Sure. Martin Luther didn’t know anything about the Church.
Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but is received as a gift of God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin and with an eternity in Hell. The office of the pope was broken in an important break from the all powerful monarchic alliances of Europe, by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge from God. Pretty powerful stuff.
The new presence of a jesuit pope will not increase the “flight” of devout Lutherans and other Protestants to the roman church. Other than those who have always followed the great wealth the church has amassed. That will never change.
The deists who were our greatest Founders would understand this, in founding the only country to largely escape euro-tyranny. Until now, of course.
It has nothing to do with wealth, and everything to do with theological truth and the Petrine Doctrine. These converts are among the most pre-eminent Lutheran theologians with a lifetime of scholarship and instruction. I venture to suggest they know far more than any of the Bible-Christians who are on FR who have this habit of throwing out snippets of scripture.
Before the Bible there was the Church. The same infallibility that informed the assembly of the books in the Bible (the books in the Bible did not fall from the skies and self-assemble) continues to this day. The canonical texts were approved in the Synod of Rome n AD 382 after hundreds of years of sorting out various writings and having them cross-checked with the received oral tradition.
That infallible authority of one Church did not suddenly evaporate eleven centuries later with the Reformation. As America’s leading Lutheran convert to Catholicism, Rev. Richard Neuhaus remarked on his conversion, “the fullest expressions of scripture are found in the Catholic Church.”
The rest is all heresy ala Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Moonies, Mormons, and the list never ends.