Do you think that St. Bede and St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the earth is a sphere because they were brainwashed?  Their explanations make sense to me

How did they come to this conclusion or explanation? How is it determined catholics reached this consensus?

A few, but not all, Fathers of the Church taught that the earth was flat.  When there is no consensus among them, like in this case, one does not assume that it is a part of Church teaching.  One needs to look at later teaching. 

Church teaching (going back to St. Augustine, a Father and Doctor of the Church) is that Scripture is silent on the shape of the earth, it is a matter for science, and that Christians may hold any belief that is in accord with reason.

You say above to let the honest person judge, and I agree. And yet those who staunchly believe in a globe earth are not always honest in what they present. And as such, it's difficult for an honest person, who simply wants to know both sides of the issue, to be able to judge fairly.

It's as if (with many of those who believe in a globe earth on these threads), they think that being dishonest about the issue is okay, because they are absolutely and always right (they believe), and it doesn't matter if they don't always tell the truth. That's why I won't debate with some of them anymore. But I'm glad that you are bringing the subject up.

Perhaps the one aspect of the flat-earthers that puzzels me most is that they have to deny every picture of Earth taken by satellites, the same satellites that allow CIF to be read and indulged in by all on Earth at the same time, as well as tracking the weather world wide that is forecast with amazing accuracy. Not a night goes by that one cannot see these satellites way above the Earth orbiting it. The assertion that all the evidence of a global Earth that these show are made up to fool the world is beyond my reasoning.

Finally, this is a subject that one cannot debate without the thumbs downers. If I am debating with someone I do not go behind their back and give them a thumbs down with two of my posts on the other flat-Earth thread. I put up what I disagree with on that post and put my opinion forward rather than a thumbs down. Then again maybe they have no argument and individuals thumb down because of that.

It is true enough that St. Albert was yet another Doctor of the Church who, like St. Thomas and St. Bede, taught that the earth is a sphere.  And it is true that St. Thomas was a student of St. Albert and was probably influenced by him. There is, however, no reason to think that St. Thomas blindly accepted everything that he was told by his teachers.  He measured everything against Church doctrine.

St. Thomas wrote a commentary on Aristotle's work on cosmology, Περὶ οὐρανοῦ. In this work, St. Thomas carefully went through line by line considering what was true and compatible with Christianity.  In the section concerning the shape of the earth, St. Thomas said that Aristotle taught the truth and made good arguments when he said the earth is a sphere.  

Since this is a matter of science and not Faith, Catholics are not obliged to accept this.  But there are no grounds whatsoever to claim, as TomGubbinsKimmage just did, that flat earth is a Church teaching or that spherical earth was condemned by the Church.

Even considering flat earth as a matter of science, we need to keep in mind St. Augustine's warning against causing scandal:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].

I already replied to this but I have since looked at the quotes on the flat earth trads site.   This is a site that claims:  "The Church Fathers were almost unanimous in their opinion that the earth was flat. Here we provide the citations to back that up." They give four quotes from four different Fathers.  In the  forum section of this site, a poster asks, "Could you quote me the complete texts of the Fathers of the Church, where they condemn the spherical Earth? Or at least, pass me the links, please." He receives the reply, "the list here on this thread [using the same 4 quotes that appear in the Church Fathers section of the site] is complete."

Wikipedia's list of Church Fathers can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Church_Fathers  There are dozens of names listed.  It is absurd to claim 4 people out of that many shows near unanimity.  Knowledgeable people always concede that a small number of Fathers believed in flat earth.  For example,  Jeffrey Burton Russell, who most acknowledge as an expert in this area says:

A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

Most of the Fathers on that list do not seem to have said anything about the shape of the earth.  This is not surprising since St. Augustine, St. Basil and St. John Damascene all taught that Scripture is silent on the topic and/or that there is no de fide teaching concerning it (and this was later incrporated into magisterial teaching.)  St. Bede, one of the later Church Fathers, as well as a Doctor of the Church, very clearly taught the earth is a sphere, but as a matter of science not faith.

There are no reasonable grounds for claiming that flat earth is/was a Church teaching based on what a few Fathers taught.  And after the Patristic period there is no evidence of any Catholic whatsoever believing that the earth was flat (until the recent movement).  The idea that the Catholics did not accept spherical earth originated among anti-Catholic writers as a way to attack the Church.

This historian says the early fathers of the church had established earth is flat and based it on scripture.

HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM Andrew Dickson White