If you search for this question on Google, sites like Answers.com, which do not provide answers but merely provide opinions, will give you false answers. It will say that, yes, they are Christians. It will say that they are the first Christians. It will even say that they were the only Christians for the first 1000 years. But these "answers" are all false; they are all lies.
Catholics are not Christians! Not even in the least. Catholicism may be a Christian sect, but they are by no means Christian. A simple reading of Scripture will reveal a great many contradictions within Catholic beliefs and traditions. Rather than Scripture be their sole authority and they conform themselves to it, Catholicism says that they and their traditions transcend Scripture. Catholicism broke off from genuine Christianity somewhere within the first five centuries. Catholics were not the first Christians, nor were they the only Christians for the first 1000 years. As soon as the papacy began its rule, it began blotting out true Christianity and ruling the world with an iron first until the Reformation, when men and women touched by God began to read the Scriptures and see the inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehoods of the Catholic church and expose them to the light. The Catholic church and Catholic apologists are not above lying and deceiving people with lies because they are nothing more than two-bit liars.
Catholicism is a joke. You can obtain a price list for the Catholic church that lets you know how much you need to pay in order to absolve your particular sin. If you commit fornication, sex outside of marriage, you simply pay the priest, say your "Hail Mary's," and away you go, free to commit the same sin again. True repentance does not exist within the walls of the Catholics church or within the confines of Catholicism. Catholic women, while wearing crosses around their necks, will prostitute themselves out over their webcam, sell their bodies to complete strangers for a couple hundred or thousand dollars, and participate in pornography. The cross around their neck is meaningless. It is nothing more than a religious trinket. These Catholics "profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him" (Titus 1:16).
Catholics are highly superstitious. Every practice in Catholicism was
taken from some other cult and absorbed into Catholic tradition.
Lighting of candles, prayer beads, etc. Catholics pray to Mary, who, apart from being the chosen vessel to give birth to the Messiah, Jesus, is nothing and can do nothing. They also pray to dead "saints," who are also nothing and can do nothing. It is as silly as you praying to your dead grandfather or grandmother. The Catholic church tells people that if they pay a certain amount of money, they can absolve the sins of a dead loved one and make a way for that dead loved one to enter Heaven. If your dead loved ones left this world without knowing Christ Jesus as their personal Saviour, your dead loved ones are in Hell and will reside their for all eternity. Do not believe the lies of the Catholic church. They like to presume that they have more power than God and that they are some how above God and that God will bend to their will.
Catholics and the Catholic church are some of the greatest religious hypocrites in existence. Some will religiously attend mass daily, yet willingly commit a variety of sins at the same time. Catholicism, like all other cults, is a religious system based on scales. They believe that if you do enough good to counterbalance the bad you do, then you will be able to get into Heaven. But that is not what Jesus said, nor what the Bible teaches us. These Catholics would do well to start reading the Bible, beginning with Romans 6 and 8.
Charles Spurgeon once said, "I can never understand how a 'Catholic priest' can ask people to confess their sins to him. I would not make my ear into a common sewer, for all the wealth in the world! What foulness must there be on the soul of him who has heard the sins that others have committed, and who knows what sin he has himself committed!" "For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). The only person you need to confess your sins to is the Lord Jesus. Repent of your sins, trust in the living Saviour, and live a life of holiness.
Charles Spurgeon once said, "I can never understand how a 'Catholic priest' can ask people to confess their sins to him. I would not make my ear into a common sewer, for all the wealth in the world! What foulness must there be on the soul of him who has heard the sins that others have committed, and who knows what sin he has himself committed!" "For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). The only person you need to confess your sins to is the Lord Jesus. Repent of your sins, trust in the living Saviour, and live a life of holiness.
Are Catholics Christian? No, they are not! They were not the first Christians, and they were not the first Christians for the first 1000 years. Catholicism is a sect that broke off from genuine Christianity in the first five centuries, began to dominate and rule the world, and continues today to be a cult that leads millions of people to an eternity in Hell.