Catholics ignore much of Scripture on this topic:
Mark 9:38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.
Your post proves the point. We can’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry crack open the pages of the Bible (books put together with the infallible authority of the Catholic Church) and offer us his/her definitive interpretation by throwing out swatches of scripture.
Perhaps you know something that the great constellation of Catholic theologians and particularly eminent Episcopalians and Lutherans who who converted to Catholicism did not know and missed out.
What we have is the precise curse of Protestantism that has led to a torrential mudslide of interpretations from how Jim Jones and David Koresh “interpreted” Scripture to the pure vapid nonsense and rubbish preached by lightweights such as the likes of Billy Grahams; Joel Osteens, Jimmy Swaggarts, Benny Hinns and the Rev. Jeremiah Wrights of this world whose Bible-Christian congregants lap up their nonsense because their knowledge of Scripture is as shallow as the theological waters in which they swim in.
Cynical Bear’s post makes matters even worst. If you think the Catholic Church can’t prove the infallible “truth” based on the authority of Christ, then you must also doubt the very infallibility that allowed it to select the canonical texts. You can’t have it both ways.
The Petrine doctrine of infallibility did not evaporate with the Reformation that took place ELEVEN centuries after the books in the Bible were authenticated as the true Word of God in AD 382 in the Synod of Rome. And of course only the Church carries out the non-written Word of God (John 21: 25) as understood in the liturgies and practices of the early Church.
By there is another absurdity that follows. If the Catholic Church can’t prove the truth of what it instructs, then who can? Then we have multiple truths each one believing “his/her” own truth. But this contradicts the Great Commission given to Peter and his successors to “Go forth and teach..” This is to teach ONE truth and only the Church teaches ONE truth for all times in all places when it acts with the infallible Petrine authority.
This is why after a lifetime of scholarship, writing, teaching, and preaching, several leading Lutherans have converted to Catholicism. Of course the most notable was the brilliant Anglican Cardinal Newman whose book “The Catholic Church” is a tour de force. But Protestants in the pews will not have the intellectual stomach to read these works or for that matter the great works of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and Benedict. Or the lives of its saints, martyrs, stigmatists. One wonders why??
In the end, today Protestantism has been reduced to a sad caricature when low-information Protestants are left stranded in the pews while their theologians head for the Catholic Church, the city on the hill.