I'm a cradle Catholic and that bothered me also. I come from as insular a Catholic community in a city as you can get (and truthfully, nowhere close to being marginalized). The sisters and priests who taught us would have made the author rewrite this and take all of that out. Pride has no place in the discussion.
Pride is perhaps the best explanation, or maybe it's the desire to emphasize the rightness of their decision. I don't know the reason, and maybe they are blind to how writing like this looks and honestly don't understand how off-putting it is.
As a late in life convert (I am 62) I have had to defend my faith to those who knew me for years as a Protestant (I was a children's choir director at a Methodist church). It IS possible to explain things without resorting to the tone of this article.
For example, when people argue that personal revelation and interpretation is the only way to understand Scripture and that you should not allow others to do so, I explain that I do not see the difference between the Magesterium and some of the great pastors we have here locally who interpret Scripture for their congregations. To me, the Catholic Church, through the Magesterium, provides one central teaching authority for that which in Protestant churches is divided among many different pastors. This system also keeps theology from running off the rails, like I ran into with a Methodist pastor who insisted Jesus had girlfriends.
This is not to say some Catholic priests don't run off the rails, too. We have an associate pastor at my church right now who is dodgy in some of his homilies. The difference is that I have an authority to turn to separate from the priest, so I do not have to either agree or march off to another church.
This is probably simplistic, but it is how I have dealt with this one difference. And I really do NOT like comparing fundamentalist Christians to Moslems!!