BoD is at most what's known as a
sententia communis ... that theologians of the past few hundred years tend to agree that there is something called BoD. Dogmatic SVs exaggerate infallibility to the point of absurdity. There was one posting here a while ago who claimed that any books with a pre-Vatican II
imprimatur was effectively infallible and could not be disputed.
At no point has a notion of an "infallibility of theologians" taught by the Church. There's no such thing. Theologians do NOT belong to the
ecclesia docens. At best their opinions can be gathered as a sign of what the
ecclesia discens believes.
Above the level of theologians would be the Ordinary Magisterium (and to reiterate, theologians are NOT part of the Magisterium), and the infallibility of the OUM, as clearly explained by Vatican I, is limited to those things proposed by the OUM as "divinely revealed" (a passage routinely ignored by the hyper-infallibilists). Not only that, but ...
Catholic Encyclopedia in article on Infallibility:
And while for subsequent ages down to our own day it continues to be theoretically true that the Church may, by the exercise of this ordinary teaching authority arrive at a final and infallible decision regarding doctrinal questions, it is true at the same time that in practice it may be impossible to prove conclusively that such unanimity as may exist has a strictly definitive value in any particular case, unless it has been embodied in a decree of an ecuмenical council, or in the ex cathedra teaching of the pope, or, at least, in some definite formula such as the Athanasian Creed. Hence, for practical purposes and in so far as the special question of infallibility is concerned, we may neglect the so called magisterium ordinarium ("ordinary magisterium") and confine our attention to ecuмenical councils and the pope.
If this is true of the Ordinary Universal Magisterium, how much more so of the consensus of theologians (who are below the Magisterium and not part of it).
Not only that, but we have clear and obvious historical examples that falsify Cekadism. For about 700 years, every every theologian taught and believed the erroneous opinion of St. Augustine regarding the fate of unbaptized children ... until the Church overturned it.
EVEN AMONG THE CHURCH FATHERS, whose unanimous consensus is widely regarded as being definitive evidence that various truths have been revealed, a mere agreement of opinion (even if uncontested) does not of its own suffice to establish what's known as "dogmatic" consensus. Agreement on a topic could simply be the result of one Church Father expressing an opinion, and due to the respect that others had for him, all the others falling into line, or it could even be sheer coincidence. It would have to be clear that the Church Fathers all agree that this was handed down from the Apostles and divinely revealed. [As an side, on the subject of BoD, the majority of the Fathers rejected it ... something that's ignored by the BoDers, and in fact one of them, Father Laisney, had the temerity to mendaciously claim that the Church Fathers universally taught BoD. BoD was floated only by one Church Father, who clearly indicated that it was his personal speculation ... which he later retracted. But that's a separate discussion.]
So, if even with the Church Fathers, one must establish that they held their common teaching as being "divinely revealed" and coming from Apostolic authority, how much MORESO does that hold for "theologians" ... if they may have just happened to be in agreement on a subject for a mere 400+ years of Church history. Do theologians UNIVERALLY teach that BoD is "divinely revealed"? No. Even Father Cekada's survey of theologians (that he grossly misapplied) had only a minority claiming that it was
de fide ... only 7 of the 24. So, no, theologians do not unanimously teach that BoD is "divinely revealed", but even if they did, they have no special infallibility. OUM is infallible when it UNANIMOUSLY teaches something as "DIVINELY REVEALED" (cf. Vatican I). So here we have theologians (below the level of the Magisterium) NOT UNANIMOUSLY teaching it to be DIVINELY REVEALED.
Father Cekada then concluded that BoD was theologically certain. Inconveniently for him, however, 11 of the 25 theologians cited did NOT agree with him that BoD was even at least theoogically certain. And 14 of the 25 did not agree that BoB was at least theologically certain. At best this can be categorized as
sententia communis, the common opinion of theologians, and no one is bound to hold to mere common opinion. Strangely, 0 of the 25 held that BoB was
de fide ... while 7 held that BoD was. That latter can be attributed to the perception that Trent taught BoD ... but 18 of the 25 did not seem to agree with that assessment.
Common Opinion among theologians for the past 400 years has little weight or authority.
Strangely, however, Cekada glosses over the fact that theologians UNIVERSALLY agreed that Vatican II was consistent with Tradition and that the NOM was a Catholic Mass.
Also strange is the fact that Cekada, while exaggerating the scope of infallibility, rejects the Pius XII Holy Week Rites as somehow defective and tainted with Modernism.
And, most strangely, the Church taught UNANIMOUSLY for 1500 years that there can be no salvation without explicit knowledge of and faith in Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity. This teaching was also later confirmed by the Holy Office when some innovators began to question it. If the Church universally believing and teaching something for 1500 years doesn't constitute an infallible teaching of the OUM, then there's no such thing. This would require Cekada to condemn Rewarder God theory as heretical. Instead, Cekada promotes Rewarder God theory, holding that the Native Americans in the New World, before being exposed to the Gospel, could have been saved. Msgr. Fenton stated that even at the time leading up the Vatican II, despite the erosion of this doctrine over several hundred years, it was still the majority opinion among theologians that explicit faith was necessary for salvation. Where was his "infallibility of theologians" then? And where did it go when all the theologians accepted Vatican II.
So all that exposes the hypocrisy and the dishonesty in forwarding this opinion, which I refer to as Cekadism.