"For you there is today no visible authority in the Church. Rather all those in positions of authority are to be judged by the individual faithful, i.e. private judgment."
Sorry. I misunderstood your point. So, here's back at you. I quoted St. Vincent of Lerins, most likely a lay monk in A.D. 435 on the island of Lerins, but he might have been a hieromonk. Nobody knows for sure. In any event St. Vincent is considered a canonical saint East and West because of his "Commonitory". Are you accusing St. Vincent of being a Protestant, or of promoting the idea of a visibly divided Church, or of promoting individualism? I ask because I'm just going with what he said we should do under the circumstances presented to us by Taxachusetts Man.
The challenge these days, at least in my opinion, is to FIND the Church. Once found, it is not for us to question her authority. But the Orthodox don't look at ecclesiastical authority as the azymites do. For us, a bishop loses his authority if he "preaches heresy with bared head". I suppose you might call that individualism. Orthodox Christians do not.
Why can you not go about any city or town and simply ask for the Catholic Church, as in the time of the Holy Fathers?
What has changed? Did the Gates of Hell prevail?
So, here's back at you. I quoted St. Vincent of Lerins
St. Vincent of Lerins? The same saint who says of the Popes of Rome that they are "the Head" of the Church (Book 2, Chapter 30, 79). The one who knows of the authority of Rome as "the Apostolic See", the Prelatic holder of which "exceeded all others in the authority of his place" (Book 1, Chapter 6, 15-16). Are we really talking about the same saint and his beliefs about the Church and Faith?
Nothing that you quoted St. Vincent as saying supports the idea that he would place private judgment above that of visible church authority. Quite to the contrary he affirms the authority of Church councils:
Then it will be his care by all means, to prefer the decrees, if such there be, of an ancient General Council to the rashness and ignorance of a few.It is only when the judgment of the Church has not been exercised by the authority of the church visible that a private appeal be made to the sentences of the Fathers:
But what, if some error should spring up on which no such decree is found to bear? Then he must collate and consult and interrogate the opinions of the ancients...If the Church in ancient times had the authority to pass binding judgments then she possesses that same authority today. St. Vincent is not implying that private judgment has the right to judge the Church herself. Thus St. Vincent escapes the charge of being a Protestant.
The challenge these days, at least in my opinion, is to FIND the Church. Once found, it is not for us to question her authority.
But how are we to FIND the one true Church. For us Catholics it is to recognize the visible apostolic authority that our Lord Jesus Christ established. By your rubric, however, we are first to pass judgment on the teachings of the alleged true Church. If it passes the muster of one's private judgment then, and only then, is it to be accepted as the true Church. Once found you then say "it is not for us to question her authority." But this is to deny any authority outside the individual.
Why should I, or anyone, accept your judgment in this matter? My judgment, and that of 1.1 billion other Catholics as well as some of the finest minds in the history of the West, all accept that the Catholic Church is faithful to the apostolic teaching and the teaching of the early councils. Your insistence that you are right carries no weight with those whose judgment disagrees with you.
And where, according to you, are we to find the true Church? By your judgment Catholics are heretics because well they are Catholic. The Ecumenical Patriarch is a heretic because he speaks with Catholics (and because he can count and knows that the Julian calender is inaccurate). But by your past statements anyone who is in communion with heretics are also heretics and thus excluded from the Church. Thus the entire Greek church, being in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch, is also heretical. The same for the Russian church, etc. In the end the one true Church can only be found in a dozen monks of the Esphigmenou Monastery on Mount Athos. And you have the nerve to call the Greek Catholics "pitiful, pathetic & perfidious"?