Am I a Catholic? Yes. ·
Against Protestant Propaganda ·
Answering Ray Comfort, Part I of the video on Bergoglio's Near Death ·
A Catholic Wanted to Concede Too Much
The youtuber Apostolic Zoomer speaks about "6 bad arguments against Protestantism" ... I'll grant his first one. The other five are actually good, if not always presented at their best before he spoke of their supposed problems (or real, but overcomeable ones).
A Catholic rebuts 6 bad arguments against Protestantism
Apostolic Zoomer | 22 Febr. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc72n1ZM8eE
4:10 I would like to steelman the argument this way.
John 2 has the first mention of the Blessed Virgin in the Gospel of John.
John 19 the last of them.
And on BOTH occasions Our Lord called His mother woman.
Again, Eve is called "woman" in Genesis 2, and of the Gospels, the one most closely related to Genesis is John. Mary is called woman in John 2.
4:52 I think any study of the women other than the Blessed Virgin would reveal allusions to Her.
The Samaritan woman was cause of faith.
The adulterous woman recalls the ancestor Bathsheba, Queen of Israel while Solomon was King, and it ends with no condemnation and, interesting twist on "no sin" the "sin no more" ...
Mary Magdalene runs to the Disciples like Our Lady ran to Elisabeth in Luke 1.
Jesus calling someone woman in the Synoptics often refers to faith and to healing. The Blessed Virgin is faithful above all faithful and was the beginning of mankind's healing from sin and damnation.
7:24 On exegetic principle and on Church Structure, partly on Sacraments, I would say you have a point that Evangelicals are further away from Catholics than Lutherans, Anglicans and Presbyterians are.
On the question of salvation, Evangelicals are more Catholic than they have been historically.
I would say the Reformers had more Easy-Believism or Free Grace, than Billy Graham. He will humour them in words "Salvation is free" and then contradict them in tenor "but not cheap" ...
If Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians today sometimes are closer to Catholics, it's partly due to Catholic and partly to Evangelical influence.
9:00 Pastorals and Epistles of Peter were NOT disputed in Luther's day.
That came only later, and partly as a result of Luther's attitude.
10:29 Ouch ... you cited Ephesians 2:8,9.
Don't. It's Ephesians 2:8 to 10!
It teaches that works prevenient to justification do not justify, which is fully accepted by and even dogmatised by the Council of Trent. But it also teaches that accepting justification means accepting the subsequent works that God has prepared for us. If you confer other passages, they actually do
keep us saved.
11:56 I think you can find Church history support, very partial, but still, for some Protestant tenets. And by partial, I obviously mean insufficient.
My go to is Sts Augustine and Jerome.
The former sometimes appears to deny the role of freewill in salvation. St. Jerome doesn't, and actually if he's taken like that, St. Augustine is the odd man out.
The latter made a point against the Deuterocanonicals. However, he equally in the same passage said he was at least on a disciplinary level not supported by any bishop of the Church, he was translating them of obedience to them.
Protestantism is pretty much dissing each on the matter they were commonplace among Christians in order to stress instead the "unique contribution" of each.
Or "genius" ...
On other items, Protestantism actually does read actual texts and texts that as such are not untypical, but that simply don't tell the whole story. Then Protestantism reads to much into what they do not say. For instance, St. Ambrose writing on Baptism and the Eucharist, he's not implying the other five sacraments don't exist or aren't sacraments. Or St. John Chrysostom once speaking about the presence of Christ being spiritual, not carnal, he's not implying He really isn't there, and it's very clear bc elsewhere he speaks about making sure any remnants of the Eucharist caught in the teeth get duly swallowed, i e treats the species as Christ's presence which must not be desecrated.
12:42 The Denomination Tree at this point is wrong for two reasons.
a) by implying a tree and actually "equal split" on more than one occasions it contradicts Matthew 28:16 to 20. The ONE Church that Jesus founded is still around, or if it isn't, Christianity as a whole, not just Catholicism, is untrue.
b) Jewish Christianity isn't that Church, in and of itself, it can have partly belonged to it, but isn't it. Imperial Christianity wasn't ever the name of a Christian Church, just as "Weimar Republic" and "Third Reich" never were names of a German state. They are historian's periodicisations.
So, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are BOTH claiming to be Orthodox believers of the Evangelical Tradition, belonging to the Catholic Church. In Russian, Kafolik means Russian Orthodox and Katolik means Roman Catholic. Kafolik is the Russian pronunciation of the Greek original word in Catholic. One of the two is wrong. But calling the pre-split prehistory of the pairs "Catholic" only in inverted commas is also wrong. Both are in fact claiming to continue the Catholic Church, from Ignatius of Antioch to the last time when a Patriarch of Constantinople had the Roman Pontiff in the Diptychs.
Nestorian and Coptic / Armenian Churches are not equal daughters to "imperial Christianity" they are also claimants to be or to be part of the Catholic Church.
13:06 And Catholics and Orthodox are obviously more Methodist than the Methodists themselves.
13:30 As long as Lutherans admit Luther founded them and Calvinists admit Calvin founded them, after a long pause in which the theology and Church structure each thought correct was on their view obfuscated, this makes the name an actual truth, undisputed even.
Luther either single-handedly founded Lutheranism as opposed to reviving anything, and in that case Lutheranism is false. Or he revived an original Church that had been bogged down into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and in that case Christianity as a whole is false, Lutheranism included. Dito for Zwingli and Oecolampadius. Dito for Calvin. Dito for Bucer. Dito for Knox and Cranmer.
In the Protestant version of Christianity there really is a tree of denominations. It was this tree keeping to get back to Catholicism at some point around 1500 that led me to see Protestantism is false, Catholicism is true.
