Precisely! And that's exactly the problem with the article.
You seem like a curious, open-minded person, who wants to know when and why such an idea can take root in the Church. Well, the only way to answer that question is to study history. Christian history specifically. We need to go back to the earliest generations of Christians, read what they wrote, and trace the development of their ideas down the centuries. In other words, you have to study Patristics. The Church Fathers.
Now here's the problem that many people, including the author of this article, run up against.
When you read the Church Fathers, you find something that is, to many people including myself, rather surprising. You very often see distinctively Catholic idea *right from the beginning*. So you'll read, for instance, Irenaeus of Lyons writing already in the 160s-170s that it was a matter of necessity--necessity--that every Church be in agreement with the Church of Rome because of its foundation by Peter and Paul and because it preserved the Apostolic doctrine in its purity from the very beginning. You read Clement of Rome in the 90s writing to the Corinthians taking an unusually authoritative tone with them. You see Ignatius of Antioch writing with authority to all these different sees until he writes to Rome, where he suddenly becomes deferential. You read in Eusebius that Victor, bishop of Rome in the 190s was threatening to excommunicate the East for its Quartodeciman observance of Easter date.
And this is all way before Constantine. Way before Christianity was even legalized in the Empire. This was the time of the catacombs, of the persecutions.
Basically, most people who read these writings find that they show a much more "Catholic" Church than they might expect. And there's a range of responses to that. Some people adopt a little more of a tolerant attitude and respect toward the Catholic distinctives (I think C.S. Lewis is in this class). Others actually convert. What the author of this article has done, however, I think is a little goofy. He looks at these early Christian writings saying these things that he finds a little too "Catholic" and he says..."Well...they are obviously heretics! We shouldn't listen to them!"
That's what's wrong with the article. Instead of revisiting his own assumptions about what the early Church was like, he just labels these folks heretics. Which begs the question--if all these guys were heretics, then who back then was orthodox?
So if you think it would indeed be helpful to find out when all these Roman Catholic ideas originated, I would advise you to do what others have done who have looked into this question and read the Church Fathers yourself. I can't know of course what your response will be to what you read. But not a few people, myself included, who have done so have come to the conclusion that these ideas were contained in the Church from the very beginning.
Your entire post was excellent, but the part above was outstanding!
The author's ENTIRE thesis is that, "if it sounds Catholic" it's automatically heresy and this seems to based upon a predetermined conclusion that Catholicism is heresy. It really is the most intellectually hollow thesis someone can ever have.
“When you read the Church Fathers, you find something that is, to many people including myself, rather surprising. You very often see distinctively Catholic idea *right from the beginning*.”
Incorrect. What you find is that people who read church fathers thru a modern lens can see pretty much whatever they want. There are passages showing they believed in a spiritual approach to Eucharist, and passages from the same authors showing a more literal approach.
Augustine wrote 4 books on how to develop your own personal interpretation of scripture. He argued that difficult passages of scripture should be interpreted by other passages of scripture - not by resorting to the ‘church’ interpretation. Did that make him a Protestant?
No, but both Protestants and Catholics can read modern phrases into writing that had nothing to do with it.
When they wrote of the Catholic Church, they did NOT mean the Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope over all. When someone under Rome’s jurisdiction talked of the Bishop of Rome being supreme, it didn’t mean supreme over other jurisdictions.
It is also obvious that many church fathers had some pretty screwed up doctrine. You don’t have traditions passed down from the Apostles. You have traditions that developed over hundreds of years as various men tried to explain their beliefs.
My reply is to put those traditions to the test of scripture, which seems fair enough if they are to be given equal regard. What is the canon? Which writings are traditions, and which are not? For scripture, the tests were acceptance by all the believers, and intimate association if not directly coming from the hand of an Apostle.
So when people go from praying for the dead - which I’ve done, since the God who knows the future before it happens knew I was going to pray that prayer before the person died - to a belief in Purgatory, with temporal punishment for sins which were forgiven but still need punishment...sorry, that is a leap from faith into denial of the power of God.
All believers didn’t accept Purgatory - see the Orthodox Church, or various others outside Rome’s influence. No Apostle taught it. All scripture denies its basic premise - that God punishes in the afterlife those whom he has forgiven.
Real presence? I see no indication it was widely taught or even thought about by church fathers. And why believe a church father writing in 350 AD over the words of Christ, or the Apostles?
Those who believe tradition is equal to scripture ought to show tradition meets as rigorous a test as scripture. Where is the Apostolic authority for traditions developed hundreds of years later?