[Mad Dawg]

Trying to tack an RC down to their dogma and the dogma’s source documents is like —trying to catch fireflies with tweezers and frozen fingers —trying to build a castle on quicksand —a 2 year old trying to capture the end of a run-away full sized firehose.

Let that be so. Then why when something is said clearly is it immediately dismissed as a rationalization or dishonest in some way.

How, when everything is dismissed one way or another can your side claim to know what we teach?

De Montfort clearly lays down an initial qualifier under which everything else said about Mary is to be understood. So it's dismissed. He GAVE you what, at least HE was saying, and you wouldn't not accept that he was really saying it.

At least some of the difficulty in understanding Catholic teaching comes from the pre-emptive editing out the parts that make the teaching look plausible or acceptable.

So to do that and then complain that it's hard to find out what the teaching is is hard to understand IF one assumes that there is a real interest in knowing the teaching.

[Quix]

I haven’t examined him closely and thoughtfully.

The quick review indicated to me that his qualifier was grossly inadequate for the task you seem to assign to it.