Thanks, I appreciate hearing your story. So don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I have nothing but the best wishes for you. But I need to make this clear.
Back in post #19, you said “It is not in any way private.”
Now you’re saying, “Any decision at some point becomes internalized and in that sense private.”
So is it private, or not?
You chose to believe, based on your life experiences and knowledge up to that point. That’s what “private judgment” means to a great many Protestants, and not only is it not wrong, it is an inherent necessity of being human. That’s how we work. It’s how God made us.
Which is why, in Scripture, we are not given over to a model of blind submission to human authority. Instead, God invites us to do what?
1 John 4:1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
And of course you remember the Berean model:
Act 17:10 And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.
Act 17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
So try the spirits, search the Scripptures. Nothing there about genuflecting to Rome. It seems the “Protestant mentality” has been an ordinary aspect of the believer’s experience from the beginning.
“genuflecting to Rome”
I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I am quite certain that any such genuflecting went the way of the Borgias some centuries ago, and was in any case political rather than spiritual in nature.
We genuflect to Our Lord, not to a city, nor an institution, nor mortal man.
As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen famously said, “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church—but there are millions who hate what they mistakenly think the Catholic Church teaches.”
No, that is not at all what happened. Finding Christ in the Eucharist and kneeling before Him was a complete surprise that did not match any prior experience.
in Scripture, we are not given over to a model of blind submission to human authority
Correct. If any Protestant read the Holy Scripture for what is written, rather than seeking what part of the faith to amputate, he would come to Christ, too:
"Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me."This is not a "human authority" speaking; a human authority instead is trying to rationalize this as symbolic. Run from these teachers: they teach death.