Is hearasy damnable?
Most of Church history, the Church certainly thought so…
But now the mood changed. Even though so many protestants have blatantly left the Catholic faith they originally had. This is hearsay, right? or is it?
Why the sudden change of tone to protestants?
I dont get it.
I think that, in the centuries after the Reformation, the Catholic Church has gradually come to understand the proper pastoral approach to our Protestant brothers.
Obviously, most Protestants hold beliefs that, objectively speaking, we cannot share completely. For example—to cite a common Protestant tenet—affirming that the Scriptures are the only admissible source of doctrine (to the exclusion of the Holy Tradition) goes against a core doctrine of the Catholic Church.
Moreover, Protestants do not enjoy the fullness of union with the Catholic Church, in part because many of them do not understand the “catholicity” (universality) of the Church in the same way we do.
However, that doesn’t mean that Protestants are not to be treated with the respect and dignity that all people deserve (all the more in the case of fellow Christians). Don’t forget that the vast majority of Protestants are validly baptized and hence are fully incorporated into the Body of Christ, just as we are. (The visible unity is lacking, it is true, but they truly possess the life of grace and adoptive sonship in the Lord, thanks to their Baptism.)
One issue is that the accusation of “heresy” (which is I think what you meant) is a very serious matter. It is important to keep in mind that formal heresy is defined as
obstinate (that is, willful) doubt or denial of a core belief of the Catholic Faith.
We can never judge the interior dispositions of a person, but it is possible that the original Reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and so on) were guilty of heresy, because they all began as Catholics and were learned men. However, it is not possible for Protestants nowadays, who are now nearly 500 years removed from the Reformation.
Even the vast majority of the Catholics who join a Protestant denomination are not guilty of heresy; they leave because they perceive that the church they join gives them something (perhaps fellowship, contact with the Scriptures, or what have you) that the Catholic Church does not. Certainly, Catholics believe that these persons are missing out on the fullness of the Faith and the Sacraments, but they are not formally guilty of heresy.
This is something that it has taken the Church a long time to learn fully. For a long time, it was simply taken for granted that those who left the Church, or took part in a Protestant denomination, did so willfully and obstinately.
Perhaps part of the reason for the recent change in mood is the increasingly secularization of society. It has helped Catholics and Protestants to realize that they are, for the most part, on the same side, comrades-in-arms, so to speak. We also cannot discount the work of the Holy Spirit, Who constantly leads the Church into the truth.
