It takes a lot of faith to believe that any doctrine not found in the bible man made and false. It takes a lot of faith to believe that a billion Catholics are misguided.
Most Christians who are not members of the Roman Catholic Church don’t spend a lot of time worrying one way or another about what Catholics believe. Our faith in Christ isn’t influenced one way or another about whether other folks may be mistaken in their faith.
“It takes a lot of faith to believe that any doctrine not found in the bible man made and false. It takes a lot of faith to believe that a billion Catholics are misguided.”
I think the issue has to do with man made doctrines that when followed, produce spiritual lives that are in opposition to to a life authenticated in scripture as Christ like and pure! If however one follows an oral tradition or doctrine that with other scripture,prayer and meditation leads you to to a closer walk with Christ then obviously that tradition or oral doctrine has merit.
I seriously doubt that an entire one billion ‘registered as such’ Catholics are entirely misguided, but we also need to remember that God once destroyed the entire world saving only 8 souls. It is possible that a great mass of folks in all stated churches(both Catholic and Protestant) are all following wrong paths. God seeks those who worship him in their hearts, who do so “in spirit and in truth”, he is not necessarily guided by the consensus of a billion Catholics.