This is my experience, especially with non-Catholic Christians I’ve met online in chats like Paltalk. This is precisely why it is so dangerous to ignore the authority of the Church. It is exactly what St. Peter warned about in his second epistle (2 Pet 3:16-17).
When one is one’s own Pope, it is all to easy to mistake an evil spirit for the Holy Spirit. This is precisely how strange doctrines enter the Body of Christ. The Magisterium is precisely to guard against such errors. It’s much more difficult to bend an entire body against truth, than it is an individual.
This is perhaps the one thing that drives me craziest. In my exact desire to be charitable to people, to help them, I can see the error so easily propigated by this “go at it alone mentality” that Protestantism delightfully encourages.
We are NOT able to come to God alone; and, as I’ve said previously on another thread, this is exactly what the Church is for: it’s to help us keep on the path to Christ.
**I can see the error so easily propigated by this “go at it alone mentality” **
It bugs me too. Sometimes I am near tears because I have used all reason available to me and within my skill of words, and nothing seems to penetrate. Only God know the secret. All we can do is continue to lay out the facts.
I agree with much of your concerns—go it alone individualism—or a “me and my bible” mentality is NOT what the Church is about.
However, Luther Calvin and the rest of the early Protestant reformers thought so too—this is why these groups developed extensive creeds/catechisms (which agree on about 98% of doctrines, btw).
Submission to one man in the papacy—interpreting a whole boatload of historical beliefs (tradition) in addition to the bible though, logically, is no barrier to the subjectivism you rightly want to avoid. It does guarantee a certain amount of uniformity of belief, for sure, but, all under the direction of one man....who is certainly influenced by the times, like any other man.
This is why the Roman Church DOES actually change (albiet slowly...like a large ship) through time, bringing itself into very different conclusions than it past had...
100 or even 75 years ago, for example, I know of no doctrine against the just administration of the death penalty. Nowadays, according to devout Roman Catholics—following the teachings of the current Church (especially since John Paul—and after WWII) we are told that all capitol punishment morally is wrong...and one must oppose it, like we oppose abortion, to be truly pro life.
This just HAPPENS to be, on capitol punishment that is, the position of post WWII secular Europe.
This when, if normal intelligent people—IN COMMUNITY—read the bible, we find no prohibition on the just use of the death penalty by government—just as tradition has taught us also, down through the centuries.
So, even a large group as the Roman Catholic Church can have subjectivism—coming from the papacy—on certain issues.