Steven,
I do agree that if Catholicism was the uninterrupted Church Christ established on the earth, then there would be no need for Mormonism. Mormonism, as you know, claims restoration of what was lost and corrupted. Mormonism has not only provided biblical and historical evidences of an apostasy, but also the restoration. The Bible attests not only to an apostasy, but also to a restoration before the second coming of Christ and that is where the Mormons come in.
The only reason Mormonism exists is to fulfill this vacuum. It is not that the Mormons invented what Catholics did throughout history, it is just a natural way of uncovering history and Mormons are not alone in it…it is there for anyone who studies history. Protestants also acknowledge it and that is one of the reasons they broke way from the Catholic Church. They also have noticed how far the Church has detracted from the primitive Church teachings, but unfortunately hey had no authority to do it…it was just good intentions, and that is not enough for God.
In this process of uncovering history and stating their position, Mormons inevitably will have to expose some unpleasant facts about Catholic history that may make Catholics feel uncomfortable with. It is not throwing mud or being anti Catholic.
By the way I do believe that theologians from most Churches study Mormonism and they do try to find weakness in their arguments, you will easily see this in negative articles about Mormons all over the internet. I talked to a father of the Catholic Church in Brazil and he told me that they studied it when he attended theological school.
Other denominations also have their opinions about the history of the Catholic Church, for example this one:
*“Catholic theologians made a great mistake in the Middle Ages. They assumed the Scriptures taught things about the material universe which were, in fact, false interpretations or assumptions. Perhaps for the masses, it was enough to listen to and believe dogmas with the stamped sanction of “Church authority.” But for THINKING men, “Renaissance Man,” for scientists who wished us to “prove all things,” as the Scriptures themselves tell us to do (I Thessalonians 5:21), mere recitation of Church authority or tradition was not enough.” *
hope-of-israel.org/lifeadam.htm
This broad selection of quotations provides clear support for the idea that the doctrines and practice of the Early Church of the apostles had been altered dramatically within a few centuries at most:
Will Durant,
"Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated [new] life in the theology and liturgy of the Church."
Stuart Hall: ***“Fourth century orthodoxy is not the same as what Peter and Paul believed, any more than modern Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism is…" ***
Thomas Jefferson, though surely not a cleric, was a great student of Christianity. Even he acknowledged the loss of the original gospel and said that he looked forward to
"the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity. I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologies of the middle and modern ages"
Philip Smith:
"The sad truth is that as soon as Christianity was generally diffused, it began to absorb corruptions from all the lands in which it was planted, and to reflect the complexion of all their systems of religion and philosophy."
J.W.C. Wand (former Anglican Bishop of London)
“the new Christian church was frankly national. The people were converted en bloc; the temples were turned into churches and the priests were ordained into the Christian ministry.”
Robert Wilken, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia, wrote ***“only a few enterprising intellectuals, and only after more than one hundred years of Christian history, had begun to take the risk of expressing Christian beliefs within the philosophical ideas current in the Greco Roman world. Most Christians were against to such attempts. As late as the third century, after the apologetic movement had introduced Greek ideas into Christian thinking, Christian preachers complained that the rank and file opposed such ideas.” ***
en.fairmormon.org/Apostasy/Patristic_evidence_of
