Well I really don’t focus on Catholic teachings, or things about that Church while I gather with others, but I think you’ve come close to hitting the heart of this issue:
1) Do we actually believe what God says in the Bible is true?
2) If the Bible is true, then we must believe Christ (and what He says in how we must be saved). John 3.
Really it matters not to me what Church one attends (or does not attend), what matters is if one has believed in Christ how He has said we must (John Chapter 3, etc..).
Ah...it seems I was pretty close to the issue at hand - being ‘saved’.
My Protestant room-mate was quite sure I was doomed...and very despondent that his Catholic grandmother was as well.
There is salvation in the Catholic religion...you just take a different road to get there. Now I’m no theologian, so that’s as far as I get.
Now I posed this question to my room-mate (who was academically very smart): “What about people in the middle of the jungle who have never heard of the Christian religion - are every single one of them doomed to hell?”. He couldn’t give me a good answer to that question. I suspect a just God would not create a world where half its inhabitants had never even heard of the one religion that would save them from eternal damnation...and the answer to my question is ‘no, not everybody in the remote jungle will go to hell’. If my suspicion is correct, the notion that all Catholics are going to hell starts to unravel.
I will say this. Our little Catholic church got started in Alabama in the 1970’s, where we were regarded as ‘weird’. We had mass in a trailer. And that was trailer sat in.....a Methodist church parking lot! The Methodists had shown Christian kindness and offered up the space, until our parish could purchase land and build a church building. Later in life that same Methodist church took me into their Boy Scout program (my church didn’t have one), without reservation, and made me feel completely at home. So I have no quarrel with Protestants.
My brother recently got married. His wife is around 40, and they were required to go to marriage classes, as per usual in the catholic church. Now my brother is Catholic and she is Protestant. She went to the classes almost against her will...but loved them. She found the Catholic church to be very refreshing, and has since ‘converted’. It turns out that she had grown up with a very incorrect idea of what it was like in a Catholic church. So, my recommendation is go to mass a few times. You can see for yourself what a Catholic church is like - for most people it is not at all what they thought it would be.
I’ll respond with the opposite. I do keep Catholic and Eastern Orthodox English versions of the Bible handy to compare Bible passages when studying. I use the Orthodox Study Bible (OSB) handy for OT passages given it was translated from the LXX and not the Hebrew. I was raised in a strict Irish Catholic family and attended Catholic school through college so still have those resources available.