re: Evangelicals turning on Catholics all of a sudden.

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At the end of the day, Catholicism is just as fractured and disunified over particular teachings and beliefs as Protestants, but because those disagreements all take place under the name of Roman Catholicism, you claim that all is well. Talk about disingenuous.

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Yes, you are very much disingenuous and quite wrong here.

I've listed many examples of how different Bible Alone/Faith Alone Protestant churches believe theology that are in complete disagreement on core Salvation issues. That post is earlier in this thread. This demonstrates the severe disunity and fractured nature of what has happened since the beginning of the Bible Alone/Faith Alone movement in the 1500s.

Here's the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. Individual Catholics who are poorly catechized may individually believe something other than what is published in the Catechism, but, that doesn't make the Official Catechism either disunified or fractured. The Roman Catholic Church has a unified Catechism and there is no alternative Official Theology and Doctrine of the Church.

Since the Reformation in the 1500s, the new branches of Christianity have developed very severely contrasting Theology and Doctrine.

As such, it's quite wrong and intellectually dishonest for you to conclude that the Catholic Church is just as fractured and disunified as the Protestant churches.

Your own Presbyterian sect is broken into completely separate branches with completely opposite Official doctrines on Theology. My Church doesn't have that problem.

Catechism

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Maybe just the majority would work. The majority of US Catholics think abortion should be mostly legal.

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95% of American Catholics can believe abortion is a-okay, and it doesn't mean the church isn't unified in its opposition. In terms of the "one voice" and the pope's infallibility on matters of faith, you'd have to have Cardinals, Bishops and other clergy preaching counter to the pope's for the Church to be un-unified.

Moreover, I don't believe that the "vast majority of" Catholics disagree that abortion is a sin. Unfortunately, there are millions of Catholics that play the Pelosi game - she believes abortion is a sin but she doesn't believe Catholics should be imposing their faith on the country. Also, I think it's fair to make a distinction between practicing Catholics and those that were born into the faith, no longer practice but consider themselves Catholic.

Among Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week, about two-thirds (68%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and about half or fewer support exceptions that would make abortion legal in the case of rape (43%) or threats to the life or health of the mother (49%).

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What percentage of the faithful need to accept/adhere for a church, in your eyes, to be unified? You've created some weird threshold here that in reality, doesn't exist.

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We're talking about different things when we talk about unity. You are focusing on official teachings rather than disparate beliefs.

If 0% of Catholics actually believed the official teachings of the RCC, and all Catholics actually believed a host of different things on each doctrine and dogma, would you still say you have unity? Boy, I would hope not!

From that standpoint, I would say that you need to have probably 100% agreement for the unity that you are claiming, because what Catholics keep claiming is that you have an infallible Magisterium that takes all the guesswork out of understanding the Bible (an argument against sola scriptura, or at least the perspicuity of the Scriptures). You can't claim that we need an infallible umpire to call balls and strikes perfectly or else we get into fractured beliefs like Protestants have, and yet you still have fractured beliefs in practice because you don't enforce your standards.

Again, I would say you need 100% adherence to the stated teachings of the Church, and if someone openly defies it, they need to be corrected or disciplined. Otherwise, what's the point of having the Magisterium in the first place if anyone is free to disagree and believe what they want?

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Here's the point you're unwilling to understand - and I'll use abortion because it's such a black/white issue.

There is not a single Catholic diocese, parish, church that supports abortion or doesn't teach that abortion is murder and a grave sin. That 100% of Catholics don't agree with that position doesn't mean the Church isn't unified.

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It doesn't matter what the official teaching is if a sizeable chunk of Catholics disagree with it with no consequences.

Once again, the argument for the infallible Magisterium is that Christians can't know what the truth from God is without an infallible interpreter, and once the interpretation has been made, the Christian is obligated to believe it through an implicit faith in that Magisterium.

What you are focusing on is the unity of teaching by Rome. So what? Do you expect a singular organization to have a variance of teachings that are contradictory? That doesn't even happen in Protestantism. Each denomination or independent congregation has their own set of beliefs, and there isn't a lot of direct contradiction in those stated beliefs. Sure, there is difference in stated beliefs between denominations, but that's not what is in question. You're focusing on Protestantism as if it were a singular belief system with contradictory teachings, rather than comparing apples to apples and looking at a singular Protestant denomination.

You and other Catholics critique Protestants because the teaching of sola scriptura leads to differing beliefs among Christians. You claim to solve that problem by having a unified set of teachings from an infallible umpire that determine the interpretations for Christians so that they aren't relying on their own interpretations. But again, the problem you have is that the Catholic faithful are doing the same thing that you accuse Protestants of doing, by interpreting the teachings however they want, resulting in a myriad of beliefs that contradict the official teaching. If you do not enforce the standard of the Magisterium, then lay Catholics are doing the same thing Protestants are, and there is no point is criticizing Protestantism for what you are doing, yourselves.

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Now test protestants the same way. I don't pretend to know much about protestants, but am pretty sure there are protestant churches/hierarchy that are good with abortion, while others aren't - or am I wrong about that?

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Yes, some denominations accept abortion as legitimate while most others don't.

But again, the test isn't in the official teachings but in the variance of beliefs that are accepted by those denominations.

For instance, my denomination teaches that if you reject the Trinity, you have fallen into an egregious sin that must be repented of or the individual must face church discipline, potentially leading to excommunication and being treated as an unbeliever. That's what you do with a standard. If we allowed unitarians and atheists to be members of the denomination, then the standard doesn't mean anything.

For Catholicism, if you claim to have a standard of rejection of abortion and then you allow politicians who publicly support, promote, and vote to extend abortion in this country to receive the Eucharist and not be disciplined, then you can't claim to be unified behind that standard. It's absolutely nonsensical. You might as well not have the standard at all if you don't enforce it. If someone in my congregation was openly supporting abortion or bragged about having one, they would be disciplined by our elders. That's what it means to have a standard.

So no, you are not unified if a substantial portion of your members don't even agree with the infallible teaching authority that exists in order to prevent the people from having differing beliefs.

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Ephesians 2:20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone;

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Amen. As was foretold in the Old Testament >

"The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"

-- Psalms 118:22

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Among Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week, about two-thirds (68%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases...

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Another way to look at this is that almost one third of faithful Catholics (not even touching on nominal Catholics who don't attend Mass very often if at all) disagree with the formal teaching of the RCC.

That's a sobering statistic for a church that claims people should join her because Protestants are all over the map with their beliefs.

That statistic doesn’t really touch the claim nor does it show what you are claiming… The question isn’t whether Catholics always agree, it’s whether the Church has a teaching authority. Disagreement among members doesn’t disprove authority any more than citizens breaking laws means the law doesn’t exist.

If anything, it proves the opposite point. Even when Catholics disagree, there is still a clear, defined teaching they are disagreeing with. That’s very different from a system where disagreement produces entirely different doctrines with no final, binding resolution.

And this isn’t unique to Catholics. There’s massive disagreement across Protestant denominations on major issues too. The difference is that in one case there is an objective standard that people can conform to or reject, and in the other the standard itself shifts depending on the interpreter. So the stat is about human inconsistency, not the truth or falsity of the Church’s claims.

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The question isn’t whether Catholics always agree, it’s whether the Church has a teaching authority.

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You should let your catechumens know.

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That statistic doesn’t really touch the claim nor does it show what you are claiming… The question isn’t whether Catholics always agree, it’s whether the Church has a teaching authority. Disagreement among members doesn’t disprove authority any more than citizens breaking laws means the law doesn’t exist.

If anything, it proves the opposite point. Even when Catholics disagree, there is still a clear, defined teaching they are disagreeing with. That’s very different from a system where disagreement produces entirely different doctrines with no final, binding resolution.

And this isn’t unique to Catholics. There’s massive disagreement across Protestant denominations on major issues too. The difference is that in one case there is an objective standard that people can conform to or reject, and in the other the standard itself shifts depending on the interpreter. So the stat is about human inconsistency, not the truth or falsity of the Church’s claims.

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It isn’t just the standard, but enforcement of it, that matters.

You’re right that breaking the law doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist, but if you don’t enforce the law when it is broken, then THAT makes it as if the law doesn’t exist. If one third of this nation were committing murder of neighbor with no punishment, the world would rightly condemn this nation as lawless. Yet, if one third of the RCC opposes its teaching on abortion, you don’t think that’s a problem. That’s astonishing to me. What unity is there when the members are so disunited in such important matters?

Once again, you can’t claim unity over and against Protestants when the practical reality is that each parish varies greatly from another in terms of agreement or disagreement with the official teachings of the church.

And finally, what good is a clarifying infallible Magisterium when the people under its authority are just as diverse in their beliefs as those Protestants who hold to the infallible authority of the Bible alone? If the result is the same (a myriad of different beliefs), then how can you tout the superiority of it over the the Scriptures?

Who turned on who?
Yeah we Protestants had such a easy time. Geez.

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Thanks for bringing up the example of the Baptist theological doctrine on Baptism and Communion with the Lutheran theological doctrine on Baptism and Communion.

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My question here is so what?

What’s the practical difference for one’s faith if one believes transubstantiation or consubstantiation or symbolic?