Protestantism is, by the stated reasons for its foundation, anti-Catholic. Protestantism to justify its continuing existence must declare Catholicism wrong, heretical, and not Christian.
To rationalize this Protestants constantly make bold proclamations about what the Catholic Church teaches and what Catholics believe without ever having read or studied the Church history and Catechism beyond the self-serving lectures and sermons of Protestant preachers whose livelihood is dependant upon fomenting anti-Catholic bigotry. Recognizing this and citing examples is not the sin.
A classic, backseat Catholic apologetic. I encourage you to take a History Lesson: Positively Protestant. Here's a quick summary:
What do the major historians of Protestantism say? Like almost all their colleagues, John Dillenberger and Claude Welch link the origin of the word Protestant to the Protestation of the German evangelical estates in the second Diet of Speyer. But they see in that term the duality of protest and affirmative witness. That protest, they write, wasfrom the standpoint of affirmed faith. Few churches ever adopted the name Protestant. The most commonly adopted designations were rather evangelical and reformed. ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not objection but avowal or witness or confession (as the Latin protestari meant also to profess).That meaning lasted for another century, say Dillenberger and Welch, and it referred to the Church of Englandsmaking its profession of the faith in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Only later did the word protest come to have a primarily negative significance, and the term Protestant come to refer to non-Roman churches in general.....When Edward VI was crowned, the word still had a positive connotation. On the CultureVulture blog for the Guardian, Sean Clarke notes that it was 60 years from the introduction of Protestant in English until its first use in the extended sense of "object, dissent, or disapprove. That (according to the Collins Etymological Dictionary) was first recorded in English in 1608. The Online Etymological Dictionary places the first use of protest to mean statement of disapproval in the year 1751another century and a half. Through much of that history and well after, protest continued to mean avow, affirm, witness, or solemnly proclaim.Poor, misunderstood protest has had a history something like that of another wordapology. That word has gone from its positive, head-held-high sense of a formal justification or defense (as in the essay was an apology for capitalism) to something tinged with shame and remorse (a statement of regret or request for pardon).
I have heard Catholics say Protestants are not Christian, just as I have heard Protestants say Catholics are not Christian.
However, Protestant Christianity has never doctrinally claimed exclusivity in its relationship to Christ and the Almighty (though some denominations thereof certainly have). The very nature of Protestantism is that Salvation is achieved through grace and a personal relationship with Christ. Salvation is therefore individual, not through a specific denomination. A Baptist can be just as saved as a Calvinist, Methodist or Catholic — some denominations may be more conduscive than others, but doctrinal errors are one of many sins covered by Grace.
Catholic doctrine does claim exclusivity. So, it would seem to me that Catholicism is more invested in the failure of Protestantism than vice versa. If Protestantism succeeds, Catholicism is wrong in its claim of being the one true church of Christ. To Protestants, the success of Catholicism makes Catholicism but one of many branches of Christ’s chuch, as Protestants have claimed.
As far as I am aware, most mainstream Protestant denominations regard Catholics, though wrong in several respects, as brothers in Christ. Catholics very often seem to regard Protestants as heretics. However, I will acknowledge that Protestantism has fundamental objections to Catholicism which define it, and that Protestant denominations do not hesitate to make those objections known.
I think the characterization of Protestantism as anti-Catholic is a bit too heavy. There are doctrines which are specifically contrary to Catholicism, but mainstream Protestants do not typically regard Catholics as non-Christian. I certainly don’t.
SnakeDoc
why label christianity at all?