You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Friday, August 16th, 2019. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we have been talking about the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. We have already

discussed that our church alone was founded by Jesus Christ and the church teaches with the authority of Jesus Christ.

We've also talked about that the Bible isn't enough. Sure, the Bible is the divine Word of God,

an incredible gift for us, but it doesn't specifically address many moral issues that we struggle with today.

We also talked about how the early church set about teaching with Jesus' authority

even while Peter was still around, defining important things that we still practice as Catholics today.

Yesterday on the feast day of the assumption of Mary into heaven, we talked about the

difference between dogma and tradition. Dogma are the official teaching points of our Catholic

faith, things that we need to believe to be Catholic, and tradition are beautiful

stories, but things that we don't necessarily have to, have to believe to be Catholic, but they sure

are darn awesome. Today, we are going to talk about why you should be so, so grateful that you

belong to the Catholic Church and specifically be grateful

for the teaching authority of our church.

Now, as you get older, you probably will realize that as Catholics, we have a couple more

rules to follow than other churches. We have a creed of beliefs.

We have a catechism of beliefs that goes into many different topics. And sometimes it can feel

like we have that there's so many rules and they're taking away our fun maybe.

But I want you to realize that the authority of the church is a gift, something that you should

be grateful for.

The first reason why this is a gift is because many churches that don't have a catechism

...