A reader writes:
I listened recently to Cardinal Dulles’ comments on the History of
Apologetics and was wondering if you could draw lessons from that history
and give the outlook for future apologetics efforts.
Me personally? Well, I’m no Cardinal Dulles, but I’ll do what I can.
Christian apologetics always takes its cue from the envrionment that it is in. In the early days of the Church, it had to defend Christianity against challenges that are very different than those it faces today.
We have now entered the fourth age of human communications, which means that we are now in an unrestricted marketplace of ideas. It isn’t a question of Christianity vs. paganism or Catholicism vs. Protestantism, anymore. It’s Christianity (or, within Christianity, Catholicism) vs. Everybody. The challenges to the Christian faith are no longer confined to a single or a few ideological sources. The world is now so interconnected that the challenges come from every source there is.
This means that apologetics will have to be much more comprehensive in its scope and flexible in its approach. The demands placed upon it are now far, far greater than at any time in history.
Which leads to the next point . . .
In particular, I
was wondering if the predominantly lay involvement in current apologetics
will have an effect on the development of this work.
Yes. It’s essential to the future of apologetics. Because of the fourth-age effect of connecting every viewpoint with every other viewpoint, there will now be a much greater demand for apologetics and thus a greater demand for apologists.
Think of it this way: How many apologists do you need when everyone in the village is Catholic and you have little contact with those outside the village? Now compare that to how many apologists you need when a minority of those in the village are Catholic and everyone in the village is talking to people all over the world on the Internet? The challenge to ideas is going to be far, far greater in the latter circumstance, meaning that there need to be more apologists out there. (Though they don’t necessarily need to live in the same village, since they can create online repositories the villagers can access via the Internet.)
Given the need for the number of apologists to grow, these will come overwhelmingly from the laity. The clergy is simply not prepared at the present moment to shoulder this task. Not only is there the broad-based vocations problem in the developed world, the seminary system has no present ability to teach apologetics to prospective clergymen, and in fact many currents of thought among the clergy are actively hostile to apologetics, wishing to see it go away in favor of ecumenism. Many churchmen today simply have no perception of the need for apologetics (Cardinal Dulles is one of the few who does), as most received their definitive intellectual stamp in an age when apologetics was at its nadir.
Thus apologetics is no exception to the trend of many tasks formerly reserved to the clergy (back in the age when everyone was a farmer) have now devolved to the laity under the pressures of the contemporary environment. For the first time in Christian history, the majority of major apologists are and will continue to be laymen.
Finally, given the
existence of some famously, unreliable "Catholic" apologists, do you
foresee some sort official certification process for public apologists?
Not any time soon. The Church is not at present set up to train or evaluate apologists. There are laws, both universal and particular, that could be brought to bear on particular apologists, but it simply is not practicable to try to certify everyone who wants to do an apologetics web page or write apologetic articles or books.
With the growth of human communications that occurred toward the end of the third age, it became impracticable to grant an imprimatur for every book of a religious nature that was published, and so the Church switched to a model whereby imprimaturs were needed only for certain books. The problematic ones that then got published were handled by another mechanism, with the bishops’ conferences and the CDF issuing warnings against the most egregious books–a process that has not been wholly effective, but which is unavoidable given the volume of publishing that takes place and that needs to take place if the Church is to maintain an active presence in the present media environment.
The same consideratins (among others) make it difficult to enact a broad-based mandatory certification program for apologists. Any attempt to institute one would cause far more harm than good. That’s not to say that it might not be tried in the future, but it would be ill-advised, as well as ineffective. The problematic apologists are the very ones who would ignore the requirements; all it would do is hamper the good ones by making them jump through more hoops, which would deter further good apologists from entering the field, knowing the hoops they’d have to jump through.
I therefore suspect that the future when it comes to cerifying apologists will look more like the present model of imprimaturs on books: Except for very specific exceptions, it’s largely a message of "Go forth and do good, and we’ll warn people about the really major problems that show up"
What books need to have imprimaturs nowadays? For instance, I notice that the “Worship” hymnal we use in our parish is “published with ecclesiastical approval” by the Archdiocese of Chicago. That, to me, has an entirely different meaning. For all we know the chancellor or someone could have signed off on it. If it said “episcopal approval” that might be different.
Perhaps a good place to begin would be for all those who aspire to Apologetics to be trained as Diocesan Catechist’s first. Accreditation would be given by a reputable Agency (authorised for this purpose by the Archbishop of the Diocese) and approved by the Catechetical Office of the Sacred Congregation for the Clergy, in Rome.
This method of structural learning with the sole purpose of handing on of the faith affords no opportunity to flex one’s own perspectives (if they differ) and hence avoiding any seeping in of liberalism, providing a stable foundation faithful to the Church.
A thought.
God Bless.
Can some of you share your thoughts, as to which extent the common Catholic is expected to undertake some apologetics? What suffices, learning-wise: Learning the catechism and the Bible? Is today’s common Catholic not doing enough, if they do not know how to defend their faith against those who are set out to convert them or others, or to scandalize the Church? Has the common Catholic failed by omission, if they are unable to tell their neighbor–at least to some degree beyond the catechism–why their confused neighbor should not convert to another religion? Would the general principle be, “If you are able to learn some apologetics for the purpose of defending the faith, then you should?” (By “able”, I mean, according to ability, the time to learn, and so forth). I’d appreciate some thoughts on this.
Ukok-
Unfortunately, if my experience is any guideline, I would hesitate to recommend diocesan training for aspiring apologists.
I have taught junior high, high school and RCIA classes and the training I received from the diocese was horrendous. Not just inadequate, but positively wrong-headed. The worst kind of modernist, new-agey relativism. I expect that the quality of the training would vary widely, so people should thoroughly check to make sure that the diocesan programs are faithful to the magisterium.
I agree that we are a long way from implementing any type of Church “approved” certification for apologists (what would you do with it anyway?), but I would surely like to see a Catholic equivalent of the Evangelical Biola University’s apologetics program, which my sister-in-law is enrolled in. If an orthodox Catholic college (say, Franciscan University of Stubenville) was able to offer something like this, at least some benchmark could be established and it might lead to the development and rebirth of apologetics as a formally recognized form of theology.
Steubenville’s catechetics degree program (which I’m currently in, with a double major in theology as well) offers most of the skills you’d need in apologetics I’d imagine. Perhaps if they did a catechetics MA with concentration in apologetics?
Interesting topic. And I appreciate your thoughtful answer.
However, when you asked the question – “How many apologists do you need when everyone in the village is Catholic and you have little contact with those outside the village?” – it made me think of another interesting question for which, pehaps, you also have an answer:
“How many apologists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
Here’s my answer to my own question.
“One for each watt.” (what?)
I second the idea of a Catholic equivalent to the Biola apologetics program. It seems that this type of coursework would lend itself to the sort of long distance education currently found at Steubenville, Holy Apostles, etc.
Tim,
I’m sorry to learn that Catechist Training has been so poory given or received in your experience. Had it been approved by the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome?
I was thinking more along the lines of the 2 year home study part time course I’m taking – don’t know how to do links properly here so I’ll just give the URL:
http://www.maryvale.ac.uk/
It’s rigid. No flexibility. The weeds amongst us are surely going to be rooted out with a course like this ?
Pehaps you have something like this programme in America…though I have a friend in Hawaii who has completed a Maryvale course, so if push comes to shove, anyone anywhere could take it.
God Bless.
Another problem with formal certification is that it sets up an economic barrier.
Anyone with access to a decent library can be a self-trained apologist of high caliber. But if that person must also be able to afford a two-year degree program? Much harder. And, at least here in the States, most financial aid is now in the form of loans rather than grants.
Large debt burdens make it difficult not to be “concerned with the things of this world.”
It also depends on what questions will be need to be answered.
In two newsgroups I was in, for some reason the two bits I needed most often were an explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a explanation of why Catholics (or Christians) attempt to convert people (it’s part of our religion!).
OTOH, anything could come up.
Solution to that would be to have dioceses sponser people for apologetics and catechesis to put them through the program. Maybe have a quota of grants/scholarships based on population, with the scholarship given to those already accepted into the program on a provision that they go work for that diocese for x many years as a diocesian or parish apologist/catechist.
Which sounds like a really really good idea, and not just because I’m currently an (amateur) apologist studying to be a catechist at Steubenville 😀
Catechist and Apologist ROTC
An idea that came to me while reading through and discussing Jimmy Akins latest post on the future of apologetics. In it he mentioned the idea of having certified apologists. In the discussion, the idea came up of having an college apologetics …
At the end of Catholicism and Fundamentalism, by Karl Keating, he talks about a really rigorous apologetics program active early last century in England. The book was called Catholic Evidence Training Outline by Frank Sheed. Apparently, it was implemented in a “militarylike system” that was really hard to get qualified in. The focus of the book was training people for street corner apologetics. I had never heard of this book before reading this…
I would like to thank Jimmy for his excellent post on the topic. It is one of those things I always knew but never understood quite so clearly. This is indeed a new age in which everything gets challenged from every angle.
Luckily, our faith includes Scholastic theology which from of old always sought to do just that…
Actually, the more I think about this more excited I get. What kind of faith can withstand a universal onslaught? A universal faith. Catholicism has always had to deal with people attacking it from different angles for completely opposite reasons.
No other faith is better suited to survive this “Fourth Age of Media”.
It means the task of doing apologetics is more difficult for the individual, but we have the tools.
I notice that the latest book from Catholic Answers, the Essential Catholic Survival Guide, seems to already be a response to this dynamic by collating a host of tracts meant to deal with random topics into a single book.
This is good. Because we already have so much information and so many answers to the problems particular to this present Dark Age, a winning tactic would be to make what exists more available. Central to this would be a system of categorizing and cataloging all this information. While tools like the internet, and computers in the home are great advancements, we should not be satisfied.
Systems for searching for information need to be more intuitive and need to be more precise. One example is that the search function on Catholic.com. This could definitely use some tweaking. Some search terms do not bring up related articles simply because the term itself is not mentioned in the text of the more suitable article (or not mentioned frequently).
That is all just battlefield general musing, though…
Stubblespark, I agree with your comment on the search engine at Catholic.com! However, here’s somewhat of a solution for you that I recently implemented, after learning about how to use Google more efficiently:
Search for something like:
site:catholic.com search terms
The part that says site:catholic.com will make Google search Catholic.com for your search terms. It doesn’t help with the problem of the page not containing relevant keywords it should have, but with some experimentation in choosing different keywords, you’ll have a lot more success than if you use Catholic.com’s search engine.
I would sometimes get a lot of results from forums.catholic.com. I think I eliminated the forums part by putting in a “www.”; that is,
site:www.catholic.com search terms
I hope this helps many until Catholic.com can give their engine an overhaul.
P.S. The reason that works a little better, is because I don’t think Catholic.com’s search engine orders pages by relevance when there is more than one search term. If you put in two search terms, for example, sometimes a page will be at the top of the results when it actually only contains one of the search terms.
Also remember that with Google, you can put exact phrases in quotes. Ex.: site:catholic.com “Pope Benedict XVI” — so that you can get results about our current pope, and not every single irrelevant listing that contains one, two, or any combination of the words Pope, Benedict, or XVI.
Regarding Paul’s comment on Diocesan sponsorship;
For, I think, the first time in our diocese, parish priests themselves are open to funding the training of Catechist’s to be instructed and tutored through the Maryvale Institute (I’m sure you have similar in the U.S, don’t you ?) or at least subsidising them as required (as in my own case – I’m paying a third of the course costs but buying all the course materials – very expensive books that are literally worth their weight in gold!-slight exaggeration, but not much)
Interestingly, I was reading this afternoon in the car (not while driving)…
Apostolic Exhortation; Catechesi Tradendae 71 ~
” Training Institutes
We must be grateful to the Lord for this contribution by the laity, but it is also a challenge to our responsibility as pastors, since these lay catechists must be carefully prepared for what is, if not a formally instituted ministry, at the very least a function of great importance in the Church. Their preparation calls on us to organize special centers and institutes, which are to be given assiduous attention by the Bishops. This is a field in which diocesan, interdiocesan or national cooperation proves fertile and fruitful. Here also the material aid provided by the richer Churches to their poor sisters can show the greatest effectiveness, for what better assistance can one Church give to another than to help it to grow as a Church with its own strength?
I would like to recall to all those who are working generously in the service of the Gospel, and to whom I have expressed here my lively encouragement, the instruction given by my venerated predecessor Paul VI: “As evangelizers, we must offer. . . the image of people who are mature in faith and capable of finding a meeting-point beyond the real tensions, thanks to a shared, sincere and disinterested search for truth. Yes, the destiny of evangelization is certainly bound up with the witness of unity given by the Church. This is a source of responsibility and also of comfort.”
God Bless.