Wow you put a lot of time and work into that. I hope you saved a copy and are able to use it elsewhere other than just here at USMB.My departure from Catholicism
(written October, 2023)
Dear Reader,
This is my explanation for how and why I left Catholicism. It is long because I am sharing a lot of scriptures to support my positions. I am using the English Standard Version due to its ease of reading, although there are some verses in that (and most other English Bible translations) that were MISTRANSLATED and so I will, in those cases, use another Bible to provide an accurate translation. (snipped here). . .
(resumed here). . .In closing, I am a member of Jesus’s church here on Earth. Everybody that believes in and faithfully follows Jesus is a member of his church. We the people ARE THE CHURCH! Jesus’s church is NOT some worldly institution based in Rome nor at some megachurch. We the people are the church!
The Pope's dictates were never considered 'infallible' until the First Vatican Council convened and led by Pope Pius IX in the mid 19th Century. And it was by such Papal declarations over the millennia that such the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church developed. It was the decree of Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century who for purely political purposes enlisted the organizational skills of the church that gave the church its power and allowed it to become such a dominating force in the Roman Empire. though it wouldn't be called the ROMAN Catholic Church until the 16th Century.
The 16th Century was the Reformation that pulled people out of the RCC and began spreading the church into thousands of different denominational groups and carried it into most of the world.
But don't be too hard on the RCC. No church denomination or independent congregation has ever been organized that did not intend to represent the closest thing to the one true church it could achieve. And every single one of them has come up with human engineered culture, emphasis, doctrine, rules, policy that is sometimes supportable by scripture, sometimes not. The Church is intended to be God's people on Earth, but because humankind is fallible, willful, and sometimes very stubborn, we now have an amazing 45,000 different Christian denominations around the world, over 200 in the USA alone.
So my advice to anyone seeking the 'one true Church' is that it doesn't exist. And yet the Church is the foundation for all that is good, ethical, provides a sense of right and wrong, like nothing else can do. Every believer is part of the Church and that makes the Church a vessel of God. The best we can do is find a Church denomination/congregation that we sense is right for us and accept it as the imperfect vessel that it will invariably be just as each of us is an imperfect vessel but still capable of doing great good.