“Says who?”
Common sense. If someone has chosen to be a member of a sect that means he either is ignorant of the FULL truth or is deliberately rejecting some of it. There is no other possible logical understanding.
Even Protestant theologians intuitively recognize this fact and over the last 500 years have honed the idea of the “invisible church” to try to get around it.
As Jason Stellman, once a stalwart Protestant, put it:
“In a word, I fought the Church, and the Church won. And what it did was beat me, but it didn’t draw me, entice me, or lure me by playing upon some deep, latent psychosis or desire on my part for something Protestantism just couldn’t provide. Catholicism went from being so obviously ridiculous that it wasn’t even worth bothering to oppose, to being something whose claims were so audacious that I couldn’t help opposing them. But what it never was, was attractive, and in many ways it still isn’t.
“But what Catholicism is, I have come to discover, is true.”
The rest of your post seems to be the usual self-reassuring blather I’ve come to expect from you rather than an actual argument of any substance.
Christ sent a Church. He never sent a Protestant sect. All Protestant sects are just man-made bodies with no authority. It’s just that simple.
Jason Stellman, who must have never found fullness of Christ outside of the RCC, and may still never have ---as a witness that anyone should be impressed with?
That's what you have to lead off with. Not impressed. There are more potential "Stellmans" who don't fall for the multitudinous sales-pitches which those of Rome have long been polishing (including polishing things which can never take a polish).
I've seen probably most everything the Stellmans of the world have seen in regards to theological considerations, history of the Christian Church, etc. Fortunately enough for me, the Lord supplied His own fullness of spirit to myself upon many occasions otherwise, long before I encountered the special pleadings argument of the Church of Rome. You can have Stellman -- my own testimony is stronger than his (if you only could know what I know...).
The Lord has revealed himself to me greatly (and who's own spirit still is never far, my own thoughts never without the knowledge and remembrance of the Truth of Himself) with nary a so-called "priest" of Rome around for miles.
That does not mean that the Lord overlooks and never visits those within Roman Catholicism, but He does have other sheep to attend to, also. Those who are His, are His Church.
Church (the ekklesia) is wherever His people are, worshiping Him. Yourself may not see them nor yourself understand them (how to describe the spirit of the Lord? are there words that can convey what can only be known in relationship with Him?) but that does not make them invisible.
The definitions which you asserted are as I said, artificial. When a Church goes wrong --- people have been known to go out, and take the name of Jesus with them -- or else be driven out by the corrupt -- and still take the name of Jesus with them.
It matters only little if a troubled ecclesiastical organization 'reforms' itself at some later date (and arguably, in the instance of the RCC, not reformed entirely. It is not the same Church which Christ and the Apostles initially established). The continued existence of the troubled org does not invalidate those other Churches which the membership of troubled org may disapprove of while comforting themselves that at least they're not as bad as those people ---over there.
Meanwhile, I see you're back to the usual projecting, this time in regards to characterizing what I wrote as being "self-reassuring blather".
That's you, pretty much all day.