Well, of course. That is characteristic of all Catholics. To trust that the church is, as it claims to be, the only true church, the only one established by Christ, the one that is endowed with infallibility. I do not want to savage anyone over this point, though. My comment before was about something much more basic--
When it comes to the claim, whether made by a Roman Catholic or a person affiliated with some other church (and we could name plenty) that members of other churches believe whatever they figure out for themselves from the Bible while they, the speakers, instead go with the truth (which is whatever their preferred denomination tells them)...
they are fooling themselves.
EVERYONE makes a personal choice. Some choose a POV that they have figured out; others defer to another party. But it's all the same because those who defer are making a personal decision to believe someone else's interpretation of things spiritual.
I cannot agree. Whether it's "Holy Tradition" and something St. Augustine or a Pope said, or something that Martin Luther or Ellen White or Joseph Smith said, or something in a preacher's sermon or book, there usually is somebody being held up as having the answers and our position is allegedly to believe them.
There is an answer however, and that is to carefully study the early Church, and the continuing unifying principles of the Christian churches since then, following the advice of Vincent of Lerins, that, to paraphrase, the beliefs of the Universal Church are those which have been held everywhere, by everyone, since the beginning.
And, as illogical as some Roman Catholic arguments are, the proposition of a Great Apostasy* that a few Radical Reformers and the 19th century Restorationist and Landmarkist churches use is, as I am sure you will agree, fallacious, illogical, contrary to recorded history, unsupported by historical evidence, contradicted by the cohesiveness of all of the major Christian churches, including Protestants, Catholics and those of the East, and most importantly, unscriptural, contrary to the exact words of Jesus Christ our God in Matthew, and to the guidance** of the Holy Spirit among the churches ensured elsewhere in Acts and the Epistles.
So, if we study the early church, and then trace how this has been implemented since that time, we get a good Christian praxis. And I think traditional Anglicanism does a very good job at this (as well as the Methodists, the other magisterial Protestants like the Presbyterians and Moravians, my Congregationalist family of churches, and also the ecumenically-minded Eastern Christians who are reaching out to the West, like the Antiochian, Polish Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic churches). And frankly I think the Catholic Church is trying, but its just the model of governance that is a problem; I wish the Cardinals could fire the Pope, and the bishops could fire the Cardinals, if doctrinal deviation or any kind of unethical behavior or violations of canon law were comitted by the Pope and the Cardinals. Now I have read that theoretically, a Pope who erred would self-excommunicate, but I just don’t see in the Roman church a system to enforce that.
Now, since I am Mr. Footnote, or Mr. Asterisk, whichever you prefer, here the asterisks are answerisked:
*This includes my church back when it was Puritan and hanged people for mere allegations witchcraft based on “spectral evidence”; that’s actually the dark secret past of the Congregationalist churches in New England, whether they are UCC, or Unitarian Universalist, or CCCC like Park Street Church, they were all under the influence of Cotton Mather, who was President of Harvard, and together with his father, the main intellectual defender of the witch trials. However, not all Congregationalists have this guilt, notably free from blame are the Hungarian Reformed, Greek Evangelical, and, the largest group, the Prussian Reformed churches that joined the Congregationals in the 19th century, instead of the LCMS (which was formed from the Prussian Lutheran majority; the Prussian royal family and a minority of the people were Calvinist or Reformed, but the majority were Lutheran, so in the 18th century the King, I forget which one, mashed them all together in one church, which existed until the Third Reich seized control of the Protestant churches in Germany and created the Reichskirche, which resulted in the underground Confessing Church led by saintly martyrs such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Now, while the LCMS was by far the larger slice of the Prussian pie, the Prussian Reformed churches are probably at least a third of Congregational churches, UCC or otherwise, and a majority in the Midwest and rural Pennyslvania. But the Congregational churches have apologized and denounced the witchhunts, however, as far as I know, Harvard University pretends to be innocent. But even if they have admitted wrongdoing on their part in the late 17th century, I still really passionately dislike Harvard, especially its School of Divinity, although I am fascinated by, but completely opposed to, the work of Karen Pagels, who has become the most important Gnostic apologist of our era. So she is totally wrong, and also got defrauded once buying what was an alleged lost Gospel, which turned out to have been a very skillful forgery (genuine ancient papyrus, compatible ink formula, but the brush strokes indicated the use of modern fibers, and the strokes of the characters were also typical of what it looks like when someone today learns how to write in the ancient scripts, rather than the natural elegance of authentic manuscripts in Hebrew, Demotic, Coptic, Estrangela, Greek and other ancient writing systems).
**I am not saying gifts, although I am neither cessationist nor charismatic, because I think charismatics and Pentecostals don’t actually have true charismas, but I have met a few holy people who I believe did possess these gifts, but they are not what people think they; I respect the cessationist viewpoint however, because my view can only be the result of an empirical experience which not everyone has, and I can’t ask people to take my word for it). So if you are a cessationist, rest assured, my position is 100% cessationist-compatible, because I regard cessationism as being logically indicated.