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.
Have you read Ludwig Ott’s “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma”? It’s a wonderful reference.
It contains a breakdown of the different levels of teaching authority, which clarified things greatly for me.
But there is a difference, and the difference is very important.
Sounds like we're on the same page in this regard.
I didn't think that it would take this long for some nitwit to make this association....pathetic