== Bonjour, transubstantiation, had had, and been being == 

 Bonjour, Proto. Oui, ça va très bien, merci. I'll add that the kindest person I ever met is a priest who has very occasionally told me things that don't match the teaching of the Church. It's quite possible that he spends more time praying and helping others than reading Vatican documents, but it still makes me sad, because I feel we should be able to rely on priests to clarify Church teaching about things we don't have time to read up on ourselves. By the way, transubstantiation would belong to "In essentials, unity"; the ability or powerlessness of the souls in Purgatory to intercede for us would belong to "In non-essentials, liberty". Saint Thomas Aquinas thought they couldn't; Saint John Vianney thought they could. The Church is leaving it open, possibly because she doesn't know. Similarly, when Pope Pius XII was defining the dogma of the Assumption in  
 MUNIFICENTISSIMUS DEUS, 

 :. . . by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith. 

 he deliberately chose wording that left open the question as to whether she was taken up to heaven without dying (an opinion which some people held on account of her sinlessness) or whether she died first (an opinion held by some, as she would conform more to her Son, who was also sinless).  

 So, if I discover that Str1977 or Patsw thinks that she went to heaven without dying, while I think she did die, I won't think that either of them is going against the Church. But, all those anathema sits in the Council of Trent extracts that I quoted earlier would show that the Real Presence is one of the "essentials" requiring unity. 

 When Kimberly Hahn – that red link is going to turn blue in the next few days if I have time – was a Presbyterian wondering about Catholicism, she went into a Catholic Church with her husband, and saw people kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. She thought, if that's really Jesus, then kneeling is the only appropriate response, so is it safe not to kneel? But supposing they're wrong, if that's not Jesus, then what these people are doing is gross idolatory. So is is safe to kneel? (By "safe" she didn't mean that she was thinking she'd be damned if she did the wrong thing, just that since Jesus is worthy of all honour, it would be terrible to deny it to Him, or to give it to a piece of holy bread.) She realized then that "the Catholic Church is not just another denomination – it's either true or diabolical." 

 Sometimes people think that infallibility means the pope can tell us anything he likes (in doctrine). All it means, really, is that he'll be prevented from teaching officially things that aren't true. He doesn't automatically know what's true. (In fact, it's theoretically possible that a pope could believe something heretical, and intend to define it ex cathedra, and would fall down the stairs and break his neck before he got round to doing so!) That's one reason why we have so many non-essentials, but transubstantiation isn't one of them.  

 By the way, I notice from your user page that you don't like "had had". You probably don't like "been being" either. I was never aware of having heard it, until I studied Halliday in some linguistics courses at the Open University. Halliday, as far as I remember, said that people use that construction on average twice a week in spoken English (not in written), and that when you tell them that they said it, they deny not only that they did say it but that they ever could say it. (The house has been being painted for the last two weeks. My cat had just been being sick.) Once I became aware of it, I began to listen for it, and while I wouldn't agree with the "twice a week" claim, it's certainly not uncommon. I've even heard it on Sky News. 

 Salut!