"...competent intellectuals these days who are willing to pretend to believe...."

But an "accusation" isn't proof that competent intellectuals -- systematic theologians, for one -- don't assent to transubstantiation, the Virgin Birth, etc., on faith, as part of the mystery of faith, faith seeking understanding. Likewise, for informed Catholics, the absence of "evidence" is not necessarily the evidence of absence forever (as in the "evidence" that Peter never went to Rome). But there is a point of no return trying to make Revelation (and Catholic belief) into what I has never been -- devoid of a contextuality of faith, reason and tradition (as De Lubac notes). Newman, too, insisted that the character of faith (using analogies from ordinary experience as scaffolding, as it were) supplies the conditions for its own meaningfulness, its own truth, for faith's apprehension. But why make any single issue intrinsic to multitudes of competent theologians not close to  any one way of thinking?