Letters after a name or years of study don’t necessarily make a person accurate in his knowledge or teaching of said knowledge. . .I should know, I work in academia with a whole host of those with “credentials” who think that they know everything about everything, and sneer at their colleagues, their students, and especially the staff or the “great unwashed” as being ignoramuses of the first order. . .
But I digress.
Certainly your priest appears to be a scholarly fellow. Equally, the majority of posters here, while we may not have degrees in theology, find some of his ideas at best questionable and at worst approaching near to schism or heresy if not apostacy. That is one of the dangers of a “little learning”.
Now, there are quite well-known scholars such as Father Richard McBrien who have been dancing rather close to the edge. . .no one would deny that McBrien is intelligent and has an impressive list of credentials. . . but not only is a lot of the material he has studied “suspect” in and of itself, his own “interpretations”, while HE might find them fascinating and indeed “worthy”, are not necessarily correct, truthful, or even helpful to himself or any other Catholic.
I’ve been on the EWTN sites and seen all the little “documented” blah-stories of how there have been NO infallible pronouncements, ONE pronouncement, TWO pronouncements, heck, anything up to “hundreds of thousands” of pronouncements. . .and every one of the scholars on a particular position has heaps of little citations from all sorts of books, articles, and their own personal “research” to “prove” their point. Problem is, they can’t all be right.
So I actually tend to walk away (slowly) from those like your priest who come out with a bare-faced statement purporting to “really know” about things like infallibility and the Petrine succession etc.
To my mind, a non-biased person/ scholar would be careful to acknowledge that his or her position is ONE OF MANY, to iterate some of the others, and to give enough information to allow his hearers to make an intelligent choice themselves.
I’ve dealt with too many who tell us, “Scholars recently have determined that most likely this. . .” and then dump all over “what the Church taught in the past was most likely incorrectly understood by people”. These scholars are always right there telling us how much MORE we know today, how ignorant people were in the past, and how much better we know an event that took place 2000 years ago than the people who actually lived then did.
Rant over.
. Obviously, not infallible.
