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I would agree with that. However, I cannot fault a Roman Catholic for disagreeing, because the early church was undivided by any long-lasting schisms (even the schisms caused by Nestorius in the fifth century are less clear-cut than many assume; for example, the Assyrian Church of the East has been using an Aramaic translation of the Chalcedonian formula since the fifth century, and the Oriental Orthodox are not Monophysites; frequently, the Church of the East was regarded as the legitimate church in the Persian Empire and in other lands east of the Greco-Roman oikumene, except for Georgia, Armenia and Edessa and parts of Arabia, and contained anti-Nestorian elements, and their main distinguishing doctrine was a belief in Apoktatassis along the lines of St. Gregory of Nyssa, and indeed, St. Isaac the Syrian is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (and some Old Calendarists are in denial about the fact that he was a member of the Church of the East who believed in apokatasis, which has since ceased to be a doctrine officially taught by the remnants of the Church of the East). Likewise, the Oriental Orthodox are effectively the Orthodox churches of those historically non-Greek speaking populations of Egypt and Syria, and of the Armenians, Ethiopians and, since the Coonan Cross Oath following the Portuguese conquest of Malankara, the Mar Thoma Christians, and in the 19th century the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Orthodox Church tried to merge into a unified Egyptian Orthodox Church but were prevented from doing so by the Khedive.
The Syriac Orthodox and the Antiochians have a sweeping ecumenical relationship to the extent that one cannot convert from one church to the other (except in those parts of the diaspora where the Antiochians established an autonomous church, since at least the AOCNA, which was originally a ministry of the Russian Orthodox to the Syrian immigrants in the US until the rise of the Soviet Union caused the breakup of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America into multiple jurisdictions, but for this reason the AOCNA and the OCA, ROCOR and the UOCNA share a common repertoire of Church Slavonic hymns, and the AOCNA also use Syro-Byzantine Chant, which is dominant in the Antiochian church in the Old Country, and various liturgical settings according to four part harmony many of them of Greek Orthodox provenance, by composers such as Michaelides. This is the type of church music that was preferred by St. Peter Moghila.
Rather, the first enduring schism that really hardened was that between the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, and following the schism, the Roman Catholic Church proceeded to engage in a course of conduct that led to further schisms with the Waldensians, the Moravians, and then the Lutherans and then an explosion of additional Protestant groups, including the Anabaptists, and the early English baptists. I am directly descended from one of the first Baptist ministers in America.
Thus, these long-term schisms pose complex questions of ecclesiology. I cannot fault members of the traditional churches for adhering to the ecclesiology of the early church, that there is one visible unified church, because that was the case. The local church ecclesiology embraced by Baptists and Congregationlists and Luther’s ecclesiology which appears based around the existence of correct worship (the literal definition of Orthodoxy and Pravoslavie is Correct Glorification) I find appealing, and then there is the Branch Ecclesiology model commonly found among Anglicans and Old Catholics. Finally there is the Invisible Church Ecclesiology, which I am not a fan of.
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