Your comment seems at least to tend towards making of the Catholic religion a sort of Gnostic cult where no Catholic can ever know his faith until and unless the pope tells him what to believe, even if the pope tells him something totally different than past popes told him.

—Mike

I have to admit, this is a new one on me.  It had never occurred to me that adherence to the authority of the living pope, as a matter of presumption on the part of the ordinary faithful, could ever be construed as a form of gnosticism or as the logical error of appeal to authority (definition).  So, I guess we could say that the postconciliar Church of today is the Gnostic Church of Vatican II.

I have never claimed that the traditionalist arguments have no plausibility whatever.  What I have argued is that the only Church that Christ established is the one under the authority of His Vicar on earth.  Papal teaching authority cannot be reduced to documents, nor can the living pope be put in a box until he is needed to define something.  As I have already pointed out, the pope’s

power of jurisdiction in matters of faith, morals, discipline and government is supreme, universal, absolute, and immediate over the whole Church and each of its members. To deny this is heresy.

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