I think it's mistake as an atheist to buy into Christian infighting about the extent to which the Bible is up to interpretation because it doesn't matter. You even end up doing their work for them by saying that sure, the Catholic Church is a genocidal cabal of pedophiles and rapists but you at least have to respect the fact that they believe the Bible is up to interpretation. Why? It's still fundamental to their worldview and the reason their morality has been slower to evolve than the rest of society's over the last 20 centuries.

I suppose a better and less glib way to frame my original comment would be to say that the Catholic institution's legitimacy depends on their followers believing that the Bible contains the divine blueprint of a moral life and that because the Bible itself is such an insane mass of contradiction and obscure references to a long-dead political structure that the only things that still make sense in the modern era are so banal and obvious that exegesis on them is incredibly boring.

But there isn't anything untrue about my actual comment and I don't see any reason to buy into the church's myth making that despite all the crime it is engaged in a legitimate intellectual exercise (see @REallyN's comment), nor the Protestant counterclaim that its failings aren't an indictment of Christianity as a whole. It's a testament to how effective their bullshit is that your instinctive response was to treat the accusation that they believe in the divine origins of the Bible as a slander.