Our Lord Christ did not remain on earth in visible form. Yet He wished to ensure that His teachings, gifts, and institutions would remain among us, and for the institutional preservation of all these, He founded the Church. The Church has become the custodian of His love and care for us, the guardian of His principles, the bearer of His laws and blessings. Through the Church, Christ showers us with His gifts. It proclaims, protects, and spreads the true faith, fights for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, sanctifies souls and leads them on the path to earthly and eternal happiness. Through the Church, Jesus nurtures and cares for us, guides our steps, and prepares our souls for eternal bliss.
One would think that for this reason everyone would be passionately in love with the Church, as the bride and fiancee of Jesus (cf. Ephesians 5, 22-30), and the greatest benefactor of humanity. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Many people inexplicably alienate themselves from the Church, even if they otherwise profess to be followers of Christ. A peculiar phenomenon! There are those who carry Christ on their lips and occasionally use His name or a snatched phrase for the defense of their own worldview or direction, but as soon as Jesus urges order, discipline, organizational solidity, as soon as He talks about the Church, spiritual governance, religious supremacy, the custodians of spiritual power, they immediately flinch. Christ yes, but not the Church! - this is their motto. They do not dare to attack Jesus directly, but they attack the Church and everything related to it: the papacy, priesthood, sacraments, the institutions of church life, all the more fiercely.
Vain and pitiable struggle! Jesus did not want mere individual piety, did not want to open a mere school, did not want to set a philosophical system into the world, but wanted a new world order, a kingdom, the "Kingdom of Heaven", the "Kingdom of God" on earth, a spiritual family, unity, an organization, or as He directly and repeatedly said: a Church. Therefore, whoever speaks against the Church, speaks against Christ, and whoever does not love the Church, cannot love Christ either. To love the Church is to love Jesus, to gratefully accept His most beautiful and greatest gift! However, Christ founded only one Church and since human capriciousness has resulted in numerous man-made "churches" vying for the palm today, we must also clearly see which is the one, true, lawful, Catholic Church.
Some might say: "Religion is needed, but not the Church." You might as well say: a car is needed, but not a wheel. Health is needed, but not health care. Lunch is needed, but not a chef. The Church is needed precisely so that there is someone to proclaim religion, to manage its affairs regularly, to lead official worship, to guide people in religious life, lest anyone should do things that are inappropriate, unworthy, superstitious or even immoral in the name of religion.
Anyway: whether the Church is needed is not for us to decide. It was decided long ago by the only one competent to decide: Lord Christ Himself. Because He Himself openly said that He is building a Church, indeed on Peter, and He and the apostles often talk about the Church, the Kingdom of God, the organized community of believers. Therefore, anyone who does not need a Church is arguing with Christ Himself.
So what is the Church? The Church is the organized community of believers, appointed by Christ, which is characterized by the fact that, according to Christ's command, there are leaders and led, superiors and subordinates in it. The leaders are those who, by the command of Christ, exercise teaching, sacrament-distributing, and soul-governing power in the Church. This hierarchical (priestly) constitution of the Church is undoubtedly Christ's own ordinance.
If we accept the gospel at all, we must also accept what we read in it about the Church being founded by Jesus. The gospel clearly and explicitly speaks of the Church, which Jesus built upon Peter as a rock and those who do not listen to it should be like the heathen and the tax collector (Mt. 16:18; 18:17). In addition, the gospel also lists those measures of Jesus, which, even if Jesus does not explicitly mention the Church, involve the organization of a religious community led by divine authority - the Church.
What is the Church? It is the association of Catholic Christians living all over the world, whose visible head is the successor of Saint Peter. The marks of this Church all originate from Christ. Jesus entrusted the spiritual leadership of the faithful to his disciples, whose preaching and sacramental activity everyone who wants to be saved must use; that is, he established an ecclesiastical organization in which there are leaders and members, superiors and subordinates, priests and believers. Therefore, there is no doubt that Jesus wanted to establish not a mere school or religious philosophical theory, but a Church, which everyone is obliged to belong to, who learns about the Church as Jesus' creation.
Protestants, of course, say that "the Church unnecessarily interferes between God and the soul." They also say that "no mediator is needed: the soul must directly connect to God."
Both are needed: the soul's direct connection to God and the Church's role in establishing, strengthening, and correctly directing this connection. The Church does not "interfere" and does not separate the soul from God, but on the contrary: it leads the soul to God. Where there is no Church, there is no serious piety, or at least not the organized, protected, lawful piety that Jesus ordered. Anyone who sees a burden and obstacle in the Church is opposing Jesus' order; if someone perceives the Church as "interfering" between Jesus and the souls, this interference is due to Christ's own definite provision.
Christ clearly established only one Church. He always talks about one Church, one kingdom of God, and wants everyone to belong to it in complete unity: "there shall be one fold, and one shepherd" (John 10:16). St. Paul derives the law of unity and indissolubility of marriage from the fact that the marriage of believers is "one body and one spirit, just as your calling is to one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. 4:4-5). He specifically emphasizes that there should not be denominations or schisms in the Church. "I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought" (1 Cor. 1:10).
That's why Ignatius of Antioch, the great martyr-bishop, said at the beginning of the 2nd century: "Do not be deceived, brothers: he who follows schism cannot inherit the kingdom of God (Philad. 3, 2. 3.)"; and Saint Irenaeus, the great martyr-bishop of Lyon in the middle of the 2nd century: "Those who are outside the Church are also outside the truth." St. Augustine warns: "Therefore cling, my dear ones, all of you with one will to God as your Father and to the Church as your mother" (In Psalm. 88; 2, 14).
So there is no question of reconciling the doctrine of "multiple churches", the bundle of denominations deeply differing in all essentials: doctrine, organization, ambition, with the principles of Jesus and the early Church. The Church ordained by Christ is not simply a collective term for the denominations of all Jesus-believers, but only the members of the Church Jesus built: those who stand on the rock foundation on which Jesus built his Church; who follow the shepherd whom Jesus entrusted with the governance of his entire flock. The rest may stand outside the Church perhaps from individual good-faith error, and may even be saved as a result of this good faith; but they are not on the right path and are not members of Jesus' Church.
Why don't Protestants recognize the Pope?
Because Martin Luther wanted to defend his errors even against papal authority and went into rebellion. He wanted to cause upheaval in the Church, and thus inevitably found himself in opposition to the papal authority that guards unity. Martin Luther was led into papal opposition and schism not by gospel arguments, but by rigid adherence to his own individual interpretation of Scripture. The same applies to the other reformers, who quite rightly saw in the Pope the guardian of ecclesiastical unity and legality, and since they wanted to push this unity and legality out of their way, they therefore waged a bitter battle against the symbol and guard of unity: the papacy.
Individually, unfortunately, some Renaissance-era popes did indeed provide opportunities for accusations and attacks. But Luther and the others erred in that they not only chastised the individual faults of the popes, but also the papacy itself, the papal institution and the unity of the Church; and in this they were definitely seriously mistaken. This mistake of theirs was all the more serious because they themselves were not free from gross human deficiencies. Thus, Martin Luther publicly broke his priestly and monastic vows, encouraged the secular lords to unlawfully appropriate church property, thus inciting church robbery, caused a terrible moral decline by denying free will and emphasizing the supposed unnecessary nature of good deeds, and allowed himself unprecedented hatred and moral licentiousness in his "table talks" and writings.
Calvin was morally stricter, but in turn perhaps surpassed even Luther in hatred and established a real court of emergency in Geneva, which punished with death, exile, confiscation of property, and imprisonment those who dared to contradict him. Yet he was not even an ordained priest or bishop and had no legal right to manage church affairs.
Christ died for everyone, but for this reason, he wants everyone to belong to that Church through which He shares the fruits of His redeeming death with us and which He left to us as the instrument of salvation. Everyone can be saved, but then they must join the true Church: this is what Jesus Himself commanded. Only those who are not part of it due to good faith, insurmountable error can be saved outside the Church.
No one says that the pope's word is "holier" than the Scripture. But the Pope never teaches anything that contradicts the Scripture. In the two-thousand-year history of the Church, we would search in vain for a single example! However, where the Scripture does not speak, or where it does not speak clearly enough and the question is what the correct interpretation of the Scripture is, the Pope's word is holy, precisely because Christ wants us to listen to him. Otherwise, He could not send us to him under the burden of eternal damnation (Mk. 16, 16); He could not oblige us to listen to the Church's word in such a way that anyone who does not listen to it should be avoided as a "pagan and tax collector". (Mt. 18, 17.)
The fact that the Pope himself is just a sinful, fallible, erring human does not change anything here. After all, it is not his personal holiness or wisdom that is the basis for why we should listen to him, but Christ's command and the support of the Holy Spirit, which cannot allow him to err whenever he, as the successor of the head apostle, speaks on behalf of the whole Church. (Lk. 22, 32.) The state law is also holy, the court's judgment is also holy, regardless of how excellent, perfect, or exemplary a person the legislator or the judge himself is in his own personal life.
No one says that the popes cannot sin and that they have not sinned throughout history, sometimes indeed severely. Individual sinlessness is one thing and official infallibility is quite another. We say it is official because the Pope is not infallible in his personal opinions; he is only infallible when, as the head of the entire Church, he officially and solemnly (ex cathedra) declares that something belongs to the deposit of Christian faith.
This infallibility of the Pope is a logical consequence of the infallibility of the Church, which Jesus solemnly proclaimed when he demanded listening to the Church under the burden of eternal damnation, saying "whoever does not listen to the Church, let him be to us as a pagan and a tax collector" (a public sinner; Mt. 18, 17).
Unfortunately, there have been unworthy popes too; true, out of 266, only 8-10 at most. But most popes, even if they made individual mistakes, were serious high priests, many of them examples of sanctity of life and martyrdom heroism. Individual sinfulness is in no way contrary to the sanctity of office and Christ's ordination; and infallibility does not mean personal sinlessness.
The Western world tends to forget that for two thousand years the Catholic Church has been the initiator or booster of every valuable progress. Who abolished slavery? Who elevated women, children, workers to human dignity? Who civilized the peoples of Europe? Who taught the wild nomadic peoples migrated here by the migration of peoples to settle down, to agriculture, to industry, to peaceful and civic life? Who sanctified the relationship between man and woman in Christian marriage and thus gave solid and secure moral foundations to child-rearing? The Catholic Church created the public education system, popular education, all types of schools, starting from elementary schools, through secondary education to universities; since almost every famous university still existing today was founded by the Church. The Church created science and culture, elevated art to unparalleled flowering: in the Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and modern styles. In the field of natural science, philosophy, historiography, and linguistics, Catholic, partly priestly scientists are still leading. The Catholic Church created care for the poor and the sick, established the first hospitals, poorhouses, orphanages, devised regular care for the blind and deaf-mute. The Catholic Church laid the foundation for social care, equality before the law, the protection of workers' rights (Leo XIII: Rerum Novarum, Pius XI: Quadragesimo Anno) - There is not a single institution or denomination in the world that has earned such great merits in the field of culture and progress as the Catholic Church. Anyone who calls the Catholic Church a brake on progress might just as well call the shining Sun in the sky a spreader of darkness.