The Bible, as I understand it (speaking from outside Christianity) has never played the role in Catholicism that it plays in Protestantism. Instead the Catholics understand that "inspired" does not mean one can just take it and read it as one wants and one cannot be so arrogant as to think what one reads actually is what was intended. The words in the Bible were through men, were translated and copied so that errors crept in, and each person has their own sense of what given words mean, which varies from person to person.
So Catholics depend, not on their own understanding, but on the understanding of the Church, as provided via Apostolic Succession.
Of course Luther and others could not claim direct succession from the Apostles, so they had to invent the idea that each man is his own Priest and that the Bible rather than the Church is the source of interpretation.
Well of course this is because by Luther's day a lot of things the RC taught had gotten so far from what is in the Bible that honest people had to say something needed fixing. The problem is their fix is worse than the disease.
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