I guess we are supposed to not notice that the Holy Spirit has been essentially divided Christendom into greater and greater separate and contradictory denominations. That’s the fruit your idea that the discern through the Holy Spirit means when it is taken as something apart from the institutionalized Church, which is just the Church, or the Pillar of Truth, as the Scriptures call us. The Interpretation has been around long enough for us to see all the rotten fruit that has arise from it.

Regarding faith, we trust because he is God and has proven himself faithful to his promises, which is just another way of talking about authority. So authority is essential to faith. The Christian position for the first 1000 years was always that the bishops, as successors of the Apostles, participate in the authority of God himself, because the discernment of truth through the Holy Spirit was not left to the individual but to the Church as a whole, with the bishops overseeing and leading the effort.

Not only is the individual discernment philosophy not in Scripture, not historical, and has born evil fruit, but it has done all this because it is simply contradictory: without clearly discernible lines of authority actually being involved, the fragmenting of Christendom at the expense of the truth is nothing less than the natural consequence. Christ would have been a fool if he thought that there was no need for clergy telling people what to do, and everything in the Scripture clearly indicates that he recognized this need, and Matthew 16 is him institutionalizing exactly this. Even protestants recognized the authority of the Apostles, and just simply recognize that this authority has been passed on to people like Saint Timothy and Saint Titus, the first bishops of the Church.

No appealing to “bad Catholics doing bad things” changes any of these points, it is just another manifestation of the original Protestant position, started by John Wycliffe, that authority is only legitimate if the person the authority is moral, which is also contradictory. I never realized that Saint Paul denied that Saint Peter was an apostle because he was a hypocrite. I never realized that Christ took back what he said about Peter after he accused Christ and betrayed him.

Like I said a couple times already, appealing to the fact that Alexandria and Antioch, which by the way aren’t Eastern Orthodox sees anymore, are Petrine doesn’t affect the Catholic position, which is that Rome is ranked above them because this is where Saint Peter’s succession was passed on in his death, Which is clearly recognized by many of the church fathers, and also recognized by the ancient cannons of the Church councils. You come off like you’re trying to kick up dust on this when even the Eastern Orthodox generally recognize that Rome is ranked first and it’s because of Saint Peter.