So… if all protestants were loyal to tradition under the Pope, there’d still be thousands of denominations?
So far as I can tell, his only real point is that the number is not exact. I got fed up by his insults, general attitude, and ignorance of the argument he was addressing after 12 minutes, and so didn’t hear his final number, but whatever it is, it must be in the thousands and that’s too many.
He then somehow seems to think that because lots of Catholics ignore Catholicism, that makes Catholicism itself less united rather than there simply being a lot of people who are wrong calling themselves Catholic, and claims that that somehow makes the actual divisions among protestantism less bad. Frankly, the Catholicism-is-false Catholics are making exactly the same error the Protestants do - deciding for themselves what is true based on their own desires and interpretations and rejecting what they don’t like. It’s the same principle, and Catholicism condemns it whether the people practicing it are formal members of the Church or not.
We mention sola scriptura by name because it’s a commonly held manifestation of this “what is true is what I decide is true” approach. There may be various variations on this theme, but they all amount to the same thing, and they’re all dangerous and wrong.
That is, he may say that some sect or other doesn’t believe in sola scriptura, but when you trace it far enough it still ends up being that ultimately each person decides what is true for himself, using primarily scripture. Even in the groups that don’t claim individual interpretation: you have many people saying that the only authority is X (which really means that each man is his own authority, because X usually can’t talk), and then acting as though “what X says” must necessarily be exactly what that individual says - which is individual interpretation, the interpreter just happens to think he’s special. As do all other interpreters who decide he’s not special and break off and form their own churches, and so individual decisions on truth is what happens
And it makes no difference whether they call it Sola Scriptura or something else - one sect or the other might claim that scripture should be read in light of tradition, but this doesn’t really change anything as tradition is up for interpretation too and is (generally) considered to be subservient to scripture, which they interpret themselves. So you still have the case where nothing is fixed outside my own brain.
All the other things that he cites for divisions, “new scriptures, traditions of men” are a result of… what? A protestant may say that the dueterocanonical books aren’t scripture, but by what authority? His own. He decides, because he interprets everything, figures he knows better than the Church built on the rock, and kicks em out because he doesn’t like what they say. Sola Scriptura indeed, but pick your own scriptura - which is what the whole thing amounts to anyway. Traditions of Men? Why does he think that they’re traditions of men and not from God and bad things? Because they contradict what HE has decided is true, and HE doesn’t think there’s support for them in the bible (or in whatever set of stuff HE has decided is true), and so HE decides they must be false, and therefore HE thinks they must have been made by men and therefore, for some reason, automatically bad. And he decided based on his own decisions about what everything means.
The problem with protestantism is relativism in general. Sola Scriptura is the most common manifestation of it, but really they’re all the same. The Truth is what I decide it is.
And of course, half of his words are insults, and he has disabled comments on his videos so that no one can address his flawed arguments. And, with all his insults and the closing of his comment box, he has the gall to call Catholics childish and accuse Catholics of not listening to what people say.
uch: The FSSP do say mass in the ordinary form.
:thumbsup: