Michael, that was a fascinating and informative article. It fits right in with my own research into the history of Catholicism and puts a lot of pieces in the puzzle. My own friendship with a Jesuit priest has led me to realize that church decrees are just that…decrees. A bad decree has to be eroded from the bottom before it will be reversed at the top. So, I welcome Catholics who talk like this Oakes fellow.

However, the “official” view on Protestants is that we’re not heretics. You have to be in the Church and repudiate the teaching you have received before you can be a heretic. Since very few Protestants were ever part of the Church and never received the sacraments or teaching of the Church to begin with, we’re not heretics. From the conservative, dogmatic point of view, saying your local Baptist pastor is a “heretic” makes as much sense as saying that your local imam or rabbi is a “heretic.”

Further, he risks running afoul of his church’s ecclesiology when he says that “the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them.” The essential patrimony of the Church is inextricably tied to the indelible character which is transmitted through the succession of bishops via the laying on of hands. According to numerous papal declarations, no Protestant cleric is validly ordained. Therefore, there is no more of the Church among us than there is among Muslims or Jews. Period. We don’t have sacraments, we don’t confer grace, and we don’t have the Tradition. It is not possible for us to have any essential part of the Church that the True Church does not already have in all fullness.  Anything we have is fundamentally no different than whatever goodness God decided to manifest among Greek philosophers or Turkish scholars and not something essential we took from the Church.  The Church is one, it cannot be divided, and it cannot lose its essence.