I view them as the Catholic Church "church fathers". As such I use them to show that what those "church fathers" believed often contradicts what the Catholic Church teaches today. We are shown in scripture that "churches" had strayed and taken in pagan beliefs already in Revelation. There is no way that just because they were writing in the second century that they can be considered correct in all they believed.
That's just desperation.
They're grasping at straws of any kind somehow give their teachings some credibility.
It is revealed truth always living in the mind of the Church, or, if it is preferred, the present thought of the Church in continuity with her traditional thought, which is for it the final criterion, according to which the living magisterium adopts as true or rejects as false the often obscure and confused formulas which occur in the monuments of the past.
Thus are explained both her respect for the writings of the Fathers of the Church and her supreme independence towards those writings–she judges them more than she is judged by them .” — Catholic Encyclopedia: “Tradition and Living Magisterium;” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15006b.htm, emp. mine.
And as Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. finds,
When one hears today the call for a return to a patristic interpretation of Scripture, there is often latent in it a recollection of Church documents that spoke at times of the "˜unanimous consent of the Fathers´ as the guide for biblical interpretation.(fn. 23) But just what this would entail is far from clear. For, as already mentioned, there were Church Fathers who did use a form of the historical-critical method, suited to their own day, and advocated a literal interpretation of Scripture, not the allegorical. But not all did so.
Yet there was no uniform or monolithic patristic interpretation, either in the Greek Church of the East, Alexandrian or Antiochene, or in the Latin Church of the West. No one can ever tell us where such a " unanimous consent of the fathers" is to be found, and Pius XII finally thought it pertinent to call attention to the fact that there are but few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church, " nor are those more numerous about which the teaching of the Holy Fathers is unanimous." (fn. 24) Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Scripture, The Soul of Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 70.