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Would someone in simple english explain what all the hubbubs about?

The appearance that Church rules and canon law are "Good enough for thee, but not for me." If the pope need not obey Church rules, why should any of us? If the pope can make the rubrics moot, why not your humble village pastor? If the pope can arbitrarily make up the rules as he goes along, why not the pro-choice pols and the LGBT crowd?

This has real implications in a world that rejects God and His rules.

Maybe its much ado about nothing. Maybe its Pharisaical.

But Christ said, "Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."

How is any given faithful Catholic to know which things the Church binds on earth can be arbitrarily ignored, and which are important? In an age when Catholics are so poorly catechized after 50 years of the "Spirit of VII," this type of action increases the confusion and gives a green light to dissent and liturgical abuse.

How is any given faithful Catholic to know which things the Church binds on earth can be arbitrarily ignored, and which are important?

That gets to the heart of the matter.

I was a protestant for 60 years, and while I confess that I believe all the truths that the Catholic church teaches, there is much I do not understand. I still have protestant reflexes.

How is any faithful Catholic to know which things the Church binds on Earth can be arbitrarily ignored?

I suppose the answer is, "none of them". But how you approach a font containing Holy Water and whether or not you can dismember infants in the womb are not at all the same thing.

Rubrics and customs are proclaimed by Christ's vicar to encourage the faithful. They are entirely invented out of human ingenuity, they have changed many times, and will do so again.

The commands of the natural law, expressed both as revelation and exegesis of scripture, are invariant. They never change, nor can they change.

Your "faithful Catholic" should have learned the difference by third grade.

I agree with you that, especially in America, there are adult Catholics who do not know the difference. There are even seminary graduates who apparently feel that varying a liturgical custom and murdering the innocence of a little boy are of the same order of importance.

But there is a difference, and the difference is very important.