“Ready to be proven wrong.”
Are you able to logically explain how they prove me wrong? Unless you’re alleging that my quotes are false. If not, you would have to take the time to explain how they’re just kidding in my quotes, but how they’re serious in yours, and how yours, despite the existence of other quotes that define the Eucharist in spiritual and symbolic terms, really proves that they were literalists all along.
You're automatically wrong because you're not Catholic. Had you borrowed a power drill and turned yourself Catholic, you could quote those exact same "Church father" excerpts and magically been counted "right" by the local branch of the FR Magisterium.
The sky's only blue because/when a Catholic says it is. That's how it works around here.
-— Are you able to logically explain how they prove me wrong? ——
There is usually a clear consensus of the Church Fathers. They did not have the gift of infallibility. But “The exception proves the rule.”
Additionally, some statements, taken out of the context of the author’s other writings, or contemporaneous Church Teaching, appear to be ambiguous, when they’re not.
For example, there is a thread on the Catholic Answers web site that addresses Augustine’s Sermon #227, which is supposed to disprove his belief in transubstantiation.
“What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that THE BREAD IS THE BODY OF CHRIST ANDTHECHALICE [WINE] THE BLOOD OF CHRIST.”(Sermons 272)
* * *
“In the reading of Augustine in the perspective of later problems, an attempt has been made to OPPOSE his realistic and symbolic affirmations regarding the Eucharist. But, in fact, his realism and symbolism are NOT in opposition. The reality of the Eucharist is expressed in the Sacrament, which is essentially a SIGN (C. Admin 12.2) : the reality (-res-) of the Eucharistic bread and wine IS the body of Christ, the WHOLE Christ, the Church (Serm 272; In evang Ioh 21.25.4; 26.15). But without pausing over what has since been termed the -res et sacramentum-, Augustine most OFTEN stressed (Serm 37; 131.1) the ULTIMATE REALITY of this Sacrament of UNITY (Serm 227). All his theology of the Church and of the Sacraments is thus centered on UNITY, which is the ultimate reality, because ‘God is love.’”