read the New Testament. Your ready to defend the Church! Wrong. You have only begun the basics. The real task comes with combining the Bible with the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church, and this is found within the Catechism of the Catholic Church. All of the Church's teachings are found in the Bible, mainly the New Testament, but they aren't organized in a way that is easy for most people to understand. This is where the Catechism of the Catholic Church comes in. It is not only important, but absolutely necessary to study the Bible with a guide to know how to discern the Scriptures. Protestantism began, and thrives, by someone reading the Bible and interpreting a particular passage based on a personal opinion, then makes this normative for how they read everything else in Scripture. A new denomination forms when the entire Bible is not viewed in context, and a single verse becomes the doctrine of the whole Bible. Usually, untrained ministers are unaware of where else in the Bible a particular teaching is found, and if they are aware of it, they may twist the rest of what Scripture says to fit their interpretation of this passage. We find this even in the Scripture itself, because St. Peter was very concerned about taking on the task of reading and discerning the Scriptures without proper training and teaching. He addressed it in two places in his letters. In 2 Peter 1:20-21, he said, ".no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." St. Peter, in this context, does not mean the prophesy of seeing into the future, or seeing particular events, but by the revelation of the Scriptures. The reason why the Catholic Church is so hated by most radical Protestants is because the Church dosen't set forth doctrine by asking "what does this Scripture mean to me, and how can I make it work for me?" The Catholic Churc...
