text: Judaeo-Christian tradition is as much an academic tradition as a spiritual one, perhaps more so. All such traditions should be open to objective intellectual scrutiny and reasoned counter-argument, whether by social (or any other)  science. 
  
  Unfortunately,  with the ministerial Catholic Church, there is a complicating factor: obduracy. Its provenance is the wildly expanded notion (unofficial, of course) that papal infallibility has a much-wider remit than than the actual dogma allows for.
  
  The common ground for debate here is really academe, not the customary self-regard: 'Roma locuta, causa finita est.'
  
  It is not that both camps talk past one another, but simply that Rome refuses to talk.