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I have read the entire thread, up till this comment.  I haven't read the rest.

But I find the last sentence the most interesting.

The OP deals with a variety of options a Catholic of good will could take to deal with this crisis.

But it seems like a *person* of good will could just as much conclude any of the following.

"Maybe this crisis with the magisterium shows that magisteriums are defectible, and that Eastern Orthodoxy (a Church that is much less reliant on magisterium as a source of authority) is really the Church that Christ founded.

"Maybe neither side was right in 1054, and Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy are actually branches of the true Church."

"Maybe all this stuff really points to the idea that Sola Scriptura has to be true, because all other authorities have failed."

I'm wondering, and I'm especially curious for the OP's imput here, but also anyone else's, will a person of good will even necessarily be lead to one of the Catholic positions, and if so, why?

(To be clear, I obviously think Catholicism is correct or I wouldn't be here, but I have a hard time believing that everyone of good will ends up there, doubly so in the current situation.)

Yeah idk, the Crisis has left us in a real mess. It's impossible to try and convert people to Catholicism when I basically have to claim to be more Catholic than the pope, which they (fairly) consider to be utterly ridiculous. I also have to try and explain why the Church post-V2 is contradicting itself and its pre-V2 tradition, and how that doesn't contradict indefectibility when I'm not even certain on the answer to that myself.

Someone could quite fairly call me a hypocrite - saying that I can't even explain my own position fully. And I can't. But for me it's really a case of, even during the confusion and absurdity of the Crisis, I still think Catholicism has less problems in its positions than Orthodoxy or Protestantism, or any other religion for that matter. Protestants can't even explain how they know the Bible is infallible - it was the Church that decided which books were gospel, which books were apocryphal, etc. Protestants can't tell you why the Gospel of Thomas isn't in their Bible but the Gospel of John is. Orthodoxy can't tell you how they know a council is ecuмenical or not. They quite literally can't even explain their rules of faith. At least we can still explain how we know what is gospel and what isn't, and what is dogma and what isn't.

Of course, attacking logical problems with other denominations while being unable to explain all the problems with my own is not conducive to successful conversion. In my own mind I chalk the problems with the Crisis to - "We're on the eve of either the Great Chastisement or the End Times, it's meant to be a time of confusion and apostasy where nothing goes as normal" and hope that I live long enough to see the problems resolved and explained, but that's a lame and unconvincing explanation to give to a non-Catholic in a debate.

Look, this thread was not intended to blow up into a full R&R vs. SV debate.  Just stop already.

I lean sedeprivationist, but I readily admit that ALL the sides have issues.  SPism is the side I find to be the least problematic.  This is precisely the point of Matthew's post.

R&R rely on the fact that not everything the Pope teaches is infallible ... but then stretch it to the limits of credibility.  It's one thing for an isolated statement in an Encyclical to be wrong, but quite another for the entire Magisterium and Universal Discipline to go corrupt with Modernism, and to be actively leading souls to hell.  If people can lose their souls by adhering to the Magisterium, then the Church's mission has failed.

SVs rely on the fact that vacancies of the Holy See exist and that the Magisterium does not thereby go defunct.  Again, on their side, 60 years does stretch the limits of credibility.

SPs actual hold an in-between position, that the organs of the Magisterium continue to endure but they have gone dormant (in so many words).

But all sides are stretching the limits of credibility, because, to be perfectly frank, this entire crisis stretches the limits of Catholic credibility.

It would explain why people are looking for explanations other than those presented above.

Haven't we gone full Old Catholic already?

Maybe the r&r is more like the Eastern Orthodox position?  The pope doesn’t have the primacy, he has the semi-primacy where we obey him only when he is conforming to what we think is Catholic.  And when he doesn’t conform we only recognize him.  But if Bergoglio isn’t the pope then r&r is merely confused about Catholic theology and they have no obligation to obey a non-Catholic heretic. So it completely depends on whether or not Bergoglio is objectively the pope.