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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 …

Identifying Infallible Teachings Sometimes 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 each document was infal …