We are Traditional Catholics. Not Protestant.

You are doing exactly the opposite of what St. Augustine taught.  He wrote that it is incorrect and of no spiritual benefit to use such statements as the basis of a cosmology.  And this is not simply an opinion of a Father of the Church; it was incorporated into magisterial teaching by Leo XIII.  We cannot simply ignore it.

This approach to Scripture is essentially Protestant and should not be practiced by Catholics.

Because I'm going through Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus now, and he states that we must the guided by the Fathers and the Church in interpretation and not stray from the definitions provided by the Church. 

 To understand how just is the rule here formulated we must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost "Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation."(53) Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science. Ordinary speech primarily and properly describes what comes under the senses; and somewhat in the same way the sacred writers-as the Angelic Doctor also reminds us - `went by what sensibly appeared,"(54) or put down what God, speaking to men, signified, in the way men could understand and were accustomed to.

19. The unshrinking defence of the Holy Scripture, however, does not require that we should equally uphold all the opinions which each of the Fathers or the more recent interpreters have put forth in explaining it; for it may be that, in commenting on passages where physical matters occur, they have sometimes expressed the ideas of their own times, and thus made statements which in these days have been abandoned as incorrect. Hence, in their interpretations, we must carefully note what they lay down as belonging to faith, or as intimately connected with faith-what they are unanimous in. For "in those things which do not come under the obligation of faith, the Saints were at liberty to hold divergent opinions, just as we ourselves are,"(55) according to the saying of St. Thomas. And in another place he says most admirably: "When philosophers are agreed upon a point, and it is not contrary to our faith, it is safer, in my opinion, neither to lay down such a point as a dogma of faith, even though it is perhaps so presented by the philosophers, nor to reject it as against faith, lest we thus give to the wise of this world an occasion of despising our faith."(56) The Catholic interpreter, although he should show that those facts of natural science which investigators affirm to be now quite certain are not contrary to the Scripture rightly explained, must nevertheless always bear in mind, that much which has been held and proved as certain has afterwards been called in question and rejected. 

You are doing exactly the opposite of what St. Augustine taught.  He wrote that it is incorrect and of no spiritual benefit to use such statements as the basis of a cosmology.  And this is not simply an opinion of a Father of the Church; it was incorporated into magisterial teaching by Leo XIII.  We cannot simply ignore it.

This approach to Scripture is essentially Protestant and should not be practiced by Catholics.

Kindof.  St. Robert Bellarmine addressed this during the Galileo situation.  Some scientific matters could be matters of faith to the extent that they uproot the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture.  That is in fact why the Holy Office condemned heliocentrism as HERESY.

St. Robert said that they are not matters of faith ex parte objecti but they are ex parte subjecti ... if I recall the exact Latin phrases.  So the object of the propositions isn't a matter of faith (i.e. the configuration of the cosmos), but the inerracny of Holy Scripture (the subject) turns it into a matter of faith.

This passage from St. Augustine is way overused ... and leveraged by Modernists, eventually morphing into the suggestion that Sacred Scripture can err except when it's teaching about matters of faith, etc.

It is true enough that Augustine's teaching could be (and has been) abused.  They might be applied to issues they shouldn't be or used to erode our belief in the errancy of Scripture.  But we are discussing the issue of cosmological models which is the exact question that he was addressing.
 
When he wrote "What concern is it of mine whether heaven is like a sphere and the earth is enclosed by it and suspended in the middle of the universe, or whether heaven like a disk above the earth covers it over on one side?"  he was writing about the very same models that we have been - the classical/medieval model of a spherical earth within a spherical universe as opposed to the dome over a flat earth.