I’m sorry your experience with the Church has been distressing.
Would you please, to enlighten me, tell me what you believe is inerrancy, what is it you want to define, and what you believe has been the church’s failure in this regard?
Thank you. And that is sincere, not sarcastic.
Would you please, to enlighten me, tell me what you believe is inerrancy, what is it you want to define, and what you believe has been the church’s failure in this regard?
Roman Catholicism simply shrinks the importance of the Bible to nil. I am not referring to sola scriptura; I reject sola scriptura myself. But today's Catholic media, theologians, spokesmen, apologists, publications, bishops, cathechisms, etc., either severely downplay Biblical inerrancy or else deny it altogether. Most Catholic bibles--those with the imprimatur--actually teach the blasphemous documentary hypothesis in their notes and commentary, teaching that the first eleven chapters of Genesis were adopted from ancient near eastern pagan myths in order to teach certain "theological truths." And of course books such as Esther and Daniel are late-dated and declared ahistorical.
The most-often invoked passage on inerrancy (from Dei Verbum) is intentionally fuzzy on the topic so that one may interpret it as teaching either total inerrancy or else limited (theological) inerrancy. What use is Church infallibility if it waffles like this in its "infallible" pronouncements?
I would say there is also a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) hostility to the Bible, especially when Biblical miracles and figures are downplayed and mythologized while post-Biblical specifically Catholic figures and miracles are celebrated. It is well-known that the Catholic Church considers the sun standing still for Joshua in the Bible an embarrassment. However, those same Catholics who attack the Biblical miracle with "science" enthusiastically believe that Mary made the sun dance in 1917, that saints could bilocate, ancient blood liquefies, and of course the crown jewel--transubstantiation. To defend these miracles while shooting down the miracles of the Bible (especially the "old testament") can only be due to some deep-seated hostility. Perhaps the anti-Judaism that has always led the Church to oppose Jewish practice has merely come to its logical conclusion in which Biblical Jewish stories are now considered un-Catholic?
Finally (and I'm making all this very, very brief), I would say the Catholic Church bears a cultural hostility to rural and small-town America (Catholicism in America being an urban, immigrant, liberal religion). It is quite maddening to read of the efforts Catholic missionaries go to to show respect for the pagan beliefs of their targets (totem poles and such things) while not having the slightest sympathy for rural American Protestants. No, if you're a rural American Protestant and you convert to Catholicism you're supposed to morph automatically into an urban Irish intellectual and join in the Catholic media in decrying the "bigotry" and "ignorance" of rural Protestant America. Obviously the Catholic Church considers these people undesirable and has no wish to see them "come home" (I even read articles in my diocese's official newspaper advocating the teaching of Biblical higher criticism in public schools and stating quite openly that the Catholic Church's policy was to concentrate on converting intellectuals and leaving simpler people for "the fundamentalist churches."
To hear or read of this Church being celebrated as "universal" or "conservative" when my experience is that it is neither is quite infuriating to me.
That's a short version.