You Protestants are not the true church
The Catholic Church defines itself as “Christianity” and like the “True Church” that Christ founded. From there other confessions would then be detached, following various heresies. Among the Christian religions, Catholicism is often distinct from Protestant.
Yet it is not the only Christian church.
Note that the term “Protestant” can be understood as “the non-Catholic Christian faith in the current context”. But there is not only the Protestant faith, and many of them have nothing to complain about. On the European continent since 16 Century, i “Protestants” include Lutherans or Calvinists, depending on the region. In England they mean Anglicans. In America, the term can be used for Baptists, Presbyterians, episcopali o methodisti, all of them Calvinistic. Eastern Orthodoxy and Coptic Christianity are also usually defined “Protestants”.
This is to say that the Catholic Church considers all those who have broken away from it Protestant “in protest” over the centuries.
Also note that the word Catholic as a common adjective it means “universal”. When writing with a capital letter, Catholicit refers only to the Roman Catholic Church. This distinction is important as many Protestant denominations can use the phrase “the Catholic Church” to refer to oneself as a Catholic church means “universal christian church”. And Protestants are Christians, as well as the Orthodox.
As for the single church or the “TRUE CHURCH”, Jesus spoke of the true church and the united church as the union of believers who would accept Him as Savior and they would follow his teachings. In fact we Christians are everywhere and he will catch us during the final rapture of the church, regardless of belonging to a Christian denomination or confession. God's church is the union of believers who are everywhere, not in a religious building or in the Catholic Church. Church means “assembly” ekklesia, and not “construction”. And believers can also gather in homes because Jesus said “when two or three are gathered in my name I will be among them” (Matteo 18:20).
The Christian does not have to belong to a denomination or religion to be “the real church” but belong to Jesus Christ. The true church is the union of believers who have recognized the saving work of Jesus Christ, the invisible church that God knows. Always remember that “God knows hearts and knows which ones are his” (2Timoteo 2:19), there is no need for so much visibility and prominence and the flaunting of the fact of 2000 years of catholic church, then made by humans. If you then think about the fact that the Catholic Church has resisted over the centuries with political intrigues and agreements with the state, crusades and blood, we want to think that if he did not do so, today it would give what it is? Of course not! It continues to be called the church willed by God? How many Protestants have burned at the stake as heretics? True Christians who wanted nothing more than to follow the teachings contained in God's Word? Because they have included the Bible in the Index of Forbidden Books? the Bible, God's Word! Because after the Reformation they included deuterocanonical books in the canon to justify the cult of the dead and purgatory? Why do the “infallible” popes proclaim dogmas and then retract them, like that of Limbo? It could go on indefinitely. therefore, this is the Church that Christ founded?
Because Protestants were born only in 1500?
Just think about the fact that before that date people were illiterate, there was no press and no one could preach in public something contrary to the Catholic Church, otherwise the death penalty for heresy. As well as after the reform, the rest. So on the one hand, people didn't know the Bible and had to trust what the church said, and on the other hand those few who knew it, such as the Waldensians, which existed before the reform, they were persecuted and killed.
But only Protestants are saved? And those that existed before the reform?
As the Bible says, those who accept Jesus as Savior by faith and who make him the center of their life are saved, and these people can be found in every area, it does not depend on visible belonging to a Christian confession. The important thing though, it is to stay as close as possible to the teachings of God's Word, avoiding dogmas, idolatry and doctrines born over the centuries.
Addition:
Who goes ahead and does not remain in the teaching of Christ, has not God. He who abides in the doctrine, He has the Father and the Son. (2Giovanni 9)
