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That has nothing at all to do with methodology.  
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You want to run the Dimond checklist on me so you can get triggered and hit the reset button, go back to square one and wax sensationally about it. I know the tactics, you're pretty much all the same, and very predictable; chances are, your next reply will include something about me being oily like a heretic, or slippery and elusive, incapable of answering a simple question, and so on.  You're not the first, and probably not the last, person to develop a man crush on the sensational Dimond boys and parrot their tactics on the web.  You'll (hopefully!) grow out of it.
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In either event, I'm quite content with what I wrote, and it IS a question of methodology (at its heart, anyway); if it has as many falsities as you claim, then it'll be no problem for you to overcome.

TO MITHANDYLAND, WHO BELIEVES THAT JEWS WHO REJECT JESUS CAN BE IN THE STATE OF GRACE AND IS THEREFORE NOT REMOTELY CATHOLIC

First, your failure to answer the simple question about the blatant heresy of the CMRI and Fahey reveals all one needs to know about your corrupted and false theology.  You refused to answer the question about whether it's heresy to hold that Jews who reject Jesus can be in the state of grace. That's because you also believe that Jews who reject Christ can be in the state of grace and saved (directly contrary to the true rule of faith and the Church's dogmatic profession of faith), and you refuse to condemn their position.  That proves that, sadly, you are certainly not Catholic.  The Catholic Church professes that Jews cannot be saved.  You don’t.  You’re not Catholic.  You’re no more Catholic than the E. ‘Orthodox’, who also deny at least one dogma of the faith.

Second, sound positions are connected to properly identifying the rule of faith.  That, of course, is intimately connected to methodology.  That’s why, contrary to what you imply, the question about Fahey and the CMRI is relevant to both faith and methodology.  I understand why you refused to answer it.  It’s because you don’t have the Catholic faith.  Further, your long (and empty) response didn’t even answer the question I posed to Lover of Heresy about Fenton and Vatican II (who of course also did not answer the question).  You attempted to conceal your failure to answer the question in a multiplicity of words.  You diverted into many other (false) arguments on the matter of BOD which were not germane to what was asked.

Here are just a few examples of the pointless or erroneous statements in your long response.  I could provide more if I wanted to:

1.  You (Mithandyland) write: “inasmuch as the teaching of the theologians is properly incorporated into the Church's magisterium, some doctrine or another, or some explanation or another, really is part of the magisterium.”  To a dishonest fool like Lover of Heresy, your sentence is wisdom.  But an honest and observant person recognizes that what you wrote is totally pointless; for of course it’s true that if the teaching of a theologian is incorporated into magisterial teaching, it is part of the Magisterium.  If that were the case about BOD (it’s not), then you could just cite the teaching of the Magisterium which incorporates the teaching of the theologian on BOD, and you wouldn’t need to cite theologians.

2.  You write:  “When one looks at the fathers, one does not find a condemnation of BoD; one either finds reticence, or approval.”  This is totally false.  The early Church was overwhelming opposed to the idea of BOD.  St. Gregory nαzιanzen and Pope St. Siricius directly denied the concept, and popes officially and repeatedly taught that the only way to be saved is water baptism, with no other exception, including for those in danger, etc.  That’s the rule of faith.

3.  You write that BOD is “found in Trent's Catechism, which is how the Church taught Trent to the faithful.”  This statement, as part of your argument, is false.  Yes, there is a paragraph in the Trent Catechism that favors the concept of BOD, but that is not part of the Catechism’s teaching to be delivered to the faithful.  You are unaware of this crucial distinction.  It’s laid out in detail here: http://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/catholicchurch/catechism-of-trent-baptism-of-desire/

To put it simply, the Catechism of Trent does not tell pastors to teach the faithful BOD.  However, it does tell them to teach that no one is saved without water baptism, in numerous statements.

Catechism of the Council of Trent, “Matter of Baptism – Fitness,” p. 165: “Upon this subject pastors can teach in the first place that water, which is always at hand and within the reach of all, was the fittest matter of a Sacrament which is necessary to all for salvation.”

This is the true rule of faith.  Not every paragraph in the Trent Catechism is part of what the Catechism identifies as the rule of faith to be passed along to the faithful, as the article explains.

4. You write: “Fenton died before the new mass even came out.  To whatever extent he approved of Vatican II, he didn't approve of its errors.”  This is an utterly gratuitous statement, contrary to all the evidence.  Fenton was a very learned man.  He studied traditional docuмents and he was going to write a book on Vatican II and ecclesiology.  Therefore, he was presumably very familiar with Vatican II’s teaching on ecclesiology.  Yet, he concluded that Vatican II’s teaching on the matter is Catholic, when it is quite heretical.  Thus, evidence indicates that Fenton did approve of Vatican II’s errors on ecclesiology; yet, you state the opposite with no proof and contrary to all the evidence.

I could further expose your long and vapid response, but the above illustrates the point.  You believe Jews who reject Christ can be saved.  You don’t profess the true faith, and you don’t reject heresy.  You don’t believe one must be ‘born again in Christ’ to be saved (which is a dogma), that one must have the Catholic faith to be saved (a dogma).  Thus, it’s not a surprise that you can’t understand deeper matters on the baptism issue.

When I say that BoD is essentially a question of methodology, what I mean is that it is a topic that is inextricably woven into how one learns the faith.  Really, all doctrinal questions are, but because there is such a lacuna between how BoD deniers and everyone else learns the faith, the question of BoD really highlights and underscores the importance of methodology.  CatholicTrue has tried to agree with me (I think?) that methodology is important, but he is taking it to mean simply what someone believes rather than how someone learns. 

Forget about BoD for a minute.  Any time there’s a question about anything, the fundamental human response is to gather relevant information in order to arrive at a judgment or opinion about the matter.  If your car is making a weird noise, you pay attention to the noise, and you at least mentally catalogue different qualities about it.  You pay close attention to whether or not there are patterns to the occurrence of the noise (maybe it only happens when you’re turning, or when you’re breaking, or when you’re reversing, etc.).  You pay close attention to the types of sounds produced; maybe it’s a rattling noise, maybe a whirring, maybe a squeaking; maybe it’s a combination of these things and maybe sometimes it’s louder than other times. 

Different people have more or less knowledge about cars.  For some people, after they’ve gathered enough aural data about the sound, they can conclude that it’s produced due to such and such a thing.  For others, further investigation is required.  So they’ll hop online, or they’ll pull out their owner’s manual, and they’ll further investigate the possibilities for the source of the sound.  Whether one already knows what the sound is or whether someone needs assistance to further identify its source, eventually the question of what’s causing the sound is resolved and it now becomes a question of addressing the underlying cause.  At that point, there will be some who want to give it a shot themselves—they’ll go to the local auto parts store and get the relevant parts, or maybe they already have them laying around somewhere.  Then they’ll pull up some YouTube videos on fixing it, consult with a friend, or in some way or another learn about the process of fixing what’s wrong.  For most others, they’ll take it to an auto shop they trust and they’ll let the mechanic handle it from there.  Some might not even do much investigating at all (on their own) and go right to the mechanic and let him diagnose and fix the problem.

Whether it’s car troubles, health concerns, wood-working, computer-building, or anything else, the common theme in approaching any question—this is a fundamental theme to all human inquiry—is the gathering of data to understand what’s important, what’s not, how the important data lends itself to a resolution or the revelation of a presently obscured truth, etc. .  Man—a rational animal as he’s called in the Aristotelian tradition—is a learning thing.  And fundamentally, man is a learning thing when it comes to religion.  Divine revelation is not something that is immanently implanted in every man; there is no “Divine Spark” that he extracts from his essence to arrive at some religious truth or another (I’m sure we all agree with that, at least intellectually).  Rather, throughout all of human history, God has chosen fit to reveal certain truths to humankind.  And when we believe those truths, what we are doing is learning from God as the authority who neither deceives, nor can be deceived.  The very definition of faith is apprehending and believing a truth on God’s authority.  But this does not happen by way of a telekinetic and divine inception of some truth or another in our minds.  It happens through the rational and sometimes observational activity of collecting information and, in the case of faith, with God’s assistance and grace, understanding it as true.

But we’re not Protestants, so even when we say that this learning activity involves the collection of information, it is not, by design, the individual receiver of the data who is responsible for interpreting it.  This is both a question of ability and of right order.  It is a question of ability because, as St. Paul says, to each are given different gifts.  It is a question of right order because the world—the natural order and everything contained therein—is a hierarchy of not just ability but authority, of rights, privileges, duties, and responsibilities.  In this world, that hierarchy includes a Church—the Mystical Body and Bride of Christ.  A real and divinely instituted organism, populated by men to whom the authority is given by God to teach the faith to the faithful.  We all know that this is done through what the theologians call the Church’s magisterium—her teaching activity, whether solemn/extraordinary or ordinary. 

Where the methodology comes into play is that we, as Catholics who live not contemporaneous to Christ’s ministry on earth, and not in the times of the prophets of judges, learn the faith from the Church.  Of course, the BoD denier will say that they learn from the Church—they learn right from the top of it, too, by learning from her solemn pronouncements, such as those at Trent which state that baptism cannot be viewed as optional, or that it should not be twisted into a metaphor.  These people will argue that they learn from the Church through her clear and definitive statements of doctrine, such as are found in exercises of the extraordinary magisterium.  Taking this data into account, their position rests on the literal interpretation of the clear meaning of words, which is something that can be understood easily by any Catholic of good will.  When disagreements about BoD arise, their interlocutors are wrong because they are going against the clear and literal meaning of some solemn decree or another, and this transgression against the literal sense is usually (so the argument goes), indicative of bad will.  This is the methodology (how the faith is learned) used by the BoD denier: direct engagement with primary solemn texts (extraordinary exercises of the magisterium such as Trent or Florence, and also Scripture).

The methodological presumption (i.e., the unspoken premise that justifies this approach to learning the faith) is that any Catholic of good will who reads these docuмents will have the Catholic faith, or at least some article of it, clearly imparted to them, and if they are of good will, they will believe that clear impartation without hesitation.  The problems with this presumption include:

-----a)      The fact that any literal meaning would only apply to the original language of the pronouncement; translative efforts themselves are non-literal, because the nature of languages after Babel is not one of equity, but disparity.  Even similar languages (like the Romantic ones) have unique idiomatics and require certain changes in order to transport the meaningful contents of one language expression to another.  So, discussing the matter in English, or relying on English translations, either undermines or defeats any attempt to retain the integrity of the BoD denier’s methodology. 

-----b)      Resultant from a), the presumption that anyone who does not cleave to the alleged literal meaning is of bad will is unwarranted and improbable.  More likely than not, they (who do not share in the denial of BoD) simply don’t read Latin.
----------a.       There are authors and posters who claim to read Latin and will attest to equity between literal senses across languages.  That is all well and good, but we are to be learning from the solemn docuмents, not from mere men whose brief seminary stint has given them the confidence that they can effectively translate for the Church.


-----c)      If the Catholic faith is clear, simple, and universal then it follows that it is has a certain dynamism inasmuch as it “adapts” to different demographies—the fact that there are saints all across the world who spoke different languages and who attended uniquely cultural rites of the Holy Mass (there’s literally dozens) and who preached to their own people in their own language testifies to this fact as a matter of ecclesiastical praxis.  Given all of this, it seems unlikely that the intended methodology for Catholic learning (i.e., the order established by God for his faithful to learn true doctrine) requires multi-linguicism.  For Catholic preaching, yes, but not for Catholic learning.

-----d)     There were no solemn decrees for the first three centuries of the Church.  If the BoD denier’s methodology is correct, it follows that there was no clear impartation of the Catholic faith until Arius came along; this would make the Arian heresy somewhat legitimate (ultimately wrong, of course, but not obviously so), as since the Church had never defined anything, and Catholics can only be expected to hold that which is defined, it’s rather contained within such a system that no one could really expect Arius to believe that Christ was God.  One may say that scripture makes it clear enough, but that would suppose that Arius and his followers knew how to read it; the challenges of a)-c) are applicable here.
----------a.       To add, if it were really the case that the Catholic faith was intended by God (because keep in mind that this is His Church, established by His design) to be learned through solemn decrees exclusively, it seems strangely unusual that He would allow multiple—probably at least half a dozen—generations to pass after the Apostles’ death before any instances of infallible teaching were to occur again.

-----e)      The majority of men who do speak Latin affirm that Trent teaches BoD.  By this, I refer to St. Alphonsus and literally every Tridentine theologian who’s approached the matter.  This poses two difficulties: first, it certainly challenges the notion that bad will is required to believe in BoD after considering the source material, unless one is prepared to rashly ascribe it to St. Alphonsus and his successors.  It also poses a difficulty in general believability; if St. Alphonsus, about whom the Church says his moral theology can be followed without need for further consultation, who was trained by the Church, who was a fluent Latinist, who was the greatest moralist to ever live, who is a doctor of the Church, etc.—if he got this point wrong (a point which most BoD deniers will identify as being integral to the entire modernist revolution and universal salvation heresy), it undermines the credibility of all approved doctors, doesn’t it?  It’s not like the Church is reticent on Alphonsus; she says go to him and learn from him.  Why should we trust the opinion of other doctors when one of the most lauded is (intentionally or inadvertently, it doesn’t matter) quite responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today?

-----f)       The fact that most BoD deniers do not even consistently apply this methodology.  They will, without variance (at least, without any that I’ve observed), believe in: guardian angels, Our Lady’s perpetual virginity, St. Joseph’s chastity, the sainthood of all the apostles and the vast majority of saints, none of whom were ever solemnly decreed to be in Heaven (this includes all twelve apostles, St. Joseph, St. Paul, all of the doctors whom they occasionally rely on to make their case, etc.).  At random, it seems to me, that a given Catholic truth has never been defined.  The solemn magisterium is, relative to the ordinary magisterium, alarmingly quiet throughout Catholic history.  It tends to, on average, speak once a century (though can be silent for centuries at a time).  When someone is inconsistent in applying the fundamental methodology by which they arrive at a given proposition or another, it lends against the credibility of the methodology.  In other words, it betrays the person who uses the methodology as inconsistent in their reasoning, and it naturally leads the mind to wonder why, if it is a reliable methodology, it is not applied with consistency.  Now, this doesn’t mean (of itself) that the methodology is false, but it does mean that the people who use it don’t have any grounds to accuse others of not using it when they themselves only use it selectively.

But the biggest problem with assuming that any Catholic of good will who takes the literal meaning of some thing or another will inviolably arrive at the truth is that the Church herself does not believe this, and this can even be proven at the solemn level.  Denzinger 1800 (Vatican I) drives this point home by stressing the importance of understanding and believing as the Church understands.  Why would the Church stress the importance of believing what the Church teaches in the sense that she understands herself except and unless it were possible that the true meaning of a given teaching might be other than the literal sense of the words themselves?  What she is teaching is that we are to believe what the Church teaches in the way that she understands it rather than to believe what the Church teaches in a literal sense.   

If I say “Johnny, you can’t play on the computer until you finish your homework” there is a literal sense to those words that allows Johnny to watch TV, play Nintendo, read comics, or even go to sleep without doing his homework.  So, Johnny goes off and doesn’t do his homework but he doesn’t play on the computer either; then I see him playing outside or watching TV and I say, “I thought I told you to go do your homework!”  Johnny replies, “No, you said that I can’t play on the computer until I do.”  That’s what I said, isn’t it?  It was clear, direct, and easy enough for a child to understand.  Johnny’s transgression has nothing to do with violating the literal sense of my directive, on the contrary, his fidelity to that is manifest.

So with the Catholic faith, the true meaning of any doctrine is what the Church intends the meaning to be, not what the literal sense of the words is.  The Church may very well intend the literal sense of the words to be the true meaning from one doctrine to another, but the rule of faith is what the Church understands herself to mean above all.  So the Church rebukes those heretics, who, stating some “safety” in believing within the confines of a literal sense, violate what the Church understands herself to mean.  That’s exactly what happened at Nicaea; the Arians continually formulated their belief in a way that would be literally compatible with Christ as God, and that’s why they were so difficult to overcome.  The same problem is present at Vatican II; Vatican II doesn’t slide itself under the rug by dancing around the literal sense of any particular doctrine, but more so by never violating the literal sense of any particular doctrine.

Now, the BoD denier will sometimes take a bit milder of an approach on certain issues, and rather than insist that the Church has some literal definition that settles some matter or another, will assert that the matter is not yet defined, so we cannot infallibly know one way or another, and then treat all possibilities as equally likely.  Believe it or not, this is really an error of the enlightenment; it is the compartmentalization of truth into that which is known infallibly, and that which is doubtful.  This is what Descartes did, this is what the empiricists did, and this is the fundamental approach of all rationalists and post-positivists.  So I'd like to spend some time addressing the role that non-solemn teaching plays in the equation.

The Ordinary magisterium is often said by traditional Catholics to be “that which the Church has taught always and everywhere,” as they claim to have taken from the Vincentian canon.  But the word “always” doesn’t really belong in a definition of the OUM; it suffices that it is taught everywhere, and by everywhere we mean that a moral unanimity of the bishops teach it (which sometimes may mean that they simply allow it to be taught by their priests even if there is no immediate or direct record of the bishop himself writing a deep theological exposition on the matter) in union with the pope (which again doesn’t necessarily mean that the pope has to write an encyclical about it; his tacit approval suffices).  The reason that “always” doesn’t really fit into the ordinary magisterium is that truth is timeless, and there are truths which were not explicated at the time of the Ascension but which later were “revealed” to be contained in the deposit of faith nonetheless.  Canonized saints are a prototypical example of this; God’s providence ordained from all eternity that they would be united with Him in Heaven, but we didn’t really see it “happen” until they actually lived on this earth.  No sane Catholic would ever contend that the sainthood of St. Peter is something about which there can be legitimate doubt, despite the fact that there’s no solemn definition about it, and the Church certainly didn’t teach that he was in Heaven while he was on earth, did she?  Many Catholics have a strong conviction that the Ordinary magisterium is what’s been taught always because we know (from Vatican I most poignantly) that it is the job of the popes and the Church to safeguard, protect, and pass down, with inscrutable fidelity, the deposit of faith—not to add to it.  But clearly we are not talking about additions, but organic extractions. 

I say this only for those who are not satisfied that the Church always taught BoD.  The condemnatory reticence combined with unanimity of approval from those who did teach it should suffice to show a true moral unanimity (theologians say that moral unanimity need not be absolute, but it suffices for a given proposition to gain approval from all who speak on it, even if there are those who simply don’t address it).  Even if it were the case that BoD were not taught explicitly in the early Church (which I would deny, but we can grant it for present purposes and see that the ultimate conclusion still holds up), it was taught explicitly in the “later” Church, and that suffices for it to belong to the Ordinary magisterium.  It likely comes as a bit of a shock, especially for “SSPX” type Catholics who’ve had it drilled into them that the ordinary magisterium only consists of that which can be shown to be taught from day one, to hear that the ordinary magisterium is not necessarily “universal in time” the way that it is usually alleged to be by certain authors.  So, for a moment, consider the reason that the ordinary magisterium is simply defined as whatever a moral unanimity of the world’s bishops teach in union with the pope, regardless of when this happens.  Catholics ordinarily learn the faith through ordinary means—that is, through oral preaching, written letters, catechisms, etc.  “Ordinary” isn’t really a technical term, and it can’t be, because the ordinary tools themselves change as communication technologies change.  If a later pope wanted to disseminate his magisterium through a billion-item email list, he could—he isn’t bound by the Church to only pen and paper for his encyclicals; in fact, the encyclical itself is a form of ordinary teaching that is only found in the last three hundred years or so of Catholic history.  The point is just that the Church as a whole learns the faith through the every-day teaching activity of the Church’s pastors and doctors.  Now, the Church, being a perfect society (that is, one equipped with everything necessary to effectively govern its members and execute its mission), does not fail to do what it is deputed by God to do.  What it is deputed by God to do is to teach and sanctify (the Great commission: Go out and teach all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, etc.).  Here we’re talking about both, but mainly talking about teaching.  Were the ordinary and usual means by which the Church to teach intrinsically liable to error, the Church would very quickly defect (which is of course impossible).  Thankfully, God’s design made the pope infallible and that infallibility diffuses to the bishops who teach in union with him, and even to the believing Church who assents to whatever is proposed.

The point is easy for sedevacantists or for those who understand the sedevacantist thesis to appreciate.  Mainly, the thesis explains the modernist revolution by claiming that no pope was present at the council or afterwards; for, if there were a pope, both the solemn and ordinary magisterium would have been protected from error.  If there is no pope, there is no infallibility.  Not just at the solemn level, but at the ordinary level, too.  Neither types of magisterium are actively exercised in an interregnum.  Only under such conditions could we ever imagine such a wide loss of faith and what appears to be a moral unanimity of bishops teaching error collectively.  I think one of the reasons BoD denial is primarily an (American) SSPX attendee type of thing is that in such circles, it is possible to believe that the Catholic Church can ordinarily teach error.  But if one instead believes that the Church is infallible in both her solemn and ordinary magisterium, one quickly sees that this is not a satisfactory explanation.

How does this apply to methodology?  Well, for those who are not BoD deniers, it means that we learn the faith differently.  We learn the faith from the ordinary magisterium as the proximate rule of faith.  This definition is in all the manuals, which we also use as evidentiary data for our beliefs, inasmuch as they are approved and disseminated by the Church, and especially when they concur with each other.  So, we are dealing with a completely different data set than the BoD denier.  We can bring up Alphonsus, or Bellarmine, or even Fenton, Van Noort, or Pius XII, and we do so eagerly because the Church tells us to go to them, and we are excited about what the Church has to teach us.  But the BoD denier categorically denies that anything contained in the ordinary magisterium is infallible of itself; only and except when it coincides with the extraordinary magisterium is it infallible.  And of course, the extraordinary magisterium is to be understood in its literal sense, rather than “twisted into a metaphor” (as they will say).  Which further confines the ordinary magisterium and corrupts its actual content and purpose. 

The BoD denier's methodology corrupts the content and purpose of the ordinary magisterium because it is a methodology that errs about what infallibility is.  Infallibility does not mean “correct.”  It’s not a synonym for something being true.  In 2017 everyone has a smartphone and knows what time it is; no one will ever be wrong about the time.  But we’re not infallible time keepers.  Infallibility is not just “being right,” and it is not just “not being wrong,” it is the literal (ha!) protection from even the possibility of error extended by God to the pope and which then diffuses to the universal Church.  So when we say that the pope or the Church or whatever is infallible, we are not saying that they’re right (though they are, of course), we are describing the fact that it is impossible for them to be wrong on a given point.  When someone says that the ordinary magisterium is only infallible when it agrees with the extraordinary magisterium, they’re not describing anything remotely resembling infallibility.  They’re just describing a coincidence.  No different from if we both agree what time it is.  There’s nothing the ordinary magisterium can teach a BoD denier, because (in this system) the ordinary magisterium can never be learned from; instead, it can be suspiciously received and regarded as correct only after the believer checks it against a different source of teaching.  That’s not learning, that’s proof-reading.

Is it clear, now, how many worlds apart these approaches to learning are?  BoD deniers do not just disagree with the ordinary magisterium—they don’t consider it.  It’s not relevant.  If we go back to the car analogy, the ordinary magisterium is as relevant to the noise being made by their car as what they had for breakfast or what they’re planning to do over the weekend.  It simply doesn’t count.  But in this analogy, the ordinary magisterium is the noise itself.  It is the proximate, most immediate repository of data from which we learn.  No matter how one proceeds to solve the car noise problem after studying the noise, there is no substitute to actually studying the noise.  Whether you fix it yourself or have someone else fix it, the noise must be listened to.  In the Catholic faith, no matter what one does afterward, everything starts with the ordinary magisterium; we don't even know that there is a Catholic Church until the ordinary magisterium presents itself to us.  Don't believe me?  Again, the Catholic Church existed without exercising its solemn magisterium for its first three hundred years.  And it wasn't obscure, it wasn't destitute, it wasn't in the shadows-- it grew exponentially, because of the ordinary magisterium.  It is the singular most fundamental data set in all of Catholic learning, and they think it's dispensible.  But our present crisis, which is one where the shepherd is not just struck, but as a result, his deputy shepherds are liable to error, proves all the more how utterly destructive it is when the ordinary magisterium is not learned from.

There is nothing that anyone can do to convince a BoD denier that BoD is Church teaching because the BoD denier excludes from consideration the usual way the Church teaches.  And that’s why I am spending so much time on the issue.  I have no interest in trading patristic quotes, I have no interest in taking out the yard stick and measuring one doctor against another, I have no interest in even really discussing BoD because I’m about as far away from the BoD denier in my methodology as a theist is from an atheist.  And I really don’t ever expect any BoD denier to eschew their errors except and unless they first deploy a methodology that actually promotes Catholic learning.  I predicted previously that I’d be anathematized by the caps lock brigade and that they’d project their own avoidance on to me, and that’s exactly what’s happened, and it’s happened pretty much exactly the way I said it would.  My refusal to answer a simple question is evidence of my bad will and my silence is proof of my guilt (after all, St. Thomas More was condemned by the Church and refused Sainthood because he would rather die than answer a simple question about whether or not he recognized the King's religious authority, and that's why Catholics are forbidden from invoking him... that is how that story goes, right? ).   Thankfully, for the casual reader, there's the Cathinfo BoD denial club, and the Dimond Bros., and Saint Benedict's Center, all of whom can teach you... wait, I thought the Church did the teaching?  What's wrong with the clear and literal sense of the canons as they are written that we need anonymous seminary dropouts, fake monastics, and Novus Ordo apologists to get the point?  Ah, well, at any rate, agree with them or be a heretic.  Cheers!

Ah, well, at any rate, agree with them or be a heretic.  Cheers!

Ah well, at any rate, agree with you,... oh wait no that would be the Church, or be what?

Why don't you start a new topic, presuming one does not exist, and instead of a diatribe, go point by point, line by line, word by word and really break things down and "enlighten" the short-bussers professor? Really, really really, subject what you say to scrutiny. You know, orderly, with your best game Criteriology and Methodology.

Or does that not merit an answer either?

"Cheers"

Ass