granting indulgences in order to obtain early release from this condition for oneself or for others?
4. Looking to a separate class of celibate (with rare exceptions) believers (priests ) whose primary unique function is that of offering the Eucharist as a sacrifice for sins, and dispensing it to the people?
5. Believing in said Eucharist as the "true body of Christ and his true Blood" the true and proper and lifegiving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, (CCC 1376; 1381) the true and proper and lifegiving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, being corporeally present whole and entire in His physical "reality. (Mysterium Fidei, Encyclical of Pope Paul VI, 1965) "the very body which he gave up for us on the cross, the very blood which he "poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,"(CCC 1365) with His human body and human soul, with His bodily organs and limbs and with His human mind, will and feelings,(John A. Hardon, S.J., Part I: Eucharistic Doctrine on the Real Presence) to be consumed as "the actual partaking of Christ in person," . (Catholic Encyclopedia>The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist) this being the food that makes us live for ever in Jesus Christ," (CCC 1415) Refuted, by God's grace.
Praying to created beings in Heaven.
6. Kneeling before a statue and praising the entity it represented in the unseen world, beseeching such for Heavenly help, and making offerings to them, and giving glory and titles and ascribing attributes to such which are never given in Scripture to created beings (except to false gods), including having the uniquely Divine power glory to hear and respond to virtually infinite numbers of prayers individually addressed to them
Moses, put down those rocks! I was only engaging in hyper dulia, not adoring her. Can't you tell the difference?
7. Baptism as the act itself effecting regeneration, and without the without repentant personal faith, that being the stated requirement for baptism. (Acts 2:38; 8:36-38)
And the list goes on.