Anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time attacking a particular denomination, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, is harming themselves and others.
With regards to themselves, they are distracting themselves from what the Greek fathers called “nepsis”, that is to say, watchfulness, over their own sins, by focusing on the alleged or historical sins of others which are in many cases literally ancient history. The time spent attacking Rome endlessly is better spent in repentence.
With regards to others, much of what they say has the effect of also causing great offense to other traditional liturgical Protestants, such as the Lutherans and High Church Anglicans, who are among the oldest Protestant denominations, and Moravians, who are the oldest Protestant denomination to preserve their own distinctive theological and liturgical identity (the Waldensians are older, but converted to Calvinism, and later embraced a hybrid Methodist doctrine in becoming the main Protestant denomination in Italy; their original beliefs were eccentric, not quite in line with later Protestantism, and from what we know about them, were quite possibly erroneous after the fashion of the Donatists). These liturgical Protestants share many beliefs with the Roman Catholic Church and many worship practices; many of them call their main Eucharistic service “the Mass” for example.
Furthermore, harm is caused to Eastern Christians - the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East. These churches were at one time in communion with Rome, but were historically independent, and later were separated in schisms, many of which are close to healing (for example, Roman Catholics and members of the Assyrian Church of the East can receive the Eucharist in all of each others parishes, and this is also true for some Oriental Orthodox parishes, and would be the case for the Eastern Orthodox, except most bishops are not prepared to allow it, but some probably do in certain parts of the world; indeed some of the EO churches with the most formidable reputations for being conservative are actually among the most liturgically relaxed.
The problem is that a great many anti-Catholic polemics were written by people unaware of the Eastern churches, or the history of the early church; for example, they were unaware that most of those present at the Council of Nicaea were Greek, with a Roman Emperor and two Roman legates among the 318 bishops who signed the Nicene Creed. There were also probably some Syriac Fathers, who did attend at some ecumenical synods, and perhaps even an Armenian, Ethiopian or Georgian (Ethiopia and Georgia were either the fourth or fifth countries to convert entirely to Christianity, or the fifth and sixth to embrace it officially, counting Rome; I forget the order in which they converted, but the basic order was the City State of Edessa in 301 AD, followed by the Kingdom of Armenia in 306 AD, the Roman Empire in 314 AD with the conversion of St. Constantine, the Edict of Milan and the defeat of the pagan co-emperor Licinius, who was a known persecutor of Christians (interestingly, St. Constantine’s mother St. Helena had been Christian for some time); followed by Georgia and Ethiopia.
Some people falsely claim that Constantine imposed all of these doctrine on the churches, which is hugely offensive to Eastern Christians who were persecuted by Arian Emperors like Constantius, and who had been involved in the Council of Nicaea and the later Ecumenical Synods, all of which were held in the East, in Constantinople or elsewhere in Asia Minor.
Lastly, the attacks against the Roman Church are scurrilous in many cases, ignoring the extremely important humanitarian work performed by the RCC, which is the largest charitable organization on Earth, with operations that as an Orthodox I greatly admire; due to communism nearly all Orthodox hospitals and universities in Eastern Europe were seized, leaving only some facilities in the Middle East (in particular, orphanages in Egypt, which are necessary because the Muslims cruelly oppose their religion’s objection to adoption on all orphaned children in Egypt, not just Muslims but the Christians who comprise over 10% of the population, including Coptic Catholics as well as Coptic Orthodox and Alexandrian Greek Orthodox.
The Roman Catholic Church was also indispensible in procuring the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States and has stood with other traditional Christian churches in opposing abortion, euthanasia and other contemporary evils.
Thus perhaps we should consider the beam in our own eye before complaining about the splinter in the eye of Roman Catholics, and cease constant and unwarranted criticism of their denomination.
