HOW DOES GOD SPEAK TO US?

Last time we arrived at the conclusion that, God speaks to his Church through the Bible and through sacred Tradition. To make sure we understand him, he guides the church’s teaching authority the magisterium so it always interprets the Bible and Tradition accurately. This is the gift of infallibility. Like the three legs on a stool, the Bible, Tradition, and the magisterium are all necessary for the stability of the Church and to guarantee sound doctrine. Then we saw that Sacred Tradition and the Bible are not different or competing revelations.
They are two ways that the Church hands on the Gospel. Apostolic teachings such as the Trinity, infant baptism, the inerrancy of the Bible, Purgatory, and Mary’s perpetual virginity have been most clearly taught through Tradition, although they are also implicitly present in (and not contrary to) the Bible. The Bible itself tells us to hold fast to Tradition, whether it comes to us in written or oral form (2 Thess. 2:15, 1 Cor.11:2). On the other hand we saw that Scripture, by which we mean the Old and New Testaments, was inspired by God (2 Tim.3:16). The Holy Spirit guided the biblical authors to write what he wanted them to write. Since God is the principal author of the Bible, and since God is truth itself (John 14:6) and cannot teach anything untrue, the Bible is free from all error in everything it asserts to be true. Today we are going to look at the Magisterium. (CCC 8587, 888892). Together the pope and bishops form the teaching authority of the Church, which is called the magisterium (from the Latin for “teaching”). The magisterium, guided and protected from error by the Holy Spirit, gives us certainty in matters of doctrine. The Church is the custodian of the Bible and faithfully and accurately proclaims its message, a task which God has empowered it to do. Keep in mind that the Church came before the New Testament, not the New Testament before the Church. Divinely-inspired members of the Church wrote the books of the New Testament, just as divinely-inspired writers had written the Old Testament, and the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit to guard and interpret the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Such an official interpreter is absolutely necessary if we are to understand the Bible properly. (We all know what the Constitution says, but we still need a Supreme Court to interpret what it means.) The magisterium is infallible when it teaches officially because Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit to guide the apostles and their successors “into all truth” (John 16:12-13).