Shielding your conscience on moral or doctrinal or liturgical issues on anyone in the hierarchy right now won't get you to heaven.  You must study the Bible and the Magisterium to do that.  Christ said 2000 years ago towards those blue-collar folks who would hang their hat on the Jewish hierarchy, For I tell you, that unless your justice abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.—Mt 5:20.  A few hundred years later, most Arians were bishops and most Catholics trusted them.  Maybe they said things like "These are protected offices so God couldn't let 99% of all bishops be wrong." [...]

Wiktionary erroneously defines epikeia as "the principle in ethics that a law can be broken to achieve a greater good."  Of course, the notion that the end justifies the means can never be squared with Catholic moral theology.  As soon as one believes that the end justifies the means, one approaches the moral theology heresies of consequentialism and proportionalism.  I blogged against those errors here in a post called The Greater Good is Not a Catholic Moral System especially when applied to forcing people to take an experimental injection "for the greater good" a couple years ago. But St. Thomas Aquinas did hold epikeia to be an important virtue.  St. Thomas essentially [...]