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“The Church is definitely a higher authority than your own personal interpretation of Scripture, or mine.”

I agree that the Church, and especially its leaders, are responsible for the defense of the eternal message. As a Protestant I view the Bible as the final authority. I understand and appreciate the counter-argument that the world is full of people who CLAIM to believe the Bible and yet disagree with each other over its meaning. So, the salient question becomes how it is possible to determine who is right or wrong.

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. However, the Holy Spirit indwells the Church—i.e. the collective members of the body of Christ. So, listening to the Holy Spirit often means listening to other Spirit-led Christians.

Hopefully, this thread will not spiral into the up-until-now endless debate over this issue. It’s been a while since I’ve engaged on that subject here and have probably had more than my share of participation in it. I recognize a lot of usernames of those on the forum who, such as yourself, are apologists of Catholic views. But I do not recall the specific debates and with whom they were engaged.

Based on the arguments I’ve heard over the years on this particular subject I understood that Catholics considered it possible for a Pope to make errors and even teach things that were wrong on occasion as a fallible human being. We even see the apostles made a few mistakes that required correction when we read the historical accounts, though there was never any error or wrong teaching from them in the recognized cannon of scripture. But my assumption about the Catholic view of the Pope has been that a Pope could never be a heretic or change “the historic Christian faith” as you described. I thought the principle of apostolic succession excluded these from ever happening. However, this may be a misunderstanding of the Catholic view on my part.