"if the Pope comes out and asserts that divorcees can receive communion..."
GPH, there is no problem with Catholics who have gotten a civil divorce receiving Communion, and to my knowledge never has been. Divorcees lawfully receive Holy Communion now. What would bar one from Holy Communion, would ongoing cohabitation with a person who is not your lawful spouse per Catholic marriage.
Or how about this:
"You are saying that if the Pope comes out and asserts [heresyxxx], that you have no obligation to believe official church teaching? "
No, exactly the opposite. If the Pope asserts heresyxxx, I would still be obliged to be faithful as always to official Church teaching.
"The Catholic Church can't change any of these official doctrines [?...] they do it all the time! See Vatican II."
The Catholic Church has not in fact changed official doctrines of the faith via Vatican II. If you think it has, you will perhaps find more agreement with the sedevacantists and others who are in schism, than with me. I think those in schism have (probably in all sincerity) failed to distinguish between dogmas and disciplines, and/or failed to distinguish between the legitimate development of doctrine and the outright contradiction of doctrine.
"The trick is that they just assert that their obvious changes are really in continuity with the past, even the whole kissing of Korans fad, despite previous Popes calling such activity anathema."
This exposes what seems to be a misconception on your part: the idea that kissing a Koran is a doctrine of the Church.
The Catholic Church has never been so foolish as to propose that the Pope is intellectually or morally faultless, flawless, or foolproof, let alone impeccable, personally ---- but only that he will never be able to bind the Catholic Church to falsity in matters of faith and morals.
That means the Pope could be stupid or sinful (some of them, esp. during the Renaissance, were notoriously so) but cannot make an erroneous doctrine binding on the whole church. Thus "infallibility" is more a divine protection from the Pope than a personal quality of the Pope, since it constitutes a divine promise that no matter how screwed-up some opinion or practice of a Bishop of Rome may be, he will not be able to make a binding dogma out of it to mislead the whole Church. (Keywords "gates" "hell.")
So whatever it was that St. Pope John Paul was doing in the famous 16-year-old picture that has been around the world 10,000 times on the Internet, it was at worst a cringe-making personal gaffe and not an erroneous definition of dogma.
Yeesh.
I would want to add that Pope John Paul was Polish after all, and therefore a kisser.
Any time anybody gave him anything, he kissed it as a sign of thanks. He kissed sombreros. CD's. Guitars. Sweatshirts. Soccer balls. Sandwiches. Photographs. Baseball caps. Pineapples. Personal correspondence (letters). Cheeks. Foreheads. Hands. Walls (in Jerusalem.) He's famous for even getting on his knees and kissing the ground for godsake, and literally for God's sake because he was the kind of guy who easily and spontaneously expressed gratitude for gifts all the time.
It's pretty clear he was kissing the book "as gift" ("as soccer ball") and not as a liturgical gesture canonizing Islamic scripture.
I might render a different opinion if it had been Rowan Williams, GOL (for Groaning Out Loud); but, not unfairly, I'm going to give our Lolek the Mensch the benefit of the doubt because this is the same guy who commissioned Cardinal Josef ("the Enforcer") Ratzinger to write "Dominus Iesus," which clarified that nobody is saved by anybody except by Jesus Christ Our Lord.
"Dominus Iesus." Ya could look it up. (LINK)
I don't read Arabic, so I don't know. But if it turns out, as one FReeper suggested, that it might have been what it looked to be, the Sharif Bible, an Arabic-language edition of the the Jewish/Christian Sacred Scriptures--
...if so, well, Holy Moses, brother, get a grip.
Oh. And here's a relevant and wacky cartoon featuring a Pope who croaks, for your edification:
"How to Explain Papal Infallibility in Under Two Minutes (YouTube)