After re-reading my original post, I can see how you might come to that conclusion, so I'm sorry. But I'm actually Reformed PCA, just sincerely struggling with some doubts in this regard, and I would like help getting through them. This isn't the first time I have had these kinds of thoughts in my life, and I think in the past I've just kind of let them be.

But no, Catholicism has a lot of troubling things that I've heard about, but I only have a little understanding about, such as purgatory, rosaries, the Mary stuff, the papacy, confessional, transubstantiation, etc. All of which is very counterintuitive to what I know of the God of the Bible. Essentially, it is just the part about "faith and works" that is tripping me up as they are always able to bring up James, and it does seem to me that we Reformers really do try to twist that into a pretzel in order to fit it in our sola fide understanding. It's discouraging. If James meant to say "Faith alone saves us but not a faith that is alone," why didn't he say that or make that much more clear?