This conversation was buried within another thread, and because I was hopeful of continuing that conversation, I am starting a new thread to highlight it.

Where the other thread left off, the state of the question was as follows:

Abbe Robinson -defended by Abbe Laisney- believes that the flood need not have been universal; that it suffices that it covered only the inhabited lands.

I contended that seemed to be at odds with traditional exegesis, making mention that in Genesis 7:11 (wherein the commencement of the deluge is announced), my English-language copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible (Haydock translation) appends this footnote:

"Ver. 11...The systems of those pretended philosophers, who would represent this flood as only partial, affecting [only] the countries which were then inhabited, are all refuted by the plain narration of Moses.  What part of the world could have been secure, when the waters prevailed 15 cubits above the highest mountains!...Calmet and others have proved, both from Scripture, and from philosophical arguments, the universality of the deluge, against Isaac Vossius & c." (p.22).

Happy to see respect for scripture and a proper defense of it.  The amount of word spin that undermines truth has been effective against the faith and Catholics fall for it all the time.  I missed this thread the first time, it's good you reposted.  

It's amazing to me that the same battle I had to fight with the Modernists at St. Ignatius (Jesuit) High School and at Loyola University in Chicago (also Jesuit), we now have to fight with "Traditional" priests and the the "Traditional" (neo-)SSPX.

Here's another inconvenient truth for the Modernist Duo here.  Church Fathers were practically unanimous of the global extent of the flood.  There's only one dissenter, a Pseudo-Justin that SOME identify with Theodoret of Cyrus.  In other words, the lone potential dissenter is someone of unknown identity (and for all we know could have been some gnostic heretic).  One of the Fathers cited (and rejected, based on Sacred Scripture) Plato's opinion that the flood was relatively localized.  So whoever this mystery "Father" was could well have been some Platonic gnostic.  Gnosticism has been tied to neo-Platonism.

https://creation.com/church-fathers-flood

When the Church Fathers unanimously interpret Sacred Scripture, that's a practically-infallible interpretation.  Period.

They instinctively fight the universality of the flood is because the earth is supposedly a globe and too many questions arise about how to explain how water floods a ball. They'd certainly have to explain how the influx of water didn't cause an imbalance to the spin or wobble or orbit. 

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No, there is no contradiction in having a universal flood on a globe earth.

It's really hard to believe SSPX priests could maintain such a scandalous idea. Scripture says the flood covered the whole earth and killed all flesh except Noe and his family. It's hard to imagine anything simpler than that. Even if you don't believe that, it is a fact admitted even by pagan anthropologists that accounts of a universal flood killing the entire human race except for one family are taught in every culture, all over the world, at every point in history. There are few events as firmly attested to by the unanimous consent of all peoples as the universal flood. How would the Chinese and the ancient Egyptians and Indians and people on remote islands in the Pacific and the aboriginals of Australia and Polynesia and the tribes of Africa ... all know about a tiny flood that happened in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago?

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No, there is no contradiction in having a universal flood on a globe earth.

It's really hard to believe SSPX priests could maintain such a scandalous idea. Scripture says the flood covered the whole earth and killed all flesh except Noe and his family. It's hard to imagine anything simpler than that. Even if you don't believe that, it is a fact admitted even by pagan anthropologists that accounts of a universal flood killing the entire human race except for one family are taught in every culture, all over the world, at every point in history. There are few events as firmly attested to by the unanimous consent of all peoples as the universal flood. How would the Chinese and the ancient Egyptians and Indians and people on remote islands in the Pacific and the aboriginals of Australia and Polynesia and the tribes of Africa ... all know about a tiny flood that happened in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago?

Indeed.  You add to this the universal consensus of the Church Fathers, which is authoritative when it comes to the interpretation of Sacred Scripture.

Archaeological evidence of a deluge has been found all over the world, not just in the Mediterranean.

St. Robert Bellarmine and the Holy Office that condemned Galileo for heresy stated that while indeed science is not per se a matter of faith, the problem or the heresy had to do with the authority and inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, even on matters of science.  So, while not a matter of faith ex parte objecti (on account of the subject matter, aka science), it was a matter of faith ex parte dicentis, on account of WHO said it, i.e. the Holy Spirit.

But the broader problem here is that when you can "INTERPRET" the word ALL to mean (a few) and ENTIRE/WHOLE to mean (a small part of), you make a mockery of Sacred Scripture, and suddenly no passage in Sacred Scripture is safe from such re-interpretation.  In fact, no dogma is safe from this re-interpretation.

These types of assaults on Sacred Scripture were the impetus for Modernism in its origins.  Then they applied the same "hermeneutic" to the Magisterium.

As I mentioned, when I was at the Jesuit Loyola University of Chicago, I battled these heretics on many of these same issues.  I found solace and refuge with the SSPX, going to STAS after accelerating my degree to graduate in 3 years there.  Had I had my guardian angel let me see forward in time to today to find myself fighting the same battle against the SSPX, I would have been shocked and stunned beyond words.

Fr. Franz Jozef Van Beek, SJ, (pictured below), was my chief adversary, and we battled tooth and nail (although I was always polite and respectful) ... and yet he always gave me As in his classes because he acknowledged that at least I knew what I was talking about, and that I cared.  I even went to have dinner with him along with Father Mitch Pacwa (now at EWTN) a few times while I was there.  I'm not entirely sure why I kept signing up for his "theology" classes, probably a combination of curiosity (wondering what heresy he would teach next) and relishing doing battle with him.

He always wore this grin on his face (like in the picture below), and a couple of my (in)famous arguments with him left him literally snarling at me, the only time I had ever seen him make those expressions. 

So, toward the end of one class, when he was teaching that the Gospels were all written after A.D. 70, I asked him, "Father, what is the evidence for these having been written after A.D. 70?"  To which he responded, "That's because there are references to the Fall of Jerusalem in the Gospels."  To which I said, "Oh, the prophecies of Jesus about the Fall of Jerusalem.  So, you're saying that Jesus wasn't or isn't God and could not foresee the future."  That elicited a nasty scowel.

Another one.  "There are contradictions between the Gospels."  This was a conversation at his residence after going there for dinner.  I said, "What contradictions?"  He said, "So Luke says that Mary was informed about the child being of the Holy Spirit.  But in Matthew, Joseph thought the child was illegitimate."  To which I said, "So ... she didn't tell him about it?"  ... another scowel.


You can't tell by his outfit, but he was in fact a priest, and a valid one at that (ordained in 1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Jozef_van_Beeck

At any rate, I thought I had found peace away from this nonsense when I entered SSPX.

At the time, I often told people that the reason so many lost the faith at "Catholic" schools was because they heard this stuff from people who were priests and religious, and was fond of quoting Bishop Sheen, who at one point said that it would be better to send your kids to public schools, where they would have to fight for their faith, than to the "Catholic" schools, where it would be taken from them.

Here we see even a worse extension of this problem.  We have two men (and likely many more) posing as Traditional Catholics engaging in a Modernist assault on Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium.  So the simple faithful, believing these to be anti-Modernists Traditionalists, are going to more readily be poisoned by this thinking.  It's pernicious and it's evil, and these men are FAR MORE DANGEROUS THAN JORGE BERGOGLIO to faith because everybody realizes that that latter is a shameless heretic and nobody mistakes him for being orthodox.