Thank you for further clarifying what you meant! I appear to be having a slow brain day
(happens to the best of us!)Although there is nothing in your above post that I neccessarily find myself in dispute with (i.e. we have sacred tradition and a Magisterium because rank-and-file Catholics decided to accept the authority of both, whereas Protestants don't understand scripture to admit of either), I'm still unclear about your initial point and wonder if we remain at cross-purposes. The fault is mine, as I seem to be having some difficulty in understanding your meaning, for which I duly apologise.
@exchemist was making the - to me - perfectly valid point that a theologically untutored layperson on the steeet would not be regarded as having an equivalent knowledge of our religious tradition than would, say, a Jesuit priest-theologian advising the Perfect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Because we aren't a sola scriptural tradition - in a religion which accepts these things (i.e. a body of divinely inspired tradition witnessed to and developed in the writings of church fathers, doctors of the church and the Magisterium) as given postulates for membership - an untutored parishioner cannot be regarded as being just as representative in his degree of knowledge of the "sacred tradition" than a Bishop (all priests have theology degrees at seminary) or an accredited lay theologian employed by the church to advise bishops or the papacy.
In a Catholic context, laity will often get things wrong about the finer intricacies of Catholic doctrinal teaching, because the magisterial teachings and the sacred tradition which it is espousing are vast in nature, and require a certain degree of scholastic ability to read, interpret and process.
If you've read papal encyclicals, the references at the end are intimidatingly long.
For religions like this, with such a huge body of religious teachings that cannot be contained in just one "book" for easy digestibility (the Catechism is a sure norm for guidance but not anywhere close to being exhaustive), there is no equivalence in understanding between the layman on the Clapham omnibus and the Jesuit-cardinal theologian working in a dicastery at the Vatican, in terms of which of them understands the "tradition" better, because one of them has an authority over the interpretation of that tradition which the other lacks.
The layman may act, in terms of his personal involvement in faith, as a far better exponent of the church's life and the theological virtues....but he doesn't understand it better.
If you want to understand what the Catholic tradition "teaches", I'm sure the Clapham Catholic would himself direct you to his local bishop who might very well, in turn, direct you to an accredited theologian at a Catholic University or seminary who is trained in the specific area of doctrine or canon that your interested in finding out more about.
In this respect, his "modus operandi" might reflect Catholic theology in action (i.e. deference to the authority of the Magisterium and tradition as the arbiters of authority in defining his religion) but his actual knowledge of the tradition would obviously be vastly lacking in comparison to someone trained to actually analyse and "teach" it, whether in a parish church, a Jesuit University faculty or to advise the pope when writing an encyclical.
His knowledge, in this sense, would not "represent" what the church understands by it's doctrines anymore than an untutored science buff on the street is to be regarded as representative of learned scientific discussion about high-energy particle physics in peer-reviewed journals.
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