“Really? From your post #38: For the Catholic the answer seems to rely on the authority of the Church. For the Protestant the answer is seen as a personal reliance on the Holy Spirit.”
You’ll have to forgive my feeble attempts to explain the Catholic view since I am not Catholic. That was a best-efforts explanation trying to present BOTH sides, as I have been doing on this thread.
I’m not hiding that I am Protestant or pretending to be Catholic. I prefer to allow Catholics to speak for themselves rather than the likelihood that my attempts to represent Catholic views fail to do them justice.
I suppose that I can understand the delicate nature of the subject at hand. You allude to it in your tagline. Not meaning to pick at your scabs, but hoping for an honest answer which I do not intend to critique, belittle, or degrade.
Not claiming to be ecumenical, but I’ve been puzzled and troubled over the controversy about the current Pope for a while. While I do not agree with many of the arguments by Catholics against Protestant beliefs, practices, or the Reformation in general, I do think (or at least did) that I understood the arguments. I could see their logical design. But I clearly do not understand how Catholics view the issue of the Pope’s fallibility and how that gels with the traditional Catholic teaching of Apostolic succession.
Even if we never agree theologically, I hope that people such as yourself are effective at remedying deviations from Church teaching (and the Bible) on abortion and homosexuality whenever and wherever this occurs.
I have no scabs.