Why I’m Catholic (Reason 8)
From Dave Armstrong’s list:
Catholicism avoids theological relativism, by means of dogmatic certainty and the centrality of the papacy.
This is actually a pretty important one. In contrast to the scourge private interpretation that is rampant in Protestant denominations, the Church has, at its core, a central office of doctrine and teaching which imbues it with a kind of uniformity that you simply won’t find in other Christian circles. Whether you’re hitting up a Catholic Church in Edmonton, Vermilion, London, or Hania (on Crete), you’ll get the same Catholic Church — and Catholic teaching — every time. Even the Mass rite will probably be the same across all those locales, though some small variations may creep in to give it a local flavour.
Not that Catholics don’t also believe in private interpretation of Scripture. The difference is that we don’t believe interpretation ends with that private study, or that the conclusions derived from it are necessarily theologically valid. Private interpretation should be balanced against — and corrected by, where necessary — the dogmas and traditions of the Church that she, in her wisdom, has built up over the centuries.
The alternative, as Martin Luther himself so aptly put it, is what we see in Protestantism today: almost as many denominations as there are heads.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that such a circumstance is a good thing.
