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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.

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, was
from 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 England’s
making 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 1751—another 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 word—apology. 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”).