It will never cease to amaze me how much Catholics and others put so much of their faith in other mortals and avoid the book and the person that tells us all we really need to know...the Bible and Jesus. Catholics in particular seem to respond to Biblical points with rebuttals from writings from “church fathers” (who lived hundreds of years after Christ and the New Testament was written) instead of using the Bible itself.
C.S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Billy Graham, John Calvin, Martin Luther, any of the Popes, etc. all are or were smart and great men, but they weren’t Jesus and they weren’t perfect. It was instructed to the first Christians to study Scriptures and test every doctrine against Scripture and we should still do the same. It is lazy and dangerous to just blindly accept what some “great man” said, without checking the Bible. (1 John 4:1-6, 2 Timothy 2:15)
Besides, your response doesn’t negate the simple lack of logic in this current discussion of what the Catholic doctrine calls “necessary.” Again, if a person doesn’t need to the Catholic Church for salvation or taking the Eucharist for salvation then it wouldn’t be necessary. HOWEVER, the Catholic writings and Catholics themselves want to have it both ways. It doesn’t take a genius to see that doesn’t make sense.
But you ignore what Jesus states about the “Apostolic Church” and the need to go out and be “fishermen of men”.
There are many ex-Protestants who have become Catholic, because once you delve into the profound Theology of the Fathers of the Catholic Church-—you realize their genius.....which is the melding of Faith and Reason, so there is no conflict.
That is their greatness—and St. Thomas, with the Summa, aligned Natural Law Theory (Reason) with Faith. IT is why Christianity led to the “Age of Reason” and the Renaissance-—because science also originated with Natural Law which was melded with Logic—by Aristotle, certainly—but St. Thomas is known for “baptizing” Aristotle.
So, by your “logic”-—you thought 98 % of people—who could never afford a “book” much less read it-—would have been lost souls-—for thousands of years, if there were no shepherds of the Church.
Remember-—reading and books were extremely RARE for thousands of years.
Most people in the world couldn’t read—much less own the Bible.
See-—how irrational your “thinking” is?