While I'm not a Protestant, I don't believe Catholics take the words of the Bible "literal" when it disagrees with their beliefs and practices. REF: the word "soul (nephesh/psuche)"; the word "repent (metanoe)"; the words Elder, Bishop, overseers (episkopes, episkopon and presbuteros)"; the words translated as "hell" (sheol/hades, tartarus, gehenna), and many others that could be listed!
Good luck explaining away the literal meanings of these terms!
Good luck on getting a logical response to your post.
As far as I know all the Catholics I am acquainted with take all those words at their face meaning. We aren’t as uneducated as many Protestants think.
But it’s because Catholics ARE reading and studying the Bible now!
Remember, I said you could always come back.
“Literal” does not mean “morphological”. That words like priest or bishop have morphological origin in various ordinary ways to describe a leader of any kind, — even a leader of animals — does not mean they should not be used in the narrow technical sense in the Church.
“Literal” means “in the sense directly meant and understood by the writer and contemporaneous reader”. For example, “this is my body” literally means the physical body. The opposite of that is allegorical, for example, “this is my body” really refers to my friends or relatives. The Church teches that the literal meaning is to be preferred unless the allegorical is clearly indicated by context. For example, “I am the door through which sheep enter the pen” cannot be taken literally because the context is an allegory of the Church being like a pen of sheep.