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Why should I get off this "two-thousand year old stuff" when it is the absolutely essential point, next to which everything else pales in meaning? If the Catholic Church was wrong all that time--what could possibly make it right now?

The absurdity of your posture is that by accepting authority today without condition, you reject the authority of past popes and councils. That is the modernist dilemma. You can't have it both ways. You can't buy into their destruction of Tradition and think you are somehow also being Catholic. The protection of Sacred Tradition is paramount. It is all that protects the deposit of faith-- which is already slipping away in most dioceses.

As for your comments on the the alterations of the liturgy, they show some sloppy thinking as well. Of course there were slight changes and adjustments. Noone has ever denied these should be allowed and Pius XII in Mediator Dei makes reference to them. But the Mass must remain essentially unchanged. The key word is "essentially". There are divinely ordained parts which may not be tampered with, not even by a pope.

If there is anything that characterizes most of the people who post here who think like you, it is this inordinate--and unCatholic--exaltation of the pope. You believe authority can do whatever it wants with the faith and with what has been handed-down. That is not true. Authority is the servant of Tradition, not the other way around. No mandate can ever be legitimately exercised which would attack Tradition. According to Vatican I, papal authority itself has divine protection from error only insofar as it guards Tradition and the deposit of faith. If it should attack Tradition itself, it would lose its claim even to its own authority.

Who says I accept authority without conidtion? My condition is that the authority be divinely appointed which I believe is true of the hierarchy. That does not mean automatic compliance with his will , simply deference .

If the Catholic Church was wrong all that time--what could possibly make it right now?

This needs said again, only bigger:

If the Catholic Church was wrong all that time--what could possibly make it right now?