[ultima ratio]

Traditionalists don't question the right of the pope and bishops to call a council into session. That is not the issue. The issue is whether its declarations--which were not binding and not infallible--were consistent with past Magisterial teachings. The Council, moreover, deliberately utilized a language which was ill-suited to defining anything clearly. Much of what was stated was ambiguous by design--intended to be understood in two ways--by traditionalists in one way, by modernists in another. This makes true "adherence" to such "teachings" impossible.

Even Ratzinger's final point--that while the Council declared nothing infallibly, it demands our adherence is simply false. Before we lend credence to murky ambiguities, Catholics owe allegiance to those magisterial definitions of the Church which are NOT ambiguous and which ARE infallible--such as the well-known declaration of Pius XII that the Mystical Body of Christ IS the Catholic Church. This seems to contradict the declaration of VII that the Church of Christ only SUBSISTS IN the Catholic Church--a very unclear formulation, deliberately ambiguous.

[nika]

Traditionalists don't question the right of the pope and bishops to call a council into session. That is not the issue.
--ultima ratio

I see you knocked over a straw man.

The issue is whether its declarations--which were not binding and not infallible--were consistent with past Magisterial teachings.
--ultima ratio

Vatican II is upheld by the same authority as Vatican I and the Council of Trent, namely, the Pope and the College of Bishops in communion with him ...
--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

You are really saying Vatican I and the Council of Trent were "not binding and not infallible," according to Cardinal Ratzinger, since "Vatican II is upheld by the same authority as Vatican I and the Council of Trent."

I will leave you to ponder two items. First, the remark of Eck in his debate against Luther at Leipzig, after Luther admitted he believed an ecumenical council was fallible:

"If you believe a legitimately assembled council can err and has erred, then you are to me as a heathen and publican."

Second:

Between heresy and schism there is this difference, that heresy perverts dogma, while schism, by rebellion against the bishop, separates from the Church. Nevertheless there is no schism which does not trump up a heresy to justify its departure from the Church.
--St. Jerome