Me, thee, and he, don't have authority to contend against the MAgisterium.
"Me, thee, and he, don't have authority to contend against the MAgisterium."
You miss the point and the significance of what gbcdoj rightly quoted from this document of the Living Magisterium.
It isn't a case of he, me or thee here "contending against the Magisterium" - here you see the Magisterium contending against itself!:
"Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been DEFICIENCIES in moral conduct or in church discipline, or EVEN IN THE WAY THAT CHURCH TEACHING HAS BEEN FORMULATED..these can and should be set right at the opportune moment.."
Vatican II, an ecumenical council, is here laying the charges against the Church, of deficiencies in the discipline she gives us or even deficiences in the formulation of her doctrine that she teaches us.
(BTW if that is the case, how do we know that what she has just told us is exactly true? It could have been formulated deficiently.)
If previous Church doctrine has been formulated deficiently then what confidence can we have that the current Magisterium can reformulate it without deficiency?
Has there been a new gift of the Spirit given to the Church at Vatican II that will ensure that only from now on can she formulate her teaching without deficiency?
When previously in the last 2,000 years has the Magisterium made a clear distinction between the Deposit of Faith on the one hand and the Church's teaching on the other?
In this passage from the Decree on Ecumenism, you don't just have the "Spirit of Vatican II", you have the "Spirit" engraved in the "Letter" as well. If the Council Fathers are to be taken seriously in what they say here, then by alerting us to the “deficiencies, in conduct, and Church discipline or even in formulation of doctrine” they have made this a principle by which the Church is to be judged.
I am certain that it was the pre-Conciliar Church which they intended to be judged in this way.
But by creating this principle for the Church, they also set in stone the principle by which Vatican II must be judged because now, according to Vatican II itself, we must be searching for all the “deficiencies, in conduct, and Church discipline or even in formulation of doctrine” that Vatican II produced, and by extension, the “deficiencies” that the post-Conciliar Magisterium has produced.
So in actual fact, when traditionalists point out the deficiencies in the post-Conciliar teaching, the New Rite of Mass, and the way the Church has been badly governed and disciplined, they are doing nothing more than following the spirit and letter of Vatican II.
It really does seem to be you who has the problem with Vatican II here, not the traditionalists. Do you not believe its infallible?
Fortunately as traditionalists we have the 2,000 Tradition of the Church by which to measure whether and where Vatican II and the post-Conciliar Magisterium is deficient or not. And in the current climate where all is confusion and chaos and Conciliar documents make it possible to question their own veracity, Tradition is the only place any Catholic can go to measure whether any discipline, doctrine or moral conduct is deficient or not.
But this is the way that St. Vincent of Lerins always argued that it should be. And judging by what Pope Benedict has said about his role and authority, and that Vatican II must be implemented "in accordance with the 2,000 year tradition of the Church", then perhaps he agrees with him too.