You can take the Catholic out of the Church...

11Like a dog that returns to his vomit
is a fool who repeats his folly.
12Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes?
There is more hope for a fool than for him.

Listening to Gerry Matatics on Iron Sharpens Iron today made me laugh at one point in particular, when host Chris Arnzen asked him this question (around minute 38):

(Your mainstream Catholic friends may say): You are acting as a Prot, certainly your Gospel is not Protestant and your sacraments and so on are not Protestant, but in you standing in defiance of bishops and a Pope, you are merely relying on private interpretation and so on, if you could comment on that.

Here is Matatics' response (as I have transcribed it):

Absolutely, no, the... the argument is totally fallacious, the claim is totally false and falls to the ground. I don't depend upon my private interpretation of Scripture, tradition, or anything the Mag has taught. I rely upon what the Catholic Church herself, the pillar and foundation of the truth, as St Paul calls the church in 1 Tim 3:15, has faithfully taught down thru the years. That teaching is clear, it is capable of being understood, or there's no point in having a teaching church. And it's very clear when we look at that church's teaching, for example, that what Luther was teaching at, uh, during his "Reformation", what John Calvin was teaching, what other Protestant "Reformers" were teaching about the fact that we can be justified by faith alone, is a heresy. No one could read the documents of the Council of Trent which met, you know, in the 1500s to address the errors of Luther, and come away thinking, "Gee, I'm a little confused. Is Luther a good guy or a bad guy? Is Calvin correct or incorrect?" It's very unambiguous that what these men are teaching is a heresy that is contrary to Scripture... so that's very clear, that the Catholic Church has always condemned Protestantism... so the Protestant here, Chris, is not Gerry Matatics, it's the guy who would follow Ratzinger. Ratzinger says in his book Principles of Catholic Theology that Protestantism is not heresy. So if somebody wants to look around for who are the Catholicss who are really Protestants masquerading as Catholics, it is the followers of Vatican 2. Vatican 2 teaches a Protestantised version....I say, Vat 2 teaches that Protestants do not need to convert to Catholicism in order to enter the one true church and in order to save their eternal souls.

(emphasis and quotations his)


I love it. Here Arnzen does us the favor of reflecting back on a Romanist the same question that so many Roman apologists (and indeed, Matatics himself in the past) LOVE to pose to Protestants - "Isn't _____ just your private interpretation, though? Don't we need an infallible interpreter to inform us of the true interpretation so that we will not fall into the disunity of multiple 10s of 1000s of denominations as we've seen in Protestantism?"

Listen to Matatics' response! All he does is answer in the same way as Protestants sometimes do - no, the teaching of the church is totally sufficiently clear, it is wholly adequate to communicate the truth of God. The teachings of the Council of Trent are easily understood.

Herein lies the blasphemy implicit in this kind of question. Church Fathers, papal encyclicals, conciliar decrees, etc are clearer than Scripture. God apparently is unable or unwilling to make His revelation clear enough in the Scripture, but He gets it right or chooses to make it happen later on, in the teachings of the Church throughout history.

Such pitiful arguments have been answered over and over again, notably here and less notably here among countless other places. What I love most about this is to see the infighting among the "unified" Romanists, and a Roman apologist getting a taste of his own medicine.