Comment on the title of following video, they should be bothered. I'll be here responding to the first half:
Why Do Protestants Seem So Unbothered By Their Own Recency?
Ready to Harvest | 24 May 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsVYtTxmcWk
2:26 The arguments can be reduced to three. One of which is a conclusion of the other two:
1) The Church was founded by Jesus
2) It cannot go out of existence.
3) Therefore any newer Church cannot be the Church.
You don't need to have between 1 and 2 another "2" of "is the Catholic Church" because, when you take away "newcomers" (obvious such) as well as extinct ones (see point 2) you are only left with a handfull of alternatives. From there on you can narrow it down between Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Etchmiadzin and Qudshanis / exile in Chicago.
"Second, the church Christ founded was the Catholic Church. Protestants agree. They separate out the Catholic Church from what they call the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church just means the universal church. And so, they would say that Jesus founded this church, which is made up of all people who are truly believers in Christ and contains all congregations where the gospel is truly preached."
That in itself is an argument for leaving out your "2", namely that the Protestants redefine "Catholic" and dilute definitions to include words like "truly" ... you recall how the Georgia Guidestones were again and again harping on governments to be "wise" but left no concrete suggestions of what this meant, except a few hugely bad ones, like one world government and reduced / controlled world population?
This kind of definition is parallel to defining Ancient Israel so as to include Righteous Gentiles with no Abrahamic ancestry and no direct contact, let alone adoption or citizenship, into the Holy Land's Holy People.
Jesus defined the Church as being Apostolic "you" in Mt 28:20 isn't adressed to believers indistinctly, but to the Eleven, and as having a governance (Mt 18:27), and as being visible (Mt 5:14—15, again, this is adressed to the disciples in "you", not to those hearing the "for all" sermon in Luke). No wonder the Protestant Holzmann wanted to argue Marcan priority so as to argue "later accretions" in Matthew!
"Many Protestants would say that the institution of today's Roman Catholic Church came into existence slowly sometime after the time of Christ and that Peter wasn't really the first pope and such."
Insofar as they argue Catholics are non-Christians, this involves the paradox of an imperceptibly slow apostasy.
Insofar as they argue Catholics are Christians, this leaves the question, why leave it? If you can be saved, no problem whatsoever, in an already existing community, why leave it?
"Most Protestants agree and would say that there will always be true believers somewhere and so the church will always continue too."
Given apostolicity and visibility of the Church, "true believers somewhere" cannot be widely different communities with no mutual contact, like Paulicians and if Waldensians went back to Claudius of Turin, as some claim.
Church plants Church. Non-Church doesn't plant Church.
"Fourth, any new church other than this original church that arrives later is not the church that Christ founded. Protestants accept this too. A particular denomination can come along later because it's not a new church per se. It's part of that same church that Christ established, the universal church."
It isn't if (at its founding) breaking away from what it calls other parts.
It also isn't if at the moment of founding they considered there were no other parts left to attach themselves to.
Calvin failed to attach to Cyril Lukaris. Lutherans didn't even try.
It cannot be a part of the Church if they admit so and so are fully parts of the Church and still we sever communion. It also cannot be a part of a Church that never goes out of existence if at the moment of founding there were, on their view no other parts to attach to.
Note, a Church can be "born orphan" and attach later, like the Korean Catholics did, baptising each other and waiting for a bishop. But it cannot say "OK, there actually is no one else to attach to, other than very loosely to other newcomers" because that implies a de facto admission of their "ideal Church" having gone out of existence.
"And it's because they view the universal church or Catholic Church as not belonging to any institution"
But, since the original Church had visibility and governance, it was precisely an institution.
Protestant views on this are, sorry, a mental breakdown.
"According to this Protestant idea, when a new denomination begins, for example, Lutheranism, it is simply a reformation of what already exists. It's still the same universal church. When a new institution is founded, these institutions are incidental, not essential."
The pretense that Lutheran Christianity already existed is, historically, bunk.
Luther's best try was to make a wedge between Hussites willing to reunite and Catholics. But Hussites only take you from early 1500's to late 1300's. This move is also partially responsible for both the Thirty Years' War and National Socialism. Czech National Socialism harkened back to Hussites, German National Socialism started in 1905 as a reaction and mostly copy of it (adding racial delusions). "How great thou art" was written by a man who later came to side with National Socialist Germany, and "Horst-Wessel-Lied" was written by the son of a Lutheran clergyman.
Many who show Hitler together with "Catholic clergy" will miss that only Schachleiter was there on the Catholic side and that a Lutheran Diaconess is not a Catholic nun, and a Reichsbischoff is a bishop of the Evangelische Kirche, while the Landesbischoff of Saxony was a direct successor of Luther.
"But for these Protestants, there's nothing that says institutions have to be the same. And if an institution seems to have lost its way and is resistant to reform, then it can be abandoned and a new institution can replace it."
Only already existing parts of it, institutional ones, can replace it.
The salient point about conclavism is, a) against a 17th C. commenter on Cum ex apostolatus, for how long can one discover the elected pope was actually heretic? and b) how far down below cardinals can the duty and right to elect a new pope devolve if cardinals are unavailable as all killed, all captive or all apostates?
If the answer is "even ten years later" and "even down to laymen", than David Bawden saved papacy on the juridical side in 1990. People had been calling out Vatican II popes since Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga who died already in 1976. 18 years after the purported "election" of Roncalli.
As to the sacramental side, he was consecrated and ordained, in lineages of bishops already existing and reconciled to his jurisdiction, in 2011. His successor in 2023 was elected already a bishop.
That's a very far cry from saying "the institutional church became unsound a few centuries after the apostles, we must now reform that 1000 years later" ...
