Nnenna ❤️✝️ (Ugegbeze🤴👸🏽)

Scripture's authority and the Church's authority are inseparable. I don't mean any particular person or group in the Church. Under Catholicism - the Church - i.e., the congregation of people, clergy, the liturgies, and the infusion of Grace from the Holy Spirit - together constitute the Body of Christ. You can imagine that Christ's body on Earth = Congregation of the Faithful, Clergy, Written Canon (where Scripture is a part) is analogous to one biological organism. It makes no sense to ask which part of that organism has the highest authority. Is it canon law? Is it the catechism? Is it clergy? Is it the will of the congregation? Is it canonized scripture? NO it is the Holy Spirit, the Father, and Jesus Christ - in other words, God himself. The Holy Trinity has the highest authority. It just happens that God's Will and Authority are infused and permeate Scripture (his word) and the individual men of the Congregation (through their conscience, through his invisible Grace) - and through revelation and the ministry of Priests and Bishops who dispense his visible Grace through the Sacraments. I TOTALLY understand the Protestant urge for Sola Scriptura ... because Men are corruptible and fallible. For every time we defeat Goliath, we also fall for a Bathsheba. Sola Scriptura is in fact saying "Listen to your conscience, guided by the canonized, immutable words of God and let no Clergy or men in fancy Robes override God's voice" That is my steelman argument for Sola Scriptura. However, Sola Scriptura falls apart into a thousand pieces if you analyze it on empirical and logical grounds. Mainly: if you trust the Church Council, early Church Fathers, and the Testimony of Paul, James, and John, etc., that they were somehow guided by the Holy Spirit to write down the true Gospel and choose the correct corpus for the Old Testament, then why do you say their judgment is totally off on things like Apostolic authority, Marian Dogma, and, most importantly, the Real Presence? You have to declare an unfalsifiable miracle by fiat: that the written Gospel and the men who selected it were guided by the Holy Spirit to ONLY canonize scripture (except for the ones that Martin Luther later decided to remove - not just Deuterocanonical but also James) ... and these supposedly Holy men went right back into grave error in all other earthly ministry and sermons.

The Episcopal and Anglican Church is the strongest evidence we have that the Catholic Church is the one true Church guided by the Holy Spirit. Five hundred years after Henry VIII split the Church of England from the line of apostolic succession, not because of any theological difference but for political convenience, we see the result of the same tradition lacking guidance from the Holy See. What do we notice about the Catholic Church in the meantime? There are plenty of moral failings, scandals, and even bad popes. Yet the Faith remains steadfast to the Truth and continues to be a vessel for Christ’s light in the world. The biggest controversy in Catholicism is whether SSPX ordination of Bishops without Papal mandate constitutes a schismatic act. Whereas in the Anglican line, apparently, they are debating whether God is transgender.