What is Reddit's opinion of Teaching with Authority: How to Cut Through Doctrinal Confusion & Understand What the Church Really Says?

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I gave a quick glance to the website you linked to, but the short answer is probably no. Papal encyclicals and pronouncements are highly authoritative, but infallibile statements require a clear intent from the Pope to definitively define a matter of faith and practice. As the Code of Cannon Law states, in cases of doubt a teaching is to be regarded as non-infallible: “No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident” (can. 749 §3). The Dictatus Papae not only has an area of doubt regarding whether it was meant to be a definite pronouncement by Gregory VII, but there is also doubt on whether the text itself is Gregory the VIIth's or not! (even if it's probable he held those principles, we don't know the language he'd use to formulate them, and the language used is precisely what tells us if it was meant to be infallibile) There is thus doubt, and it means that it should be taken as non-infallible. The statements themselves may contain infallible truths (such as "God established the Catholic Church". [In a sense if I myself tell a friend of mine "Jesus is true man and true God" I'm saying an infallible truth, even if I'm not the Pope]), but the pronouncement is not rendering those declarations infalible per se.

If you'd be interested in learning about the levels of authority Church teachings have and which of those are infallible, I'd highly recommend you Jimmy Akin's "Teaching with Authority: How to Cut Through Doctrinal Confusion & Understand What the Church Really Says" it's a pretty comprehensive and quite accessible resource for knowinh how the Church teaches 👍🏻. God bless!

I think that your problems will be solved by a more exact understanding of what infallibility means. It is a very rarely used faculty (it has only been used twice in modern history so far) and only applies to cases when the Pope explicitly invoques his authority as successor of Peter to define a truth of faith or morals. The text Pope Francis issued today is nothing like that (and he has never pronounced any infallible ex-cathedra statement so far). This document is simply a legal decree (which may be reversed by another Pope in the future, or even by himself) with which faithful catholics can respectfully disagree without placing themselves in away from the communion of the Church.

Ps. I very dearly recommend Jimmy Akin's book <strong>Teaching with Authority</strong> it's a great primer on the levels of authority with which the Church teaches, and how to distinguish each of them.

Hey I am all about limiting the spread of the deadly disease; all the factors must be weighed, however and opposing the widespread distribution of a morally illicit vaccine for a virus that isn't that bad in the first place is not the same as being a murder for those people that have died. Appeals to emotion are weak ones and generally stand contrary to reason.

Church teaching isn't as cut and dry as we think. It is developed over periods of hundreds and thousands of years. I'd encourage you to read up on it. Wikipedia gives a short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magisterium

Better detail can be found in Jimmy Akin's book: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Authority-Doctrinal-Confusion-Understand/dp/1683570944