Please, stop putting words into my mouth. You have done this more than once. I said very carefully, ‘[M]ost everyone’, not JonNC. Please, don’t do this again! Thanks!
Honestly “most everyone outside the CC” does not give two hoots about the Pope. Some think he is the antichrist, and of course they dont want to be like him!
Protestants, along with the EO, don’t believe the Pope was given the authority he claimed for himself, so they just disregard it.
I agree it is about authority. And I agree that believers want to bind and loose for themselves. But one has to realize that this is what they have been taught. They have a distorted perception of the Church, the role of the successor of Peter, and the definition of “binding and loosing”. Believe me, I have heard some doozies!
I don’t agree that they do this out of “envy”. Envy would require that a person acknowledge that the other possesses something they don’t. Since they don’t acknowledge the successor of Peter has these gifts and authority, they can’t qualify for envy.
Because, when someone, most likely, is not in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, then that person (most likely unwittingly) ‘becomes their own Pope’ so to speak,
deciding and declaring themselves to be Catholic and others not to be Catholic, among various doctrines.
I agree, each splintered sect declares themselves by which parts, and how much of the Catholic Teaching they reject. They might not even realize this is what they are doing.
I was on another thread where a poster declared “the CC is not a good fit for me”. It made me realize how so many are afflicted with this mindset. Instead of learning which Church Jesus founded, and conform to it, they are looking for “what fits for me” (based upon what they believe is true.
You’re the one here saying who is and isn’t Catholic.
We can define Catholic doctrine and defend it, but we cannot know the hearts of others. If a person makes certain statements, we can state that they are not consistent with Catholic faith. But none of us, based on what we read on an internet forum, can discern if another person holds Catholic faith.
One problem I have is that there are a vast majority of Catholics do not hold Catholic faith. They are “cafeteria Catholics”. There are many Protestants who are more consistent and faithful to what they have been taught than Catholics. For that reason, I think it behooves us to take the log out of our own eye first.
then that person (hyperbole alert) acts as if they were their own Pope, deciding for themselves what/who is Catholic and what/who is not.
Although I agree with you that people (especially those who were taught Sola Scriptura) do believe they have the right to decide for themselves about doctrine, I don’t think that most of them do it out of envy.
