The Pilgrim Church or Remnant Church?

[auctoris]

Has anyone encountered people who claim they are not Protestant and that they identify with the “remnant church”—the “real” New Testament church that continued on from the apostles outside of the Catholic or Orthodox Churches?

From what I can tell, much of it stems from a book by Edmund Hamer Broadbent called The Pilgrim Church. Here’s a description of the book from Wikipedia:

The Pilgrim Church is an alternative history of the church, unrecorded by secular history. It covers the history of many small churches throughout the ages that have attempted to follow the New Testament church pattern, the success of those that followed the pattern laid out by the apostles and the consequences to the churches that fell away from the pattern. He looks broadly at many groups such as the Paulicians, the Bogomils, the Nestorians, the Waldensians, the Anabaptists, the Hutterites, the Methodists, the Russian Mennonites and the Mennonite Brethren. He classified early primitive churches to Anabaptist, and to Moravian Brethren were historical Brethren Movement.

I have searched Catholic Answers and cannot find any mention of this. What is the Catholic response?

Thank you

 

[Dan_Defender]

The problem is those groups occurred not only at different times in history but had different/incompatible belief systems (no need to get into details). So not possible to somehow weave them together into a single ‘church’.

 

[auctoris]

I do realize the book is riddled with problems. But the people who believe that stuff don’t see it. To them it’s just “proof” that neither the Catholic Church nor Protestantism are the right path. They believe they are carrying out what Jesus and the apostles intended.

I was just wondering if there were any Catholic responses or methods to attack the problem.

Thanks.