For all you folks who claim that Trent contradicted Aquinas: So what you want me to believe is that the most famous, most studied, and arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the last millennium was contradicted by what is arguably the greatest and is certainly the most studied Ecumenical Council of the last five hundred years… and no Catholics noticed? Just a bunch of Protestant “experts” did?
Seriously?
<cough>
Okay. Whatever…
Aquinas, Etc. 
Good point. I’ve made a similar argument with regard to various Bible passages that seem to contradict each other: do you mean to tell me you don’t think the Apostles had talked about this, that their disciples had studied it, had prayed it, and yet they failed to see the “contradiction” you speak of? More likely is the hypothesis that they *did* understand the verses and how to interpret them such that they did not contradict one another, since the Apostles taught them the true meaning of the words.
Hi Devin,
I agree.
Maybe this malady is an effect of the age: we are all expected to have an opinion on *everything* and those opinions are treated as having weight with almost no regard for the speaker’s authority on the subject. Or maybe it is our shallowness: just because we never heard it before, it is assumed to be “new”.
I think this is related to something I observed while studying Greek and Hebrew: a little knowledge of a Bible language is a dangerous thing, because it makes one prone to think he is a qualified exegete. In the same way, the Greek & Hebrew dictionaries in concordances like Strong’s do far more harm than good because Joe Sixpack thinks it allows him to interpret the Bible with the facility of a seminary professor. It just ain’t so.
Fred
I wish I could “like” this over and over and over! :)
Thank you, Renee :-)