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It's the Pope's job to work for unity and to pass down the deposit of faith, and work out disputes among the faithful. A Pope is not divine. Never has been. He's human.

The Pope is to faithfully pass down the doctrines which we Catholics already know and are familiar with. He doesn't have his own doctrine to which we must adhere. I hope that makes sense.

If he is not faithful in passing down the true and timeless doctrines of the Catholic Church, well then, we will know about it soon enough in these modern days when much of what the pope says is recorded, and we have access to the true teachings of the Church. That wasn't always the case. If a Pope, say, two hundred years ago were to say something against revealed doctrine, chances are we would never know about it. But nowadays, we can pick apart everything a pope says. And that's not a bad thing, since the post VII Popes have all been modernists.

They aren't popes. They sit there, as usurpers.. but they're not valid Catholic popes. You could give them the benefit of the doubt the first time, like in the early vat 2 days where things were being sorted out, but the pattern is now hear, and certain past transgressions have been revealed to the masses.

I get what you are saying, and it makes a certain amount of sense. I'm fine with Catholics taking the SV stance, but I take exception to SV's saying that we must obey the Pope's teachings. Well, as I have tried to point out, we don't have to obey a Pope's personal teachings. Because that's not what Pope is supposed to do or have. The goofball modernist Popes teach awful things as you know, but we know better than to follow those things. And we don't have to follow those things that they teach which are against the True Faith.

We obey the timeless teachings of the Catholic Church, whether or not a Pope actually teaches them, or not. He is supposed to do that, of course, (pass on the true deposit of faith) but we STILL KNOW know what those teachings are, even if a Pope is deficient in doing his job, which of course all modernist Popes are deficient, of course.

So your distinction between the Pope's teachings and the Pope's personal teachings ... while it does exist, isn't applied the way you're using it.

Whenever the Pope teaches in some official capacity, those are not his "personal" teachings anymore.  Typically we can distinguish what the Pope intends to teach "as pope" from what he intends to teach as a "private theologian" from whether or not something show up in the official publications of the Holy See, i.e. in recent times the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.

That's to be distinguished from a Pope answering questions on the papal plane, or giving a sermon (that he doesn't put in the AAS), or even from writing a private book.  So, for instance, Ratzinger published 3 books (or, rather a 3-volume set) while he was (putatively) pope, and in the preface he quite clearly stated that these were not Magisterial in any way.

NOW ... it is true that even in the Magisterium, the pope's official teachings, the pope might be in error if some teaching doesn't meet the notes of infallibility.  And this is where the dogmatic SVs err, exaggerating the scope of this "infallibility in the strict sense", as Msgr. Fenton aptly called it.

But, on the opposite side, where R&R err is in developing this attitude that non-infallible papal teaching is optional, where it might as well be your local parish priest saying something from the pulpit where you can basically "take it or leave it", as you usee fit.  That's completely false.  UNLESS a Pope teaches something that you cannot assent to because it contradicts a prior pope or some higher authority, we are bound to accepted it as true.  Then, even in cases where we cannot accept it as true because, "hey, this Pope is directly contradicting what previous popes taught ...", where accepting this teaching would require rejecting the teaching of other popes, but even in cases where we simply cannot accept a teaching as true, we must accept it and shut up about it and not contradict the Holy Father, EXCEPT where accepting it and obeying it would be against a Catholic's conscience.

But isn't a basic requirement of law to be properly published in a meaningful sense so that people know it? Pre VII never did your average parish priest read every AAS or encyclical that came out, he only did those things that were very publicly promulgated as strictly necessary and binding i.e celebrating Christ the King.

Furthermore isn't the whole idea of a pope routinely addressing "all the Christian people" in a letter quite anomalous in history? We had councils and then letters to resolve local issues, nobody ever read just what the Pope wrote on different issues.

We talked about this in the women's sport thing, if the way you get to that it's by digging through old AAS archives then it's clearly not a meaningfully published law. It certainly wasn't to a 1940s priest.


I think it's analogous to how one of the biggest holes in Protestantism is theologically depending on the printing press and mass literacy.

Your view of the papacy and these matters also seems to hinge on certain technological advances.

Since there was obviously a papacy before such advances it's clearly not a constituent part of it and how we should relate to it

Also before modernity receptio and consuetudo was the norm and standard, and the places that didn't receive a directive or had their consuetudo override it certainly weren't living in sin.