“So are you going to conk out from the logical inconsistency of your posts and therefore leave us alone?”
I have never been logically inconsistent. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t have a Protestant/government school education so it is a completely foreign thing to me. I have seen it - after all I have read your posts - but I like simply getting things right repeatedly. Life is just simpler and easier that way. Maybe you should try that.
“Probably not. Would that you were one of those androids from that one episode of Star Trek, then you would not be able to trouble us further!”
So the truth troubles you? Well, no real surprise there.
“as Bishop John Hooper recorded in 1551”
I recently encountered a young Protestant couple. They’re really nice young people. He is interested in joining the Catholic Church. She’s more hesitant. He is Lutheran. She is Baptist. He knew something about the Bible. She really didn’t. He talked about how he is trying to keep up with all of the “new” things he is learning: terms, Church teachings, learning about the Bible in a way he never had before, etc. There are plenty of ignorant Protestants STILL out there just like there are plenty of ignorant Catholics. And? Now, I say all of that before I say this: in 1551 - that’s almost 20 years after Henry seized control of the Catholic Church in England - there were few educated Catholic priests left in England because most of them were murdered or forced to flee by then. St. John Fisher - considered one of the greatest scholars of his day as well as a model bishop - was martyred in the 1530s.
By the way, three of the priests Hooper interviewed said it was the King of England who wrote the Lord’s Prayer. They had assimilated the import of the Protestant royal supremacy over the Church in England even as they did not learn the faith. These men were products of their Protestant times as much as anything else. See Powell’s 1971 article called “The Beginnings of Protestantism in Gloucester”. Do I even need to bring up how Rosemary O’Day has put together a good case about how the Protestant clergy from that point on took on the shape of a separate caste from the people, in other words, a “profession”? What I always found so ironic about that is how much Protestants rail against a hierarchical separation between clergy and laity among Catholics and yet completely ignore their own.
“I recently encountered a young Protestant couple. They’re really nice young people. He is interested in joining the Catholic Church. She’s more hesitant. He is Lutheran. She is Baptist. He knew something about the Bible. She really didn’t.”
That would explain their interest in joining Catholicism. Though, how this excuses the ignorance of your Priests and Bishops in those days even of the very basics, I know not.