Roman Catholics will tell us that we need to consult the Magisterium in order to know what Scripture is, to understand it and to settle the various debates over its meaning and interpretation. But when we ask them why we should believe the Magisterium has the authority to establish the canon and produce the correct interpretations of Scripture, we are often treated to a series of Scriptural proofs, which presuppose the Scriptures are clear and authoritative.
Dang!
I'm beginning to think that MORMONism is re-packaged Catholicism!
Right Sandy!!?
'Tis the season for a little antiCatholicism...
The issue is the supremacy of Scripture versus the Church being the supreme authority (sola ecclesia). The former does not claim assured infallibility (though it must allow that one and even Rome can speak infallible Scriptural truths, which even affirming there is a Creator can be considered), but seeks to persuade others by “manifestation of the truth,” (2Cor. 4:2) and depends upon conformity to Scripture Scriptural attestation, as did the apostles.
This method presumes that their magisterium is assuredly infallible and equal in authority to Scripture, which is a mark of cults like the LDS, but in Romanism it is more formalized, by which she declares that she alone is the OTC© (and then cries victim when challenged).
While determining which of the potentially hundreds of infallible interpretations really are such requires interpretation, the assurance that such is infallible does not rest upon the weight of Scriptural support, nor does the claimed charism of infallibility necessarily render the arguments or reasoning behind them to be infallible, but they are held as infallible when in conformity with Rome’s infallibly defined formula.
That is, Rome has infallibly defined herself to be infallible whenever she speaks in accordance with her infallibly defined subject and scope-based formula, thereby rendering her declaration that she is infallible to be infallible, as well as whatever conforms to this criteria.
Thus we have statements like this:
It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primitive, and their pretension was to revert to antiquity. But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine...
I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness. Its past is present with it, for both are one to a mind which is immutable. Primitive and modern are predicates, not of truth, but of ourselves. — Most Rev. Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Lord Archbishop of Westminster, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation (New York: J.P. Kenedy & Sons, originally written 1865, reprinted with no date), pp. 227-228. archive.org/stream/a592004400mannuoft/a592004400mannuoft_djvu.txt