My dear Roman Catholics,

SECTION 1 – FOUNDATIONS: LOVE, JUSTIFICATION, AND COMMUNION

Introduction: The Spirit Draws Us into the Church

All the striving of human hands, all the pious resolutions, all the white-knuckled moral rigor, cannot raise a single sinner from the dead. The verdict that acquits sinners—spoken once for all on the hill outside Jerusalem—reaches us today in a trustworthy history recorded in Scripture. This is the bedrock: justification remains wholly extra nos, outside of us, the finished work of another—Christ crucified, Christ risen. To say Christ for us is to confess that no human work can save; to say Christ in us is to live in the Spirit who draws us into communion—“faith working through love”—the very proof we have passed from death to life in the bonds of a living Body.

The Spirit who joins Christians to the risen Lord never leaves the justified believer solitary. The declaration from beyond the grave that “I have been crucified with Christ… and Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) is as real now as Calvary was then; and the same Spirit who binds us to Christ inevitably binds us to Christ’s people. Scripture speaks of that bond as “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6); and declares that “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14). This means that the one made right with God is drawn into communion with those likewise reconciled—such that we do not drift alone through the pews, sealed off by invisible partitions of self-interest and private belief. In effect, we are members of one Body, each living nerve-end connected to the same Head, feeling the pulse of the same blood.

Consequently, persistent disdain for the local church by a refusal to love, serve, or suffer alongside Christ’s body exposes a deeper question: has one truly been joined to Christ at all? I began with an account of justification in order to make it clear that loving the church does not justify us; nevertheless, the justified will not stay aloof from her. The apostle who insists we are “justified by faith apart from works” (Rom. 3:28) also insists that “we, though many, are one body in Christ” (Rom. 12:5) and that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor. 12:21). In other words, faith without love is not merely defective faith but a contradiction, an impossibility. The verdict that sets a sinner free binds him to a living body, or it binds him to nothing at all.

SECTION 2 – APPEARANCE, FRUIT, AND INTELLECTUAL ALLURE

Is Rome That Body?

Having given this explanation that we are justified in Christ and joined to others who are equally justified, the question I want to answer once and for all in this essay is whether the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church in which the true Body subsists.

By all appearances, she is the most representative Christian church across all domains of religiosity globally. She appears intellectually robust and aesthetically beautiful. The sight of a monk—head bowed, beads sliding through his fingers as he prays for strangers—strikes many of us as more Christlike than the ball-capped Protestant stocking shelves in a disaster relief warehouse which, with its fluorescent lights, forklifts, volunteers in jeans and work gloves, feels not only prosaic by comparison but less set apart—less holy.

But appearances are not what set us apart. “By their fruits you will know them” (Matt. 7:16).

And even fruit can be imitated; after all, Satan appears as an angel of light. So we must ask: where does this fruit come from, and does it truly spring from the Vine?

We ought to measure the tree by what it gives to others, not by the shape of its branches. The parable of the sheep and the goats puts the criterion pretty starkly: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. Paul’s portrait of the Spirit’s fruit has nothing to do with ecclesial identity or visually setting oneself apart: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal. 5:22–23).

With regard to the intellectual domain, Roman Catholicism impresses at first as an edifice of marble logic. I continue to study Thomism for its shining façade—its dévotés arranging act and potency, esse and essentia, according to a geometry so flawless it dazzles and persuades the mind that, as long as one finds more coherence along the path, one is therefore immersing himself more and more deeply into the Truth.

For a certain personality, and a certain kind of mind, this intellectual palace welcomes us in; the invitation to enter feels generous—yet the threshold conceals a condition: Those who enter here surrender their native understanding of words that are given new, sometimes tighter definitions; their mal- or under-formed consciences are handed-in to be reshaped; and any lingering suspicions that linger are turned on the convert himself as chief suspect: Who are you to rupture this beautiful, impeccable, and grand design? Every objection the convert might have voiced must then be let go into a great gaping hole at the center of the palace where it dissolves into the syllogisms which anticipate it.

One floats dreamily down these halls disoriented and more alone than they know until they realize (if ever) a door has closed and locked behind them upon entering each new room. Further and further in they float like cartoon characters, transported by a sweet aroma curling into their nostrils, not realizing that each corridor returns them to the same premise—until at last it’s too late: they don’t know whether they are following logic or merely the rules of this one Roman game.

SECTION 3 – HIDDEN PREMISES AND THE DOGMA MACHINE

Premises Without Scripture: Marian Doctrines

Anyone can imagine what men are capable of once they discover that analytical precision can shelter any conclusion, so long as the premises remain hidden. The Roman Catholic Church mastered this technique, pressing it into doctrinal service. Syncretic devotions swelled first; dogma followed, like a notary affixing a seal to a letter already sent. When late fourth-century preachers began swooning over Mary’s perpetual virginity, the Gospels’ blunt references to Jesus’ “brothers” threatened the rising tide of veneration. Saint Jerome’s apologetic ingenuity did not deny that adelphos meant “brother”—Koine Greek already had anepsios for “cousin,” as used in Colossians 4:10—but reinforced a reinterpretation already circulating in apocryphal writings and early commentaries: these brothers, he argued, were actually cousins, sons of another Mary, the wife of Clopas. What had begun as a theological instinct to protect Mary’s purity became an exegetical necessity, and Jerome sharpened the genealogical workaround into a formal defense—redrawing the family tree to preserve the doctrine without any explicit support. Today’s Catholic apologists often appeal to Hegesippus, Epiphanius, or the Protoevangelium of James—but these are either late, apocryphal, or both. The exception became rule, not because Scripture required it, but because the rising cult of Mary could not endure contradiction. This pattern—where theological instinct hardens into necessity, and necessity seeks cover in strained exegesis—repeats itself.

The Dogma Machine: Immaculate Conception and Assumption

Thus, buried premises wrought by imaginations disconnected from reality outran memory and historical records. The feast of Mary’s conception appeared in the East by the seventh century and gradually spread westward, long before anyone attempted to define it dogmatically. Scotus found a metaphysical loophole—“preservative redemption”—to reconcile the belief with original sin; three centuries of sermons embroidered the loophole into a banner; Pius IX swung the banner into a thunderbolt, and exegetes scurried back through Luke’s salutation to squeeze a single participle, kecharitōmenē, into a prenatal absolution. The feast predated Scotus, but it was his scholastic argument that transformed a pious intuition into a theological claim—and eventually, under pressure of popular devotion, into an article of faith.

The Assumption stretched the method to pure audacity: no apostle spoke of it, no grave was empty save Christ’s, and the earliest surviving homilies—by Juvenal of Jerusalem (fifth century) and John of Damascus (eighth)—are late, legendary, and theologically motivated. Yet by the fifth century, the Dormition was already a liturgical feast in Jerusalem, with earlier traces in Syriac tradition. It was typology that did the heavy lifting. If the Ark of the Covenant vanished, surely the living Ark must soar higher; if Enoch and Elijah were translated, how not the Theotokos? Fitness replaced fact; the rhyme of symbols was promoted to history. No apostolic record, no Scriptural word—just the inertia of liturgy and the imaginative logic of exalted veneration. But typological flourish soon grew into solemn definition, and liturgical devotion into mandatory dogma.

The Horror Beneath the Marble: Rome’s Engine of Torment

Although the silent and hidden premises kept the intellectual palace looking sparkling clean to most onlookers, there was always a tell discernable to the true Christian—but the true Christian paid dearly for noticing. While syllogisms fluttered skyward, another engine clanked below. From the bull Ad abolendam in 1184 to the final Valencian auto-da-fé in 1826 Rome choreographed torment as liturgy. Manuals of the Holy Office specified how high to hoist a suspect until ligaments tore but bones did not snap, how many teeth to loosen before agony dulled defiance into confession. Though modern archival research places the total executions under the Spanish Inquisition at roughly 3,000 to 5,000 over three and a half centuries—far fewer than common legend—the reality remains monstrous. The smoke of heretics rose through European dawns as faithfully as the Angelus. Béziers, which meant twenty thousand souls, was reduced to bloody carrion in a single afternoon because papal envoy Arnaud Amalric preferred indiscriminate purity (ah, we can never be too careful to let humanity in, can we?) to patient discernment: “Kill them all; God will know His own.” The phrase lingered longer than the stench. (Yes, I know: secular courts were savage—but the Church claims to be the Body of Christ!)

The Baptism in Reverse: Spectacle as Sacrament

The Roman Catholic Church owes a great deal to the Spanish inquisitors who improved the craft that defined their church for these long centuries by marrying their sacramentology to strangulation. In vaulted, heavenward, chambers that a Bishop Robert Barron today might fawn over as lifting one’s soul upward—a linen toca was thrust down a prisoner’s throat and water followed until the chest convulsed; reviving signaled another pour, like a baptism in reverse. Barron might be proud of the traditional parades that are still held by the captive or faithful today that were observed then—more proof of an unbroken traditional succession? Yes, even then the streets outside blossomed with pageantry; but unlike today, it was scarlet crosses on penitents’ tunics, drums rolling as the condemned processed toward the stake under tapestries of the Virgin who, according to freshly made dogma, had never known sin’s taint nor death’s decay. Families could even purchase a merciful garrote before the fires were lit (thank God for the merciful) which meant a lesser agony—priced, of course, on a sliding scale of indulgence. Thus charity found its fiscal register while theology found its proof: the very spectacle, they said, testified to the Church’s maternal solicitude, cauterizing error for the good of souls.

No, not even the intelligent or goodly scholar‑saints were spared. Jan Hus travelled under imperial safe conduct only to feel the pyre’s hot breath against his heels; Savonarola’s ashes fed the Arno because his zeal meant the shame of a corrupt pontiff; Bruno’s tongue, gagged with iron, could not cry that the universe might be larger than Aristotle (aka, The Teacher) allowed. Galileo, at least, was permitted to age under house arrest, obliged to kneel where others burned and whisper that the earth stands still while it hurtles through darkness unhindered by anathema.

There is one horror, preserved in Foxe’s chronicle, that haunts my mind like a night cry. John Hooper, the reforming Bishop of Gloucester, was condemned under Mary Tudor in 1555. The pyre was stacked green so it would smolder; the first spark gasped and died in damp wood, wrapping him in reeking smoke. There Hooper stood praying, his lips moving soundlessly in the haze until a second blaze caught. The flames climbed his cassock; they licked his beard, and his tongue, swollen by heat, protruded and split open. Still he beat his chest with a free hand—“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”—until the flesh peeled from it, his fingers dropping away; at last, his whole arm sheared off and thudded onto the embered ground. Forty-five minutes passed before it killed him. The crowd, we are told, sang psalms to drown the screams; the friars (i.e., the real church men) declared the spectacle a work of mercy. That same iron breath warmed the coffers. Purgatory which began as a vague (foolish?) hope that mercy might pursue the dead, hardened into nothing less than a commercial furnace. As soot from burning conversos coated Spanish tiles, pennies clinked into indulgence chests to shorten imaginary years in imaginary flames, licensed by councils that stitched together stray verses as a tailor patches velvet, sure that the garment would shine because scholastic gold-thread described each seam.

These days, all over the internet and in debate halls, you can watch Roman Catholic Church apologists mocking the idea of a Body of Christ that is not co-extensive with a powerful institution. But if the Roman Catholic Church as an institution has always been the Body of Christ, then: Christ’s Body designs its own torture. Christ’s Body drowns itself. Mothers clutch their children as the icy currents close over their faces, and the Spirit within Him thrashes for breath even as His own Church presses down, down, down, until the bubbles stop rising. This is the Body of Christ the Roman Church claims to be? The Body it has shackled, gagged, strangled, drowned, and burned for centuries? My dear Roman Catholics, is this the Body you love? Keep in mind that all of these things—the rack‑appeased syllogisms, stake‑lit dogma—were not within a parenthesis in Church history; this was the Roman Catholic Church’s heartbeat through half the Christian era. The institution that now waves away these centuries as past ‘excesses’ is the same that declares itself immune to error when defining faith and morals. But the smell of scorched hair clings to its garments, and the rationalizations for torture still polish new doctrines to mirror finish.

SECTION 4 – INFALLIBILITY, CHRIST, AND THE WORD

Corporate Sin, Not Just Personal Failure

Nor can the indictment be waved aside by the familiar dodge that “the office remains infallible while the men who hold it may sin.” From the moment popes affixed their leaden seals to Ad extirpanda (1252) and, much later, Exsurge Domine (1520), the rack, the stake, and the confiscation of goods were no longer private lapses but exercises of the Roman see’s own jurisdiction—the arm turning the windlass wore the Fisherman’s Ring. Discipline is itself a mode of teaching; Augustine, Contra Cresconium 3.51, treats the Church’s judicial sentences as an extension of the pulpit. Acts performed in nomine Ecclesiae and ratified by councils are not peccata personarum but delicta concilii—corporate crimes; when decrees forbid the chalice to the laity, chain the vernacular Bible, or brand justification by faith a heresy, the communion that wields the sword takes on the likeness of the Antichrist who “exalts himself over everything called God” (2 Th 2:4). We cannot call the persecutor the persecuted, nor claim that the jailer and the martyr share the same Body. Judas severed himself; he did not remain mysteriously united to the very one he betrayed. To equate the Roman institution with the mystical Body is to collapse the sinless Head into sinful members, mistaking human presumption for divine presence.

Rome claims that whenever the pope or an ecumenical council defines faith or morals under the proper conditions, the result is divinely protected from error and must be received without “private judgment.” Yet popes and councils have anathematized justification by faith alone (Trent VI), denied the chalice to the laity (Constance XIII), licensed torture for heresy (Ad extirpanda, Exsurge Domine), and imposed Marian dogmas unknown to the apostles (Ineffabilis Deus, Munificentissimus Deus).

To evade the charge, Rome insists these rulings were never “infallible.” But who decides which statements qualify? Rome herself—and the only way to trust Rome’s line-drawing is by the very private judgment she condemns. Suspend that judgment and you cannot know which teachings demand assent; exercise it and Rome’s unique authority evaporates, returning you to Scripture judged in the light of Scripture.

Here the deeper issue surfaces: the Word speaks; it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium to give it voice. Either Scripture is the living Word—or it is merely words about the Word, subject to revision by an authority that stands above it. Rome’s system requires the latter, but once the magisterium is enthroned above the text, it can never be tested by the text, only by itself. Thus either the magisterium erred—proving infallibility false—or the believer must privately judge Rome trustworthy—proving that private judgment is indispensable. In both cases the Roman claim collapses. There is no third way.

All of this brings us to the crux of Rome’s theological position—its claim to infallible mediation of Christ’s gifts.

Christ Is Not Divided

There’s one more argument from Rome I need to take care of before moving on to make the positive case for a better Christian church. Roman Catholic apologists often say, “Our separated brethren have the whole Christ—yet they are missing how Christ meant to give Himself.” But this is a contradiction dressed in velvet. For Christ is not divided. To possess Him is to possess Him as He is—not by approximation, not by resemblance, but in fullness. These apologists suggest that Christ’s gifts are mediated only through certain divinely instituted forms—through apostolic succession, episcopal hierarchy, and a full sacramental system. But what can be added to the One in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily? If the Spirit of Christ dwells in a man, then Christ Himself is present—and with Him, union with His death, resurrection, ascension, and reign. The oft-repeated appeal to “form obeyed” implies that grace is dependent upon adherence to ecclesial structure. But the Church is not built from form upward—it flows from Christ downward. The Church’s form is not the source of Christ’s presence; it is the result of it. Wherever Christ is present through His Word and Sacrament, there is the Church—not because men have traced their hands through apostolic paperwork, but because the Gospel is not chained.

Rome speaks of “fullness” the way a bureaucracy speaks of process: more steps, more offices, more paperwork—then you’ll have the real thing. But the New Testament says nothing of this. It does not say, “You have Christ, but not in fullness until you assent to papal infallibility, venerate relics, recite the rosary, and acknowledge a treasury of merit.” It says, “You have been filled in him” (Col. 2:10). Not filled in Peter. Not filled in tradition. Not filled in Rome. In Christ. The “fullness” Rome offers is not abundance—it is obstruction. It is the gospel with a gag order, grace with a customs office.

The claim that faith is lacking without Rome’s additions isn’t just false—it’s blasphemous. It says the Spirit who unites the believer to the risen Christ has somehow failed to bring the believer all the way. It implies the blood of Christ isn’t enough unless filtered through the papal machine. But Scripture leaves no such room. “Whoever has the Son has life” (1 John 5:12). Rome says: not yet—you need more. But there is no more. Christ is the fullness. To insist otherwise is to claim the authority to finish what God has declared finished. That’s not reverence. That’s robbery.

They speak of fullness and unity and apostolic continuity. But listen carefully: every one of their appeals subtly shifts the foundation from Christ crucified to Christ administered. From the Person to the process. From the cross to the chair. And that is the tragedy.

They say, “But how do you know? Without Rome, who can interpret Scripture?” And I want to shout: The sheep know His voice! (John 10:27). The Word of God is not a puzzle box that requires papal keys. It is living and active, and the Spirit opens it to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—not those who merely trace their lineage through episcopal paperwork.

SECTION 5 – WHERE THE CHURCH IS FOUND: HIDDEN YET VISIBLE

So if not in Rome, where is this Church—this Body that loves, suffers, and endures in Christ?

Now let’s make the positive case for an alternative conception of the Church. If it’s not exclusively (or most substantially) in Rome, then where?

Where is the Church I love? It is in the fellowship of those who cling to Christ where He has promised to be: in the Word rightly preached, in the Sacraments rightly given. Scripture promises that the shepherd’s voice gathers, not scatters (Jn 10 :4‑5). Where an anathema thunders against the plain Gospel—the Church perishes in that place, no matter how ancient the cathedra. Indefectibility adheres to the Word, not to any single episcopal throne. So I cannot step inside the Roman Catholic palace, however radiant its marble, knowing what foundations lie beneath.

The Lutheran Confession: Visible and Hidden Church

We confess—not in abstraction, but in joy—that the Church is not a relic of apostolic succession, but a living communion formed by the Word and sustained by the Sacraments. The Church is present wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered. That makes the Church a visible reality with clear, identifiable boundaries. Hence we reject an “invisible Church” conceived as a merely spiritual unity that ignores concrete, sacramental communion.

At first glance, our position can look self-contradictory. We deny that the Church subsists as an invisible entity spread across bodies lacking sacramental fellowship, because genuine unity requires a shared confession and common participation in the Lord’s Supper. Yet we also acknowledge that members of Christ’s Body can be found in denominations that do not share that communion. Does this not concede that the Church exists wherever Word and Sacrament are present, even across institutional divides—a view that sounds like the very invisible-Church theory we reject?

The tension dissolves once we distinguish invisible from hidden. Invisible suggests a non-entity, an abstraction. Hidden affirms a real, though not fully perceived, unity. Our theologians feared that calling the Church invisible would detach it from the concrete, sacramental life through which the Spirit actually works.

At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday the Church endures: her members scattered, sleeping, or alone, yet bound by the same Spirit who unites them to Christ in Word and Sacrament. This hiddenness is no disembodied concept; it is a mystical reality that always flowers—visibly—in the gathered assembly where Christ forgives, heals, and sanctifies through His means of grace.

The Incarnate God Is Not Absent

This logic carries us to the Real Presence. The God who walked in Eden, spoke from the bush, passed through Abraham’s sacrifice, and shed His blood at Calvary is not absent now. He does not remain the distant God of philosophers. He descends, stoops, and enters our dust and blood to draw near. The prophets foretold a Shepherd-King who would feed His flock and bind up the brokenhearted (Isa 61:1-3; Ezek 34:23-24). Fulfillment comes in the Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The God who once passed between torn pieces of sacrifice now gives His own torn flesh for the life of the world (Isa 53:5).

If this Incarnation were only a momentary event, if Christ’s flesh were now a distant memory, it would mean that the God who once walked with His people, who fed them and healed them with His own hands, has now withdrawn into the distant heavens, leaving us only with echoes and shadows. But this is not the case. The incarnational, covenantal nature of God’s relationship with His people continues into the present. God speaks to a deep human need for real, immediate encounters, for the concrete over the abstract, for the flesh and blood of experience over the thin air of speculation. Without this real presence, the most immediate and undeniable experience we have is the brokenness of the world—the fact of sin, suffering, and death. These evils would then define the Church itself. But no—that would not be my Church. The true Christian Church does not endure by doing violence to the minds, bodies, and souls of those who oppose her. She endures because her Shepherd still walks among us and still gives Himself, saying, “This is my body, given for you.”

The Church Is Not Rome—and Not Leaking

Even if Lutheran sacramental theology is right, that judgment does not drain Christ’s fullness from credobaptists, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Presbyterian Calvinists, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, or the Eastern churches. The Church I love has members in every one of them. Lutheranism is no “leakier” vessel than Rome, nor Rome a tighter one. As Emil Brunner reminds us: “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.” Brunner presses the point further. Rome, he says, imagines Protestants are trying to reconstruct the substance of her institution, when the real aim is to recover the New-Testament Ekklesia that precedes every later structure. We do not covet Rome’s marble chassis; we seek the living communion that the Word itself calls into being. For the Word speaks—it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium to breathe on it. Either Scripture is the living Word, or it is merely words about the Word, always subject to revision by the authority that claims to stand above it. Unity that finally matters is the voice that gathers and the mission that burns. Wherever Christ is preached and His gifts are given, His absolute fullness is already present—no papal seal, synod charter, or episcopal pedigree can add one ember more.

A Roman Catholic might finally respond, “But I’m not Catholic because of the things you critique—I’m Catholic because I love Jesus. I love communing with others who love Him. I find the traditions draw me nearer to God. I’m nourished by the Church’s intellectual breadth, the beauty of her arts, the love poured out by the saints and religious orders. These things help me walk with Christ.”

To all of that, I say amen. All of it I affirm. All of it I would preserve and name as gifts from God. But I ask you—leave behind only what is false: the oaths to error, the blindness to blood, the communion with powers that mock the very Christ you seek. Let go of those, and you will be freer in the love you already know, more unburdened in the truth you already walk toward, and more whole in the Body to which you already belong.