These folks want their cake and to eat it, too. If they want to nail 95 these (or 7 heresies) a la Martin Luther to the pope’s doorstop, fine. But they trip over themselves making all these appeals to magisterial authority. You can’t have it both ways. They end up with this tortured logic so that they can still affirm magisterial authority but also point out why Francis is not the very magisterial authority they are using to refute, well… Francis.

If they disagree on the theology on the basis of their own evaluation and conscience, fine. I’ll still disagree with them, but I would respect the position more. But they do it with an appeal to authority and tradition while selectively deciding which pieces of magisterial authority are legitimate.

Liberals tend to have more integrity when they disagree with the magisterium. They will usually just admit that the magisterium is capable of being wrong. It’s a lot simpler than saying “the magisterium is infallible… except when it isn’t.”