As Catholics, we sometimes point to the doctrinal chaos within Protestantism as evidence for the need for an infallible Church. As fallible humans, we tend to err, even when trying our hardest. And so it’s unsurprising that the various denominations of Protestantism come to wildly different conclusions on doctrine, including questions like “Does God love everyone?” “What must I do to be saved?” and so forth. But some Protestants will respond to this objection by pointing out that, for members of a supposedly-unified body, Catholics sure do spend a lot of time fighting amongst themselves.
This objection is nothing new. Back in 1850, St. John Henry Newman pointed out that “it is a well-known point in controversy, to say that the Catholic Church has not any real unity more than Protestantism,” and to claim that “the greatest alienation, rivalry, and difference of opinion exist among the members of the Catholic priesthood.” And as Newman points out, this objection is half-true and half-false.
The true half is that there are opinionated and strong-willed Catholics. After all, Newman said, “the children of the Church are not of a different nature from the Protestants around them,” and left to himself, “each Catholic likes and would maintain his own opinion and his private judgment just as much as a Protestant.” Nor is this a bad thing, of itself. Your intellect is a gift from God, after all. As Newman put it:
The intellect of man is active and independent: he forms opinions about everything; he feels no deference for another’s opinion, except in proportion as he thinks that that other is more likely than he to be right; and he never absolutely sacrifices his own opinion, except when he is sure that that other knows for certain. He is sure that God knows; therefore, if he is a Catholic, he sacrifices his opinion to the Word of God, speaking through His Church.
But the situation isn’t all good. Due to original sin, “each mind naturally is self-willed, self-dependent, self-satisfied; and except so far as grace has subdued it, its first impulse is to rebel.” And so, on all of those issues upon which the Church hasn’t spoken infallibly, “there ever has been, and ever will be, a vast exercise and a realized product, partly praiseworthy, partly barely lawful, of private judgment within the Catholic Church.”
So there are areas within Catholicism that are left to private judgment, and over which Catholics can and will disagree. This always has been, and always will be, the case. But there are also areas upon which the Church has spoken definitively, and this is where we see how the equation to Protestantism is a false one. There’s no binding creed within Protestantism, no infallibly settled doctrines upon which all Protestants must agree. There are good and bad Catholics: those who accept or reject the Church’s dogmatic teaching. But there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” Protestants in this sense, since there’s no set of dogmatic teaching. The objection makes it sound as if it were “difficult or impossible to ascertain what it was that the Roman Communion taught,” when we know the opposite to be true.
Finally, Newman points out that the remarkable thing isn’t that Catholics often disagree. We should expect as much from a Church spanning the globe, two millennia, and untold numbers of ethnicities and nationalities. Of course we have a lot of disagreements. The remarkable thing is that we have a coherent creed to which all faithful Catholics assent, no matter their culture or background or natural inclinations.