Awhile back, in an earlier blog/video, I had mentioned I was mulling over creating rebuttal videos to criticisms against the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. At first, I hesitated about the idea – not because I don’t have any thoughts on the, well, disturbingly incorrect critiques traveling throughout the Internet, or that I am worried that my channel will blow up into comment wars and sheer vitriol. But mostly because a whole host of other Catholic channels – Counsel of Trent, How to Be Christian, Catholic Truth, Catholic Answers, Bishop Robert Barron, to name a few – have put the usual, and not-so-usual, criticisms to rest. Two example links are below.
However, after watching a dialogue today between Mike Winger and Alan Parr, both of whom are in the Protestant camp and have made lengthy videos disputing Catholicism, I am including a link below to that video, as well as providing my short, summary response.
I am not planning to produced detailed play-by-play rebuttal videos anytime soon – check out the other channels below to get detailed, iron clad rebuttals – but I do think it’s important to drive home the point I am about to make – and as a call out to anyone exploring or refuting the Catholic faith – that all skeptics must be meticulous in their research and inquiry. That said, here Is my summary about Wnger and Parr’s dialogue about the Catholic Church potentially being a cult, or whether it is anti-Christian.
As someone who has been Catholic for most of my life (though I took a prior detour into Protestant life for five years, and then was a militant, “new atheist” for 10 years): Namely, no matter which shoes I have walked in, the scholarship about the Catholic Church is solidly correct: The entire Catechism, authority of the Church, the Clergy, Tradition, Mary, the Saints –all the usual, already well-refuted arguments that Protestants keep bringing up, again and again — are all absolutely rooted in Scripture.
And we have Church Fathers who have been consistent in Catholic Christian theology for *2000* years now. No, not 500 years. No, not within the past 40 years. And no, not due to splintering into ~30,000 sects — most of which claim “Sola Scriptura”, yet there are 30,000 Protestant sects. You get the point.
I know that is head-shakingly difficult for many Protestants to accept, but the Catholic Church has not invented *anything* regarding Christian theology. Rather, it has simply further explained it — just as Christianity overall has done with the Trinity (this word does not exist at all in Scripture), and the examples go on and on.
Lastly, Mike Winger’s assumptions about how we Catholics view the Pope, that we elevate the Pope above Scripture, or that the Church supersedes Scripture, is just flat-out nonsense. These kinds of criticisms about Catholicism just keep reinforcing how sadly miseducated many Protestants are about *real* Christian theology and what the Church truly represents. It seriously makes my brain and soul hurt. Some of the information being perpetuated out there is so painfully wrong.
Therefore — please, please, *please* go through a good RCIA program at a Catholic Church, study Scripture and the Catechism thoroughly, and talk with Catholics who know the theology inside and out — rather than relying on the same shaky arguments and spreading misinformation.
Mike Winger / Alan Parr dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5T2nV77WR0
Trent Horn’s rebuttals to Mike Winger’s presentation about Catholicism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coQ3Ag9yQzc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3AxxFNcxRY