What makes you think that the CC has the handle on the truth? There are so many distortions of the Word and add-ons -- the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops
The office of bishop is expressly mentioned in the New Testament, and in his pastoral epistles to St. Timothy, St. Paul gives the qualifications for serving as a bishop.
and their (often questionable) teachings,
Take issue as much as you wish with the Roman Catholic Church, but it was the Early Church Fathers, specifically, the bishops of the early church, who guided it through the persecutions and then attended the Ecumenical Councils, who defined the canon of sacred scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity, and who anathematized Arius, the Gnostics, and other non-Christians who attempted to take over the early church.
a separate priesthood (similar to the OT),
This is a profoundly flawed argument, based on the older English word priest, which was an Anglicization of Presbyter, meaning Elder, being used to translate the word Kohan, meaning Priest, or Hierus, the Greek equivalent, or Pontifex, the Latin equivalent. This confused translation is one of the flaws with the King James Version which you have in many posts complained about, and in this particular case, you have a point, in that the KJV is very fast and loose when translating “presbyter” “hierus” “kohanim” “doulia” and “latria.”
veneration of Mary (a minor figure in the NT),
Mary is not a minor figure in the New Testament by any means; she appears in all four Gospels, and the first chapter of the Gospel According to Luke is dedicated to her. She plays a key role in the beginning of our Lord’s ministry, at the Wedding Feast in Cana, and in the events surrounding His passion and resurrection. She has a more prominent role in the New Testament than any members of the Twelve except for Saint Peter and Saint John the Divine. And furthermore, her motherhood of the incarnate word is repeatedly foretold verbally and typographically throughout the Old Testament.
And, as the Council of Ephesus correctly declared in opposition to Nestorius, Mary is the Theotokos, the Bearer of God, because Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, and from the moment of His incarnation, His divinity did not part from his humanity for a blink of the eye, to paraphrase the Coptic Orthodox confiteor ante communionem.
Define “rituals,” and what you perceive as being excessive.
confession to and absolution by someone other than God,
In auricular confession, which is not solely practiced by Roman Catholics but which is also practiced by Lutherans, Anglicans, Episcopalians, some Methodists, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians, confession is made directly to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, with the priest merely acting as a witness and as a spiritual advisor. And this sacrament can be extremely helpful, which is probably why Martin Luther did not do away with it; when I was with the OCA (I still consider myself to be with them, but on assignment, answering a calling to salvage traditional high church Congregationalism, which is in danger of being destroyed by heterodoxy in the UCC and indifference to liturgics in the non-UCC Congregational churches), I was greatly aided by their priests in a number of ways.
As far as absolution is concerned, all Christian clergy, who carry on the duties given by Christ to his Apostles, can forgive or retain sin, as explained by our Lord in Matthew Chapter 16. And for this reason, the liturgies of most churches, for example, the services of Holy Communion, Morning Prayer and Choral Evensong from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, feature a public, general confession followed by an Absolution of Sins (which in the case of Morning or Evening Prayer requires the presence of a minister).
and all the other stuff that has been added on to pure faith, etc.
Like what, exactly? There are Roman Catholic doctrines such as Papal Supremacy that I disagree with (for reasons that the Traditional Latin Mass community just discovered in a painful manner), but many criticisms of Roman Catholicism are predicated on false narratives and a false Protestant vs. Catholic narrative which ignores the historic existence and importance of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian churches, which ignores the role of the East-West schism in causing the Reformation (specifically, the reformation in Prague in the 15th century that led to the martyrdom of St. Jan Hus and St. Jerome of Prague, who founded the Moravian Church, which eventually survived against all odds, out of a desire to regain communion in both kinds and a vernacular liturgy, which they had enjoyed before Austria conquered the Czech Republic), and which ignores the beliefs of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, Philip Melancthon, and later Protestant leaders such as John and Charles Wesley, all of whom favored, among other things, frequent communion on the part of the laity and reverent, liturgical worship (even Calvin).
It's no wonder that the Bible has lost its (deserved) place of prominence in the CC.
That’s not a logical statement to make, given that Roman Catholics read the Bible as much as anyone, and especially given that since the introduction of the new three year lectionary, on which the Protestant Revised Common Lectionary is based, the scripture lessons in Catholic Mass are longer than before, and there is always a Psalm, an Old Testament Lesson, an Epistle, and a Gospel, (previously, only the Gallican, Mozarabic and Ambrosian Rites, and the East Syriac Rite, had Old Testament lessons in the Eucharistic liturgy) and these lessons are read across three years, each dedicated to a specific Synoptic Gospel.
The Bible has been given to us as the perfect Word of God.
God alone is perfect, and the Word of God is Jesus Christ, as the Gospel According to John testifies.
If our understanding is not perfect, that doesn't mean that it doesn't stand alone as the truth. Sola scriptura.
On a sola scriptura basis, you have made five major errors in this thread, including denying the Scriptural basis for the episcopate, conflating presbyters with kohanim, denying the ability of ministers to bind and loose sins, mischaracterizing the role of the Virgin Mary in Scripture as minor, when in fact it is on a par with that of St. John the Baptist, and dramatically exceeds that of many other notable figures, including Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Andrew the First Called, St. Thomas the Apostle, and the wicked Judas Iscariot, and attributing perfection to an inanimate object, confusing the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, with the written word, which is a created icon of him, written by men inspired by the Holy Spirit, and edited by the Early Church under the same inspiration. As a creature created by men, and transcribed and copied many times, and not immune from transcription errors, Sacred Scripture is paradoxically an imperfect but inspired doctrine which describes, as much as any human could hope to describe, the beauty and perfection of an infinite God.
