“You are constantly harping on this fiction. The Church Fathers did NOT all hold the same view on all things. The Magisterium is the harmonizing institution of the Church so that the Church holds the correct teachings in spite of any differences that any one or two individual theologists may propose.”
The Roman Catholic claim to fame is based on the idea that they are the inheritors of an unchanging tradition taken straight from the Apostles from day one. IOW, the diversity of views, even with Popes contradicting current RCC teachings, certainly disproves this notion. The tradition shouldn’t be different from one Bishop to another or one Pope to another, and it shouldn’t take more than a thousand years before someone even uses the phrase “Transubstantiation,” as opposed to consubstantiation, or some other iation, in a Council, and another few hundred years for them to even define what that meant (and even after that, there was disunity in their understanding of what Trent even taught on the matter).
The concept of a developing doctrine simply has no place within Rome’s claims of authority.
I will congratulate you on your admission of your misunderstanding of the Magisterial office. Individual doctrinal opinions do not a Church make. It is the Church who gathers the opinions and decides on doctrine. It is not the individuals, as in the however many thousand Protestant denominations, who decide what Christ wants us to believe.
This is the first admission of misunderstanding that I have seen you make since you have rejoined FR under another name. I must pat you on the shoulder and call you George.
****The concept of a developing doctrine simply has no place within Rome’s claims of authority.****
If this were true, Gentiles would still need to be circumcised before becoming Christian.
Many do show variance, but the fine print says "only when speaking infallibly," and if you can say with certainty that a teaching was infallible, such as some hold Boniface 8 statement on Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, then you have an entity which can later autocratically define that to mean something that sounds rather contrary to what it says.
And while we know it is not the church "father's" that really determine doctrine (and the stipulated "unanimous consent" does not actually mean unanimous ), nor the weight of Scriptural substantiation, or history, but Rome's decree (having infallibly declared herself conditionally infallible), yet you have RCs that insist on arguing for the veracity of a doctrine based on sppsd support from such sources, but which cannot be the means by which RCs ascertain their truthfulness of official RC teaching, and the basis for their full assurance. And attempts to support added traditions by Scripture are an argument against them being warranted by Scripture.
Manning said it best in his oft posted quote,
It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primitive, and their pretension was to revert to antiquity. But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine. — Most Rev. Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Lord Archbishop of Westminster, “The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost.