What Is Wrong with the Roman Catholics?
In accordance with how we have addressed all these groups, our main focus is on fruit because that is how Jesus said you will know true and false prophets (Matt. 7:20). However, I will also briefly address some Roman Catholic claims from a historical perspective, and I will give you links to more thorough refutations of Roman Catholic claims.
By the way, all these arguments have been addressed to Roman Catholics. I don't like to be wrong or to lose arguments (though I hope—and am told—that I'm gracious and fair in discussion). The best way to avoid losing a debate is to join the winning side! If your position is destroyed by your opponent, abandon your position! The positions that follow are well-tested, and I have never had to abandon them, neither in person nor on the internet, though I have discussed these things even with well-informed and scholarly Roman Catholics. I have not discussed these things much with on-fire, zealous-for-God Roman Catholics, both because they're rare and because there's better and more pleasant things to discuss with committed disciples than the beliefs of a denomination they care little about.
Fruit
I was raised Roman Catholic. My father attended a Catholic seminary for high school that was supposed to prepare him for being a priest. Thank God he got in too much trouble there, or I would never have been born. We were regular church (Mass) attenders the whole time I was growing up. I am quite sure that I was the only one in my Jr. High CCD (equivalent of Sunday school) class that paid attention and cared what the Monsignor taught. I took my confirmation at age 13 very seriously, and I expected to be filled with the Holy Spirit and become a soldier for Christ. It was a major shock to my young faith when it didn't happen, though I didn't give up then. I continued to pursue God, and my mom bought me books on knowing Christ. I didn't know that they were Protestant books, so I did what they said and asked—no, begged—Jesus to come into my heart. That didn't work, either. I was young, so I only gave it a month of crying out to God night after night before I gave up and decided Christianity was false. That was the end of my Roman Catholicism and my very limited faith in Christ at the tender age of 13. I wandered into mysticism and New Age for eight years, though I had to keep attending mass throughout my teenage years, before Christ came after me at age 21 and I was soundly converted.
As a Roman Catholic I attended mass in Taiwan, Kansas, and Germany during the time I was old enough to pay attention and see the behavior of my fellow Catholics. As an adult believer in Christ, I have had several Roman Catholic friends who were committed followers of Christ, including one that went off to become a priest (against my persistent advice). I have debated numerous Roman Catholics both on and off line in a civil and very scholarly manner. I know the Roman Catholics from experience, and I know their doctrine and arguments as they—and not just Protestant cult-watchers—explain them.
The Roman Catholics do not have good fruit. As an organization, they have put at least tens of thousands and perhaps millions of people to death for opposing their beliefs. The time of their reign, when the Pope had the most governmental power, is known to history as “The Dark Ages.” It was a time of great ignorance, superstition, oppression, poverty, and hopelessness. While the people the Roman church ruled over suffered in this way, the Roman clergy, including the Pope, lived in extravagant luxury and indulged the whims of their flesh. Priests were not allowed to marry, so they had “housekeepers” that the people of their towns simply winked at. Simply put, it is hard to imagine anything more against the principles, teachings, and Spirit of Christ than the Roman Catholic Church of the middle ages.
This did not change through some repentance or reformation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Instead, they were simply overthrown as people became educated and realized that they did not have to live under such and evil and tyrannical system. Today they wear a much better face, but there's no reason at all to assume they have changed. Like all people, they are simply controlled by other governments. They do not have the freedom to rule the way they have in the past. Overall, the organization is simply and completely corrupt. There are no internal checks to prevent them from absolute corruption of absolute power. Given the chance, they will seek that power, believing as they do that they represent God and God's rule on the earth, and that absolute power will corrupt them as absolutely as it did in the past should they obtain it.
As far as the people go, it would be hard to imagine a more lukewarm and uninvolved people than the Roman Catholics. My own experience is that very few Roman Catholics I knew cared much about their faith except to follow the rituals the Roman church enforces. They are all baptized at birth, marry in the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), and in between they get their first confession, first communion, and confirmation. There is simply nothing about anything they do that even remotely resembles any church you read about in Scripture. I don't know what to tell you or where to begin. They are just nothing at all like the Scriptures.
And that's in America. In Haiti and in South America, where Catholicism is common, it's even worse. It is commonly simply combined with the ancient native religion of the country, which in Haiti is voodoo, and the Catholics there are Catholic in name only. In practice, they still hold to ancient spiritist religions. Even the Catholic rites they do practice are understood from a spiritist and superstitious point of view, not from a Catholic or Christian one.
The worst part of all this is that those who defend the RCC don't deny any of this! They want us to agree with their system of belief, and, even more importantly, submit to their “magisterium,” which is their hierarchy, based on their inheritance of the keys of the kingdom which supposedly were given from Jesus to Peter to the first bishop of Rome (the Pope is the bishop of Rome) and down to the next bishop of Rome until today. This authority means that we are to be Catholics and that God is with the Pope despite some of the most horrendous evils ever perpetrated on this earth.
However, Jesus said we would know his representatives by their fruit, not by their apostolic succession or their bizarre claims of authority handed down for 2,000 years. In this case, the test of fruit is an open and shut case. There's nothing to talk about. The only way to have worse fruit than the Roman Catholics is to actually try to. David Koresh managed to be as evil as some of the middle age priests, but his numbers were far lower.
I'm sorry for being so blunt, but it is crazy to me that anyone would defend an organization as the one and only apostolic church when it has the history it has. It's simply shocking, but the history is so well-known no one can deny it.
Since they cannot deny it, they can only persuade people to join based on some other motivation than wanting to serve Christ more. So they use their argument of apostolic succession and being the one, true organization of God as a selling point. Because of that, I don't want to only address fruit, I want to address apostolic succession as well.
Apostolic Succession and the Papacy
When I taught on this subject, it took me over an hour (videos available on youtube under Pope in the Early Church? and apostolic succession). I have to make this section of this page of my web site much smaller than that. I will be as brief as I possibly can, and I'll break this up into sections.
Apostolic Succession and Peter
To the RCC apostolic succession is the handing down of authority from a bishop to the next succeeding bishop throughout the ages. Priests are considered to have apostolic succession, too, but I believe they have to have hands laid on them by a bishop as well. The primary succession to the RCC is among the bishops of Rome themselves. They believe Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter (Matt. 16:18-19), and Peter passed them on to the bishop of Rome.
Protestants like to oppose this by saying Peter was never in Rome, but this simply isn't true. Peter was definitely in Rome. Several early Christian writers say he spent the last part of his life there1, and even Protestant tradition says he was put to death there. Even 1 Peter, in the Bible, seems to indicate this. 5:13 says that “The church at Babylon, elect together with you, greets you.” Most scholars think this is a code word for Rome that Peter used lest his letter be intercepted and Roman officials determine where he was.
Apostolic Succession and Cyprian
This does not mean that apostolic succession is true. There is simply no evidence for it. No writer before A.D. 250 makes the claim that Jesus passed the keys of the kingdom on to bishops by means of Peter. Even then, the first one who does so, Cyprian of Carthage, says that the keys were passed on to all the bishops, for the episcopate is one. He writes:
And this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the Church, that we may also prove the episcopate itself to be one and undivided....The episcopate is one, each part of which is held by each one for the whole. (Cyprian, Treatises of Cyprian I:5)
During Cyprian's time, the Roman bishop himself, Stephen, also made the claim that he possessed a succession from Peter. However, unlike Cyprian, he believed that it was only he himself that had received that succession. We know this because Cyprian wrote a letter complaining about it.
In this respect I am justly indignant at this so open and manifest folly of Stephen, that he who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, should introduce many other rocks and establish new buildings of many churches; maintaining that there is baptism in them by his authority. (Letters of Cyprian 73)
Cyprian was not only indignant. He was a man of action. He convened a council of 87 bishops to condemn the decision of Stephen. Here is their conclusion on the matter:
Neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience, since every bishop, according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. (The Seventh Council of Carthage Under CyprianThe Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. V)
Without any other pre-Nicene arguments to pull from, the Roman Catholic church is fond of quoting Cyprian, who as I said believed that all the bishops received the keys of the kingdom from Peter, to prove the authority of the pope. As we can see, though, Cyprian not only disagreed with this, but he held a council of 87 bishops to come to the same conclusion, just in case we were missing the point. This is no small total. 75 years later, when Constantine attempted to gather every bishop for the Council of Nicea, he managed to obtain only 300. 87 bishops are somewhere between a fourth and a third of all the bishops in the Roman empire.
Apostolic Succession and Irenaeus
The only other author quoted by the Roman Catholics is Irenaeus, who wrote around A.D. 185, about 70 years before Cyprian. He says nothing about Peter, nor about the keys of the kingdom, but he does mention an apostolic succession in the church of Rome.
Apostolic succession meant something completely different to the 2nd century church than it does to the RCC of today. In the 2nd century, apostolic succession was a powerful argument apologists used to show that the apostolic churches taught the truth. Each time this argument was used, it was used against gnostic heretics, who believed such bizarre things as that the Old Testament god was an ignorant, created god who never should have created the earth and that Jesus had come to deliver us from his creation and laws. These gnostics actually used the New Testament Scriptures, at least some of them, to defend their views, but Irenaeus—and Tertullian, who also employed the argument 20 years later—had another trick up his sleeve.
Irenaeus writes:
When [the gnostic heretics] are refuted by the Scriptures, they turn around and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct nor of authority, and [assert] that they are ambiguous...Yet, again, when we refer them to that tradition which originates from the apostles, which is preserved by means of the succession of elders in the churches, they object to tradition, saying that they are wiser, not merely than the elders, but even than the apostles. (Against Heresies III:2:2)
So we see that Irenaeus had two arguments against the gnostics. One argument was from the Scriptures which the apostles wrote. The other was from the oral tradition that the apostles gave to the leaders they appointed. That tradition was carefully preserved and passed down from one bishop to the next and from one set of elders to the next. This had only been going on about a century when Irenaeus wrote this, so it was quite a powerful argument. Who would know better what the apostles believed than the churches the apostles started?
However, this is a much different argument than that everyone needed to listen to the church at Rome whether or not they taught the truth or did what was right. Irenaeus knew nothing of the sort of apostolic succession that the RCC uses to justify corrupt popes and evil priests.
Here is most of the text of Irenaeus argument from apostolic succession:
It is within the power of all, therefore, in every church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world. We are in a position to reckon up those who were instituted bishops in the churches by the apostles and the succession of these men to our own times . . . If the apostles had known hidden mysteries, which they were in the habit of imparting to 'the perfect' apart and privately from the rest, they would have delivered them especially to those to whom they were also committing the churches themselves. . . . Since, however, it would be very tedious . . . to reckon up the successions of all the churches, we ... indicate that tradition derived from the apostles of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, as also the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by the succession of bishops. For to this church, on account of more potent principality, it is necessary that every church-that is, those who are on every side faithful-resort; in which church ever, by those who are on every side, has been preserved that tradition which is from the apostles . . . [Irenaeus lists a succession of 12 bishops since the apostles with some commentary here.] . . . In this order and by this succession the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles and the preaching of the truth have come down to us. This is most abundant proof that there is one and the same life-giving faith, which has been preserved in the church from the apostles until now and handed down in truth. (ibid. III:3:2)
There's several things to note here. First, the issue is truth. He says over and over things like “the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world,” “that tradition derived from the apostles,” “the faith preached to me, which comes down to our time,” and “one and the same life-giving faith, which has been preserved . . . and handed down in truth.” The issue is truth, not authority apart from truth. Apostolic succession is an argument Irenaeus employs to establish that he and the apostolic churches teach truth, not that the gnostics should listen to them whether or not they live holy.
Second, Irenaeus talks about the succession of bishops at Rome, but not because that's the only succession that matters. He does it because “it would be very tedious . . . to reckon up the successions of all the churches.” In fact, at the end of this section, Irenaeus adds, “Then, again, the church in Ephesus, founded by Paul and having John remaining among them permanently until the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the tradition of the apostles.” Again, in this quote, note that his emphasis still remains only on one thing: a true witness of the tradition of the apostles.
Third, this quote says that the church in Rome is “of more potent principality” and that every church ought to resort to it. I'm following a Protestant translation. Rome would prefer the one in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, which says it is “of preeminent authority.” I don't mind either translation. It was the practice of churches that had questions to go to churches that the apostles had taught in, especially if they had spent a lot of time there, in order to find out what was true. Rome had Peter and Paul in it, the two “most glorious” apostles. They had a pre-eminent authority. If you were going to agree with a church, the church at Rome was a good one to agree with. Keep in mind, though, that Rome was under obligation to stay in unity with Corinth, Ephesus, and all other churches. They did not have authority to teach new things. Their authority was based completely on their ability to preserve the truth given to them by Paul and Peter.
Fourth, the tradition preserved in Rome comes from Paul and Peter, not Peter alone. This has nothing to do with Peter handing down keys to the kingdom. This has to do with apostolic tradition being preserved, and both Paul and Peter were apostles, not just Peter.
This is the succession of Irenaeus, and it is pointless to quote him to justify the succession of the RCC, which is completely different.
The Extent of the Rule of the Roman Bishop
In the first and second centuries, bishops led only the Christians of their own city, which means they were the bishop over only one church. There were no denominations then as there are today. In A.D. 325, at the Council of Nicea, the council, besides producing the famous Nicene Creed, also issued some decrees, called “canons.” Canon Six of Nicea reads like this:
Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis prevail, that the Bishop of Alexandria have jurisdiction in all these, since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome also. Likewise in Antioch and the other provinces, let the Churches retain their privileges. And this is to be universally understood, that if any one be made bishop without the consent of the Metropolitan, the great Synod has declared that such a man ought not to be a bishop. If, however, two or three bishops shall from natural love of contradiction, oppose the common suffrage of the rest, it being reasonable and in accordance with the ecclesiastical law, then let the choice of the majority prevail. (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 2, vol. 14)
We see from this decree that some bishops no longer just led in their city. The bishop of Alexandria gained jurisdiction over Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis. The bishop of Rome had some sort of extended authority as well, though this is not defined. Though this indicates that the power of the Roman bishop—and that of the Alexandrian bishop as well—was expanding, but it's a powerful argument against there being a Pope at that time. The bishop of Rome clearly did not lead Egypt or Libya; the Alexandrian bishop did, and there appears to be no preeminence given to the Roman bishop in this canon. So even as late as A.D. 325, there is still no pope.
No Bishop of Rome Until the Mid-2nd Century
Both Paul and Peter used the terms bishop and elder interchangeably (Acts 20:17,28; 1 Pet. 5:1-4). It is clear from Scripture that they established churches led by a group of elders who were all bishops. History suggests strongly that John did not do this. He established churches with one bishop who led a group of elders. By the mid-2nd century it is clear from the early Christian writings that all churches were being led John's way, even the ones originally founded by Paul and Peter.
However, we have two letters involving the church of Rome that belong to a time before the mid-2nd century. The church of Rome sent a letter to Corinth in A.D. 96, and Ignatius of Antioch sent a letter to Rome in A.D. 110. Both make it clear that there was no bishop in Rome at that time. They were still being led by a group of elders, all called bishops, in accordance with the pattern of Paul and Peter. This is another big strike against the idea (which is really already dead from the arguments above) that there was a Pope going back to the time of the apostles.
The letter from Rome to Corinth, called First Clement because Clement is understood to have written it, says the following:
[The apostles] appointed the first-fruits, having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who would afterward believe. (ch. 42)
Here he mentions only bishops and deacons, which would be normal in a church started by Paul and Peter. Polycarp does the same in his letter to the Philippians, which he would write some decades later. First Clement goes on:
Our apostles also knew ... there would be strife on account of the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, ... they appointed those already mentioned and afterwards gave instructions that when these should fall asleep [in the Lord], other approved men should succeed them in their ministry. We are of opinion, therefore, that those appointed by [the apostles], or afterwards by other eminent men with the consent of the whole church, and who have blamelessly served the flock of Christ ... cannot be justly dismissed from their ministry. For our sin will not be small if we eject from the office of bishop those who have fulfilled its duties blamelessly and in holiness. Blessed are those elders who, having finished their course before now, have obtained a fruitful and perfect departure, for they have no fear that anyone will deprive them of the place now appointed them. (ibid., ch. 44)
Corinth, which had repented after receiving letters from Paul four decades earlier, was falling back into division. Elders had been removed from their office, which Clement calls “the office of bishop.” Obviously he was still using Paul and Peter's terminology. Elders and bishops were the same thing to him.
The other letter, from Ignatius of Antioch to Rome, cannot be quoted on this subject because his argument is one from silence. Ignatius focused on the bishop—in John's churches, where there was one bishop—extensively. He wrote seven letters, one to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, one to Rome, and five to churches that either were founded by John or were later led by John. In all but the letter to Rome, he makes extensive requests that the Christians submit to the bishop and the elders. He does this because the gnostics were not yet driven out of the church. Gnostics were opening schools, teaching, and baptizing people apart from the knowledge and authority of church leaders. Ignatius was trying to get them under control, and the amount of times he mentions submitting to church leaders stands out to everyone who reads his letters. These admonitions are notably absent in his letter to Rome. Why?
Some historians suggest that Rome had a gnostic bishop. This seems extremely unlikely. It's entirely possible Clement, who wrote 1 Clement would still have been one of the bishops there. Also, Rome was a noted church, as we've seen above. Having a gnostic bishop would surely have been mentioned by someone. We'd find it in church history. Further, Ignatius' letter calls the church at Rome “beloved and enlightened.” It seems extremely doubtful that he would have said this to a church with a gnostic bishop!
Instead, there's a much more obvious reason. There was no bishop! He couldn't emphasize the bishop because there wasn't one. It's what we would expect, anyway. Paul and Peter didn't set up that sort of leadership, and just fourteen years earlier the church at Rome had sent a letter making it clear they still were led by a group of elders.
So at least until the early 2nd century, there was no bishop in Rome. There was no Pope for Peter to hand the keys to.
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Footnotes:
1 e.g., Irenaeus, Against Heresies III:1:1 Return to text
