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It’s not the large institution. It’s specifically the hierarchy and the ability to throw out heretics.
Hierarchy defines both Orthodox and Catholic Christian faith. You obey the person above you. A priest must follow the directions of his Bishop. The Bishop must obey the Archbishop. The Archbishop must obey the pope. The rank above chooses the ranks below more or less. This means that you’d have to obey your authorities for decades to get into a position to go rogue. A priest who teaches abortion is okay will be removed by the bishop and on up the line. So unless you’re willing to keep absolutely silent on a teaching for decades, you can’t rise up the ranks.
Most Protestants don’t really have this. If you want to be a Pastor in a denomination, go to the proper seminary and open a church. Then you can teach anything you please. And any doctrine that the church believes is voted on by pastors. Which offers no protection at all. If a woke pastor decided to vote for gay pastors, it’s only down to getting enough people to vote yes.
The other failsafe is excommunication and anathema. Which is to say that if you’re teaching or doing something bad enough, they’ll throw you out. You’re no longer a member until you repent, confess and then you must never do that again.
Protestantism lacks this. There’s no real procedure for dealing with open heresy. The only power that can be brought in force is the ordinary person leaving.
On the other side of things, the weakness of Catholicism is that if the hierarchy is captured, there is no recourse against that.
Protestantism doesn't have a massive organisation to crack down on dissidents, but this also means that Protestantism can't crack down on correct dissidents. It's hard to shut down open heresy, but it's also hard to shut down open orthodoxy, which is a very relevant concern if you expect institutions to be corrupted. That does not seem an unreasonable fear.
Yeah. Catholicism's failure mode is centralized hucksterism: selling indulgences. Protestantism's failure mode is distributed hucksterism: some dude opens up a Church of the Revered Huckster and starts fleecing the hell out of people.
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That’s not strictly true; the archbishop has a few powers over suffragan bishops, but only a few- he maintains a local appeals court and resolves a small number of calendar issues(from a set list of options) and has the right to be an acting successor to a suffragan bishop until the pope appoints one. But they don’t have the power to command their juniors, hence why this is coming from the Vatican and not the archdiocese of San Antonio.
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