Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

1. The Greeks, having abandoned the Catholic Church, have indeed for the most part preserved the sanctifying doctrine and the means of sanctity. Yet the Orthodox Church itself neither incites nor obliges its priests and monks, much less the laity, to true interior sanctity. It has likewise deformed the helps of sanctity, especially worship and the sacraments, into a dead ritualism lacking all effective authority.¹ Whence, although among the Orthodox many members are found who stand out by a certain more distinguished uprightness and piety, yet a religious decay has invaded the greater part of the people. The clergy and the cloisters, however, flourish with almost no zeal for the holy life; rather, they for the most part teem with drunkenness, idleness, ignorance, and other vices.² A fortiori the Orthodox are wholly wanting in that eminent sanctity which is necessarily and exclusively proper to the Church of Christ. The Eastern regions, once the nurseries of all sanctity, after the schism once arisen produced no further saint who shone with heroic virtue and at whose intercession God worked miracles.³ The saints who are venerated by the Orthodox were either sons of the Catholic mother Church or are painted with the legendary varnish of sanctity and charisms. Much less:

2. The Protestants enjoy the mark of sanctity. For Protestantism professes doctrines directly opposed to sound morality, e.g. that faith alone justifies and that the virtues are by no means required;⁴ that good works are useless and to be despised;⁵ nay, that all the actions of man, however holy, are sins;⁶ that God, taking absolutely no account of the lives of men, predestined some to beatitude, others to damnation;⁷ that man is deprived of free will.⁸

With the whole foundation of morality thus rooted out, the Reformers and their followers removed also very many of the means of sanctity. They abhor the sacrifice of the Mass; they neglect all the sacraments except baptism,⁹ nay, very many do not even retain baptism; they despise the evangelical counsels, etc. Whence even the fruits of sanctity among the members of the Protestant communities miserably withered. With history as witness and by the concession of the Reformers themselves, we know that the "pure" gospel soon became a hotbed of all vices and produced the worst effects everywhere.¹⁰ Indeed, very many Protestants have striven and strive after supernatural virtue and especially after a certain natural honesty and humanity; Protestantism, however, set over against the Christian life in itself that "modern" life intent only upon cares and worldly things.¹¹

Whatever you may in the end say of the morals of the Protestants, certainly among them you will find no example of heroic sanctity confirmed by miracles. Nay rather, they mock the saints and the invocation of the saints, and affirm that miracles cannot even come to pass.¹²

Nay, not even the fathers of the pseudo-reformation themselves flourished in sanctity. Luther was notable for voluptuousness, gluttony, pride, wrath, and other vices; Zwingli was lustful, fraudulent, mendacious, and haughty; Calvin was a man of immense pride, slanderous arrogance, and savage cruelty; Henry VIII was a tyrant as libidinous as he was atrocious.¹³ Wherefore not only later and recent Protestantism lacks sanctity, but already at its beginning it was destitute of the sanctity of its authors and origins.