In all fairness, I will add that there are a few Catholic blogs that comment on this passage by O’Brien, and all the apologists I read said they find that quote extreme, but typical of language that would have been used 70 years ago.
The secondary point then becomes that while Catholicism maintains that it is monolithic, and Protestants are (in the words of another poster here) ‘fractured,’ neither is clearly the case.
I liked it better when you were writing "in all fairness." You've forsaken fairness after trying it for only one paragraph ! I guess it does make it harder to find a stick to beat us with.
... Catholicism maintains that it is monolithic, ...
We ARE monolithic. Every single one of our orders wear exactly the same habit and have exactly the same rule. All our Church buildings are cookie-cutter copies. All our poets write precisely the same verses over and over again. There is no appreciable difference between Augustine and Bonaventure. And we're all right-handed. You can't even tell the men from the women. Yessir. Monolithic, that's us.
Our monos lithos, our one rock on earth is communion with the Holy See and all that that implies. But we are awesomely, mind-bogglingly diverse in other respects, from the married priests of the Byzantine Catholics, to the ordered worship of Anglican use parishes, from the extravagant piety of some Philippine worshippers to the cool simplicity of the Trappist offices, from the careful distinguo of the Dominican thinker to the enthusiasm of the celebrations of Corpus Christi.
As I already said, if one's rhetorical excesses led one to say that because God is faithful to His promises we can dare to say that in a way He submits to us, that would not be a rejection of God's sovereignty. It WOULD be an unfortunate rhetorical excess, for which I am now vicariously suffering.
Because the devil lies crouching at the door, waiting to spin rhetorical self-indulgence into a Genevan Inquisition, and because we never give up hope that out there is some non-Catholic who would like to understand our teaching BEFORE denouncing it, we have tried to moderate our language to avoid needless and bogus distractions.
Oh heck. I confess. We think that God hovers around us, waiting for our orders almost as much as we think Calvin hated babies. Make the most of it. I have work to do.