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Is everything the Church teaches infallible? How can you tell what is and what isn’t? Just how much weight are we supposed to give to particular teachings? As Catholics, we trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church, and much of the time, we do not have a pressing need to determine the precise level of authority of a particular statement in a magisterial document. But sometimes we do, particularly in apologetic contexts: Liberal dissenters may try to dismiss teachings that are infa …

In recent days, former First Lady Michelle Obama admitted in an interview that she had her daughters through in vitro fertilization (IVF). In this excerpt from her new book Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Tough Moral Issues, co-author Leila Miller looks at what the Church teaches about IVF.In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)Years ago, I was listening to Ron Reagan, Jr. advocate on television for embryonic stem cell research. He was strongly in support of using "excess" human embryos from IV …

Leading your Protestant friends into the Catholic Church can seem like a hopeless task. Your friend may seem too far away, too biased against Catholicism, or even too apathetic. I would have loved to have had Jimmy Akin as my wingman in discussions with Protestants about Catholicism more times than I can count, but he is usually busy and, last I checked, hadn’t mastered the art of bilocation. I was sitting at lunch one day with friends: one Catholic, two Protestants, and we were having a …

  Identifying Infallible TeachingsSometimes people ask, “Is this document infallible?”The question is problematic because the Magisterium doesn’t issue documents whose teaching is infallible from beginning to end. Instead, it issues documents that contain individual propositions that are infallible.In Ineffabilis Deus (1854) and Munificentissimus Deus (1950)—the documents that defined the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary—only a single sentence …

In 1983, at thirteen years of age, I walked into a United Pentecostal church and had the experience of “speaking in tongues.” I was then taken, along with my mom and sister, to a baptismal tank and baptized “in the name of Jesus.” All of this took place at a “revival” service we attended at the invitation of a lady my mother knew from work.My family attended a Southern Baptist church in those days. Although we were not associated with a church in my earliest …