You do not have the authority to bind others to your opinion - no matter how much you believe your opinion to be correct.

You do not have the authority to bind others to your opinion - no matter how much you believe your opinion to be correct.

Yes, it makes sense.  Even if one has a strong opinion on the matter, no Catholic is in a position to bind others' consciences.  There's a tremendous amount of confusion out there and we have a vacuum of Church authority to give us direction.  I might opine, for instance, that it would be a mortal sin to attend the NOM, but that's all it is, an opinion.  I can use this opinion only to form MY OWN conscience, and may lay out arguments to persuade others, but that's as far as it can go without usurping the prerogatives that belong to Church authority alone.

And this is the failure of the dogmatic positions.  They construct a neat syllogism that seems logically sound and conclude therefrom that their conclusions are dogmatically certain, but only the Church has the authority to bind consciences with the certainty of faith, and some or many of the premises to our conclusions come from our own personal private judgment and reasoning and therefore cannot have such certaint.  Father Jenkins, a moderate sedevacantist, agrees with this reasoning.

So, for instance, the premise for Traditional Catholicisim is [this, that, or the other heresy or error taught by the Conciliar Church].  But the Church hasn't officially declared the Conciliar Church to be non-Catholic, so right now the best we can hope to have is a personal moral certainty regarding the state of the Church.

Quote from: TKGS on June 25, 2015, 07:31:51 PM

However, none of us on CathInfo have the authority to bind another's conscience on the matter. 

I always marveled at this argument.  Doesn't this go without saying?  OF COURSE SVs can't bind consciences.  That's not even a point of contention.  What's at issue is whether and to what extent individual Catholics (vs. the Church as a whole) can decide even for themselves whether or not someone is the Pope.  As Bishop Sanborn points out, that has to be known with the certainty of faith.  If we cannot know with the certainty of faith that Pius XII was a pope then we cannot know the dogma of the Assumption with the certainty of faith either.  And that's true even if I'm living at the time of Pius XII (vs. Father Cekada's nonsensical statement about this applying only to past popes).

Yes, I've called LoT's position heretical.  Haven't studied +Sanborn enough on the matter to be able to say the same thing.  Believing in BoD does not necessarily involved Pelagianism ... though in most cases it does.  Of course, I remember the Fastiggi debate.  +Sanborn opened by calling out subsistence ecclesiology as Vatican II's chief heresy (first thing he mentioned) ... and then enunciated some principles that led to nothing other than ... subsistence ecclesiology.  Beyond that, I know very little about his thoughts on BoD.

Nevertheless, I would not say that LoT needs to "convert" either ... merely that he needs to reject his heresy.  I'm in no position to determine who's a Catholic and who's not.  Both +Sanborn and LoT profess the Catholic faith.  See, it is merely my OPINION that the position of LoT is heretical, and a demand for conversion implies that my opinion has more authority than it actually does.  That's the biggest problem I have with the Dimond brothers.

I just can't sit here idly by when you basically characterize Holy Mother Church as a harlot.  If you said the same thing about my wife or my mother, I'd bust you in the chops.

You claim that the Catholic Church has become corrupt in its Magisterium, Public Worship, and also in its canonizations.  You slander the Church in the very same terms used by the Old Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants ... who all made the identical smears of the Church.  Furthermore, you smear Archbishop Lefebvre by claiming that he thought the same thing, when it's been proven clearly that he did not.  He explicitly articulated that this is not possible, that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit.  He simply prescinded from making the declaration and deferring to the final judgment of the Church.  I think that's why the Archbishop Lefebvre issue pushes your bottons, as it were, because you have long hidden behind (your false characterization of) Archbishop Lefebvre to justify yourself.

What touched of this latest round of the battle is your derogatory excoriation of the man you hold to be the Vicar of Christ.  At best, as a Catholic, you're entitled to a disrespectful disagreement with the Holy Father (as you believe him to be).  WHEN, EVER, in the history of the Church has it been considered acceptable for a lay Catholic (or any Catholic) to dismiss the teaching of the Vicar of Christ is such an obnoxious manner?

At the end of the day, I really don't care what you think, sedevacantist, sedeprivationist, sede-impoundist (Father Chazal), Siri theory, that Montini was blackmailed and not acting freely, or even that Montini was replaced by a double.  In fact, I have much less an issue with the conservative Novus Ordites who try to apply the hermeneutic of continuity in an attempt to reconcile Conciliarism with Catholicism.  I have no issue with the way Archbishop Lefebvre articulated his position (which is NOT the same as yours).  For as much as you deride Bishop Fellay, his attitude toward (what you consider to be) the Holy See is FAR MORE CATHOLIC than yours.  I believe that he's wrong in that I don't think that Bergoglio is the pope, but GIVEN his belief that Bergoglio is the pope, the respect with which he speaks of the Vicar of Christ is nothing short of obligatory for Catholics.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

You're a heretic, a liar, AND an idiot.  You've hit the trifecta.  This has been explained to you a half dozen times already.  We are not impugning Church teaching.  We assert that a passing mention of the term votum has been misinterpreted ... maliciously by some ... to undermine Catholic dogma.  We disagree with the INTERPRETATION of Church teaching, but would never dare to impugn Church teaching as your blasphemous heretical ass does.

Yes, I've made a similar observation but laid it out slightly differently.  If you look at the crisis as a syllogism, it would look something like this.

MAJOR:  Catholic Church cannot teach grave error or promulgate a form of public worship that displeases God.
MINOR:  Conciliar Church taught grave error and promulgated a form of public worship that displeases God.
CONCLUSION:  Conciliar Church is not the Catholic Church.

What a sacrilegious, blasphemous, heretical, apostate, sodomite (Hey, a five-dinger!).

Saints, popes, doctors of the Church, and approved traditional theologians (to say nothing of the Roman catechism called for by the Council of Trent and the pope who promulgated it) were all incapable of translating a word a first year Latin student could properly translate?