On April 17, 2025, The New York Post published an article titled “Why Young People Are Converting to Catholicism en masse.” In the course of this explanation, the article details the exponential growth of the Roman Catholic Church. For example, the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a 72% increase in converts from 2023 to 2024. There are many reasons for this, many of them fall outside of the purview of this essay, but one common reason is that, as one person noted while being interviewed by the New York Post, Protestantism doesn’t seem to have theological roots like Catholicism does.
This means many things, chief among them is that the Reformation is just as relevant as ever. The Roman church continues to entice us away from the purity of the truth, and as long as the Roman church continues, the issues that started the Reformation will be relevant. In this piece, I will briefly offer a defense of the Protestant positions, particularly as it pertains to the modern context, of the following doctrines: The authority of the Word of God, justification by faith alone, prayer to saints, and papal authority.
Undergirding this trend of Protestant conversion to Roman Catholicism is a subtle equivocation on what it means to be Protestant. It is an unfortunate reality that what passes as Protestantism today is not the magisterial Protestantism forged by Bucer and Calvin as they recovered the old paths. Protestantism today resembles Anabaptism more than anything. Somewhere along the line, the reasons behind the Reformation became blurred in popular culture. It is pretty common nowadays for modern evangelical Christians to buy into the narrative that the Reformation was fought over whether or not Christ was really present in the bread and wine at the table. But that is not the case. It is also common for modern evangelical Christians to walk into a staunchly Protestant service, such as a Reformed worship service, and walk away thinking, “Well, that was Catholic!” But that, too, is not the case. We must recover the Reformation, and not only recover it, but strip it of its Anabaptist garb. It is against this modern backdrop that I will be analyzing the aforementioned doctrines.
The Authority of Scripture
Most people interested in this topic and who have done any reading on it are familiar with the arguments surrounding the authority of the Word of God. It is not uncommon for the Protestant to come in and tout that the Word of God is authoritative and therefore Protestantism is true. This is not to say that this is the Protestant doctrine, but one must understand how things are understood on the ground in order to fix the problem. After Sola Scriptura is sloppily presented, the Roman apologist is able to easily sidestep the issue by granting that the Word of God is authoritative and extolling its beauty. The Protestant is put at ease by this; this is where the Romanist makes his claim— the Bible is authoritative, but it must be authoritatively interpreted, and that is what Protestants lack.
In a culture built on top of post-modernism, this argument holds sway. Who is to say what the Bible really means? Afterall, we have all been taught since we were children that authorial intent doesn’t exist and interpretation is more or less a work of creativity. Thus, the cultural staple of post-modernism functions to undermine the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, which teaches that Scripture is able to be understood and interpreted. This weak point opens up the Protestant to seek stability, objectivity, and truth in the Papacy as the supreme interpreter of scripture.
To combat this and keep Protestants from being swept up by the Romanist claim to authority, the Protestant church must recover the proper doctrine of perspicuity. At its core, the doctrine of perspicuity is the belief that the scriptures may be read and understood, even by the layman. Christ, when confronted with traditions that conflicted with Scripture, held up the Word of God as the authority in the matter: “They teach as doctrine the precepts of men…” And his solution was not to appeal to an ultimate and unquestioned interpreter but rather to appeal to the senses of the hearer: “Listen and understand.” (Matthew 15:9-11) This means that Christ recognized that Scripture, far from being vague and unintelligible to the average reader, was able to be perceived by those who heard it.
Of course, the perspicuity of scripture must not be taken too far. In things pertaining to salvation, the Scripture is perspicuous, but that is not to say that Scripture is equally clear on all topics. It is also unwise to conflate perspicuity with private interpretation. We must teach that Scripture is perspicuous and should be interpreted within the community of believers over generations. In other words, the Church must play a significant role in interpreting Scripture, but it must not be forgotten that it is the individual believer who must perceive the doctrines of Scripture in order to have true faith.
Justification by Faith
Many are very surprised to read the Catholic catechism and find statements from the Romanists extolling the role that the grace of God plays in their salvation. For example, section 1996 states that “Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.” Most Protestants, having been taught that Romanists don’t have any concept of grace, are caught off guard by these official teachings. Especially Protestants from an Arminian background, which is most Protestants at this point, are prone to believing that there is no substantial difference between the Protestant and Roman Catholic view of justification. If one is coming from a dogmatically Arminian background, this may actually be true.
The Romanist position is appealing, in part, because it may be argued that it is more consistent than your run-of-the-mill Arminianism. The Arminian agrees with the Romanist emphasis on libertarian free will but refuses to acknowledge that if salvation depends on the fragile will of man, then it is fundamentally unstable. The Arminian wants the bliss of eternal security, but the Arminian’s children crave the bliss of theological consistency, and you can’t have both.
In the modern mind, the fight over justification must happen on the field of eternal security. In this way, the Protestant mind can be fortified against the Romanist position. There is no sleight of hand going on when the Protestant knows he must give up his own certainty about his eternal state to forsake Protestantism. That isn’t to say that many Protestants don’t take the leap anyway, but it is to say that if more Protestants were forced to look down the abyss, they would decide not to jump without a parachute. Statements such as the one against certainty in the Council of Trent are very helpful in shedding light on this issue:
“If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end,-unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema.”
Prayer to Saints
All Christians must constantly be engaging in battle against the idols that seek to capture their hearts. Thankfully, we have access to inexhaustible riches through His Son, Jesus Christ, who merits for us continual forgiveness before the Father when we fall short of total allegiance to the Triune God. One of the ways the Romanist church falls short when it comes to idolatry is in the practice of praying to saints. To keep ourselves from worshipping idols, we must first understand what it means to worship. This is where the Protestant church has an opportunity to guard against falling into the Romanist trap of praying to saints.
Prayer is thought of by most pop-Protestants as an exercise in quiet piety through which you keep up your end of the relationship. There is some truth to that understanding of prayer, but it is not complete. Prayer must be properly defined as first and foremost an act of worship. Prayer must be understood to encompass the whole of the liturgy as it is in 1 Samuel 7. Prayer must be understood as an offering and a sacrifice, as it is in Psalm 141.
If prayer can be understood as an act of worship, it would simply be unthinkable to pray to saints. If prayer is simply a way to maintain a relationship, then why not pray to other saints? But if prayer is a holy and reverent act of worship, then offering it to any being other than the triune God is unthinkable. It must be said, however, that this view of prayer cannot be sufficiently recovered in the context of an irreverent worship service. What the Protestant believes about prayer, that it is a lofty act of worship toward the Holy God, is embodied aesthetically by the Romanist church in their beautiful cathedrals. What the Roman church believes about prayer, that it is a spiritual way of talking to other beings, is embodied aesthetically by the Protestant church in their remodeled car dealerships.
This must change.
Papal Authority
There is much concern in today’s political climate over foreign influence in America, and for good reason. Many young people are becoming increasingly conservative in their political views. But in the midst of all this, much of Gen. Z is turning its back on Protestantism because of its failure to combat wokeness and speak on cultural issues. Those critiques are true as far as they go. Protestantism has been abysmal in its willingness to go along with the dictates of leftism.
The Protestant convert wants to believe that the beauty and unity of the Roman Catholic Church can heal many personal and societal ills. However, it is simply not the case that the Roman Catholic Church can deliver one from the issues of foreign policy and the woke mind virus. The Roman church cannot bring clarity to the issue of foreign policy; it only brings more confusion. The Roman Church is headed by the Pope, who is a foreign head of state. Are Protestants really supposed to believe that pledging their allegiance to a foreign leader is supposed to bring clarity to the American issue of foreign policy?
Historically, Roman Catholics were correctly seen as a political liability due to their foreign loyalty— “imperium in imperio.” It cannot be ignored that the Roman Catholic Church is not only a foreign entity competing with the natural affection due to America from Americans, but the Roman church throughout history has time and time again persecuted and antagonized Protestant nations. These things must be taught and brought to remembrance before any Protestant, especially an American Protestant, converts to Romanism.
It should go without saying that the Roman Church is not immune to wokeness either. It has had traitors and cowards in its midst just as much as the Protestant Church. The purported unity against wokeness simply does not exist. The bulwarks against modern insanity that do reside in the Roman Catholic Church are causes for gratitude, but many times those heroes accomplish great feats despite their church and not because of her.
Conclusion
The apostle Paul on Mars Hill saw what the current generation was missing and sought to fill the void with the correct teaching on God. As we seek to represent Protestantism and the Reformation to prospective Roman Catholic converts, we ought to do so with their current frame of mind. Doing this may lead to more success in keeping Protestants from converting to Catholicism. This, I believe, would be better for their souls. Protestantism, rightly understood, brings the Christian to the great riches hidden in the Word of God. Souls are reborn, families are restored, and cities are rebuilt as the Spirit uses the Word of God to regenerate humans. We must not forget that our Protestant forefathers fought and bled for those blessings.
But we need not fear an uptick in conversions within the Roman Catholic Church, because at the end of the day, most American Catholics are functionally Protestant. JD Vance did not kiss the ring.
They would have to do much more than a few conversions to rid our nation of its Protestant DNA.
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