The Catholic Church is often accused of several standard crimes against the Christian faith given by Jesus. These are usually, in one form or another, the following:
1. Catholics added man made traditions to the Bible's teaching
2. Catholics added to the Bible
3. Catholics commit idolatry by (fill in the blank: praying to Mary, worshipping the Eucharist, etc)
In reality, the practices of the Catholic Church are historical and biblical, stretching back to the earliest communities of believers and attested to by Holy Scripture. The accusations above are frequently leveled at the Church's teachings, but they are all untrue and cannot be substantiated in any way. In reality, it was the leaders of the Protestant revolution that are guilty of adding man made traditions to the Faith, and committing the equally grave crime of taking away from the Word of God. Consider: Did the earliest universal canon of Scripture (Council of Carthage, 4th century) include the Deuterocanon? Answer: Yes. Did the standard Bible from that time onward until Martin Luther in the 16th century contain the Dueterocanon? Answer: Yes. Did Martin Luther, in his translation, remove not only the Deuterocanon, but also James and several other books of the New Testament (later grudgingly returned due to the loud complains of his followers)? Answer: Yes. Did Martin Luther change the text of Romans in his translation to say "faith alone" in support of his own doctrine? Answer: Yes. Do modern Protestant Bibles still exclude the books of the Old Testament that were part of the canon from its first establishment until the Protestant revolution? Answer: Yes.
These things are all undeniable, historical facts. What would the Protestants have said if a Pope had changed the wording of Scripture intentionally to support a new doctrine, then taken out seven or more books from the Bible, saying they weren't really Scripture? What rage that would have generated! What accusations of Anti-christery would be hurled at him and his Church! Yet this is exactly what the reformers did. Not only this, but they came up with a whole slew of new, man-made traditions like "sola fide", "sola scriptura", and many others which have been breeding and dividing into ever newer and stranger doctrines as the Protestant denomination splintered from several into tens of thousands as there are currently.
For some reason, though, Protestants still feel justified in accusing the Catholic Church of adding new, offensive doctrines to the true faith. So we have some questions for Protestants, and these are only a very few, to help them discern whether or not the Church really added new doctrines, or if these doctrines are in fact ancient, biblical and unchanging.
