I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth. For He shall not speak of Himself, but what things soever He shall hear, He shall speak. And the things that are to come, He shall shew you.—St. John 16:12-13.

When I had a conversion in the late 1990s, I entered very deeply into Catholic apologetics in how to explain the Bible to Protestants. I was traveling around the world back then, too.  One example is I had an American-Calvinist friend I met at the University of Paris. We debated the Bible in Europe. Our debate even made it back to the United States. I remember meeting him at a Denny’s off I-25 and Alameda in Denver (still open) to have our verse-wars. By “verse wars” I mean I give a verse proving, for example, the Catholic Church’s teaching on justification (usually from the Gospels.) Then the Calvinist gives a verse from his teaching on justification (usually from Romans, but always taken out of context.)

The best way to disprove Protestants is to disprove Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura is the notion that the Bible came directly from God (without a Church) and that the Scriptures are self-interpreting for those who are truly spiritual. The best document I have ever read disproving this is Twenty-One Reasons to Reject Sola Scriptura or here in pamphlet form. (Save that to your internet go-to list or get the pamphlets for your Protestant friends.) By Protestant, I obviously mean anyone from Baptist to Pentecostal. Even non-denominationalists are still Protestant if they’re not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. “Emergent church” folks are still Protestant even if they, um, protest the term.

Despite all the huge problems in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, I am still 100% convinced that Jesus Christ only founded one Church. It has to be One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Christ can have only one spouse. The Apostles and even the early Church Fathers (both East and West) place the supremacy of Rome above the other seats (cities) occupied by Apostles and their successors.

One example of how the Church is Roman comes from the Eastern Saint, St. Ignatius of Antioch who started a letter thus: “Ignatius . . . to the Church also which holds the presidency, in the location of the country of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and, because you hold the presidency in love, named after Christ and named after the Father” (Letter to the Romans 1:1 [A.D. 110]).

Back to my history of learning apologetics and going toe-to-toe with Sola-Scriptura Protestants: I got really good at it, to the point I could quote over 100 verses from Scripture by heart while defending the Catholic position. However, as I wrote above, these usually devolved into “verse-wars” where one person says his verse and then the other says his. It’s like a tired boxing match where each fighter exchanges a weak blow to the face without any final KO.

I’m going to teach you how to end those fights, but in charity.

Here is what I now say to Protestants who are ready to hear it: “If you can just show me one Christian in the first thousand years of Christianity who did NOT believe Jesus Christ was truly present in the Eucharist or that Mary was sinlessly conceived and ever Virgin or an early Christian who did not seek intercession from the martyrs that went before him or who did not believe baptism and confession were required for the remission of sins… I will not only leave the Catholic priesthood, I will leave the Catholic Church.”

I have been charitably giving this challenge for 15 years, and I have never had a Protestant take me on. The closest (and most clever) answer I ever received was: “St. Paul.” In other words, one of my debaters claimed St. Paul did not believe in all those things. However, such an interlocuter could not explain how St. Paul believed in the literal presense of Christ in the Eucharist (1 Cor 11) or how he wrote frequently about the three levels of ordination (episcopos, presbyteros and diakonos) which are still the three major orders of the Catholic Church today (bishop, priest and deacon.) Clearly, St. Paul was both Apostle and bishop.

Still, there is one more trick up the sleeves of certain Protestants that couldn’t name one Pentecostal or Lutheran who died for love of Christ in the catacombs of ancient Rome. They will say something like this: “The faith transmitted by the Apostles was kept in the hearts of charismatic Christians who didn’t write a lot of history. When the hierarchical Catholics made peace with the Roman Empire in 313 AD, the regalia of their bishops and Popes may have been in cahoots with the Roman government, but the true charismatic believers went underground. This pure and simple faith was then re-covered by Martin Luther and the reformers.”

Firstly, they have no proof of this.  (How convenient they were too busy praying in tongues to write a single book over a thousand years!) Secondly, it promotes the blasphemous notion that the Holy Spirit failed in his mission from the 1st century until the 16th century. Why? Because Jesus said the following on Holy Thursday before His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane:  I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth. For He shall not speak of Himself, but what things soever He shall hear, He shall speak. And the things that are to come, He shall shew you.—St. John 16:12-13.

Notice again that Christ’s promise is that the “Spirit of Truth” would teach the Apostles and all future saints “all truth.” Not just some truth, but all truth. (See again the pdf linked above on 21 Reasons to Reject Sola Scriptura that not even the Bible claims to be the be-all end-all of Divine Revelation, even though the Catholic Church—and her alone—has canonized all the books of the Bible as our own highest level of written Divine Revelation.)

If the Apostles’ faith sunk from the 2nd century until Luther’s rebellion in the 16th century, then what was the Holy Spirit doing from the 2nd century to the 16th century? (Keep in mind I am exposing, not promoting, the blasphemies in this paragraph.) This would also mean the Apostles totally failed in their mission in transmitting the faith.  I mean, if St. Ignatius of Antioch got it wrong from St. John the Apostle, then how did Martin Luther get it right?

Interestingly enough, this is the error of Mormons (that Joseph Smith amazingly discovered in Illinois in the 19th century what the early saints in Palestine, Italy and Turkey did not?) and it’s also the error of modernists with their antiquarianism.  (Again, antiquarianism posits that the Novus Ordo is a return to the early Church more than the Traditional Latin Mass.)

Heretics always assert that novelty is old.  They just never have any evidence.

Recently in my travels, I recounted using the above strategy with a very kind Protestant missionary I met.  The short version is here on X: