When it comes to some church teachings, it is clear that those teachings contradict what the church hierarchy actually believes.
For example, while its a common church teaching that the soul is something separate from the body, the actual belief of the church is this:
NewCatholicEncyclopedia (1967), Vol. XIII, pp. 449, 450.
“There is no dichotomy [division] of body and soul in the O[ld] T[estament]. The Israelite saw things concretely, in their totality, and thus he considered men as persons and not as composites. The term nepeš [ne′phesh], though translated by our word soul, never means soul as distinct from the body or the individual person. . . . The term [psy·khe′] is the N[ew] T[estament] word corresponding with nepeš. It can mean the principle of life, life itself, or the living being.”
This is a badly chopped-up paraphrase, and no matter how desperately the Watchtower tries to twist the Catholic Encyclopedia to support its view, neither the Catholic Encylopedia nor the Catholic Church teaches what you want them to teach. The deliberate misrepresentation of the Catholic Church's teachings on the part of the Watchtower, and trying to make it appear as if there's some "conspiracy" on the part of the Catholic Church to lie to people and hide the truth is why I have absolutely no respect for the Watchtower; it is academically and intellectually dishonest, and incredibly disrespectful.
This is a more complete and in-context quote from that article that sheds much light on the tiny snippets the Watchtower so surreptitiously excised:
As a human life, nepeš can be identical with the personal pronoun or the reflexive pronoun (Gn 27.4, 25; Lam3.24, where "says my soul" could be just as correctly translated "say I," etc.). As the "I," the nepeš performs all the sensations of an individual. The nepeš hungers, thirsts, hopes, longs, loves, and hates.
At death, the nepeš goes to Sheol, a place of an insensitive, shadowy existence. Many psalms pray for the rescue of one's nepeš from death, where the rescue means to be saved from dying, not to be raised from the dead. Happiness after death is known only in late OT revelation.
New Testament. The term ψυχή is the NT word corresponding with nepeš. It can mean the principle of life, life itself, or the living being. Through Hellenistic influence, unlike nepeš, it was opposed to body and considered immortal.
The psyche in Mt 10.28, "And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul [psyche]; but rather be afraid of him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell," means a life that exists separately from the body. The meaning of psyche in our Lord's statement, "[T]he Son of Man has not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life [psyche] as a ransom for many," is obviously His mortal existence (Mt 20.28; Jn 10.11). As a living being, subject to various experiences, it can refer to animals, "And every live thing [psyche] in the sea died" (Rv 16.3), or to humans, "Fear came upon every soul [psyche]" (Acts 2.43; Rom 2.9; 13.1). Thus the psyche feels, loves, and desires. In this connection it can be used to mean the personal or reflexive pronoun, as in Jn 10.24, "How long dost thou keep us [our psyches] in suspense?"
Thus far, ψυχή is quite similar to the Hebrew nepeš, except for Mt 10.28. Under the Greek influence, however, it was gradually opposed to body and was used for the immortal principle in man (Rv 6.9; 20.4).
In summary, the Hebrew nepeš generally is connected with the concrete sign of life in the individual, the "I" that feels, wills, pants for, etc. Its end is Sheol. The Greek counterpart, ψυχή, includes many of the meanings of nepeš; but it has added to the concept "I," the immortality of later philosophy and revelation.
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And another quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Three terms are used for the soul:
nephesh, nuah, and
neshamah; the first was taken to refer to the animal and vegetative nature, the second to the
ethical principle, the third to the purely spiritual intelligence. At all events, it is evident that the
Old Testament throughout either asserts or implies the distinct reality of the soul. An important contribution to later Jewish thought was the infusion of
Platonism into it by
Philo of Alexandria. He taught the immediately Divine origin of the soul, its pre-existence and transmigration; he contrasts the
pneuma, or spiritual essence, with the soul proper, the source of vital phenomena, whose seat is the blood; finally he revived the old
Platonic Dualism, attributing the origin of
sin and
evil to the union of spirit with matter.
It was
Christianity that, after many centuries of struggle, applied the final criticisms to the various
psychologies of antiquity, and brought their scattered elements of
truth to full focus. The tendency of
Christ's teaching was to centre all interest in the spiritual side of man's nature; the
salvation or loss of the soul is the great issue of existence. The Gospel language is popular, not technical.
Psyche and
pneuma are used indifferently either for the principle of natural life or for spirit in the strict sense. Body and soul are recognized as a
dualism and their values contrasted: "Fear ye not them that kill the body . . . but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in
hell."
In
St. Paul we find a more technical phraseology employed with great consistency.
Psyche is now appropriated to the purely natural life;
pneuma to the life of
supernatural religion, the principle of which is the Holy Spirit, dwelling and operating in the heart. The opposition of flesh and spirit is accentuated afresh (
Romans 1:18, etc.).
It is a well-known fact that early Hebrews and Israelites did have the belief that the soul was simply the life-force of the person, and was not a distinct entity from the body. However, by the time of Christianity, the Israelite view of the soul had evolved, due to additional revelation and understanding given to the people of Israel by God. Philo of Alexandria in particular helped to expound on this view.
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As you can see, the Catholic Church adamantly believes in and defends the duality of soul and body as a revelation from God. The ancient Israelites were much more primitive in their thinking about the relationship between the soul and the body, and had an almost nonexistent concept of the afterlife; even the resurrection of the dead was a far later development in the history of Israelite thought, coming after much later prophets had brought new revelation from God. It appears that the Jehovah's Witnesses have elected to conform themselves to this earlier form of Israelite thought, rather than the beliefs of Christians in the 1st century AD.
