Category: Apologetics

A reader writes:

I would like to know what the best way to become an expert on Catholic apologetics?  I want to someday organize and give lectures around the country on the subject and bring Catholics home.  I am awestruck when you answer the questions thrown at you.  Do I have to go to seminary to become an expert?  Thanks.

First, good for you! We need more workers in the field!

Second, you’re much too kind.

Third, you don’t have to go to seminary.

In fact, I’m unaware of any seminary or theology program in the country that gives people much background in the skills that are actually needed in day-to-day apologetics work. I’ve dealt with people who have masters degrees in famous Catholic theology programs which shall remain nameless and have found that they still had a dramatic learning curve when it came to doing apologetics in the field.

This is understandable since very few seminary and theology professors have much experience in helping people with apologetics in practical situations. You’ll get a much better sense of the kinds of things that one needs to study up on if you listen to the Q & A shows on Catholic Answers Live or read the Ask An Apologist forum at catholic.com.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE I WROTE ON HOW TO BECOME AN APOLOGIST.

The skill-building advice comes toward the end of the piece, but the rest is of use, too–particularly if you want to do apologetics full-time.

Hope it helps!

A reader writes"

I am a Catholic, faithful to Rome, who lives in the heart of anti-Catholic USA (thank you, Jimmy Swaggert).  I would like to become an apologetic, but I am having difficulty knowing where to start.  The nine book series by Fr. Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham looks good.  Do you have any recommendations for me?  Thank you for your assistance.

The Beginning Apologetics series by Chacon and Burnham is indeed a good place to start, and I’d recommend it.

It’s also recommend these things:

1. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church
2. Read the Bible
3. Read Catholicism & Fundamentalism by Karl Keating
4. Read The Salvation Controversy by me
5. Listen to Catholic Answers Live (online or via radio)
6. Interact on the discussion forums at Catholic.com
7. And, of course, read my blog. 🙂

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"

A reader of my post The Purity Tests raises a good question:

"What you say about the ‘purity filters’ may be true, but how many people are at the stage where they can effectively sift the orthodox from the cleverly disguised heretical?"

This question actually raises another concern that has bothered me for some time now:

Many orthodox Catholics are afraid of error, to such an extent that the avoidance of error can seem to become the driving force in their spiritual lives.

Please understand me: This isn’t a bad impulse. Wanting to avoid error because one wishes to remain faithful to the Church’s magisterium is a good thing. When used in a prudent manner, such an impulse can be self-protection against false teaching. The problem arises when the person is so afraid of error that it prevents him from taking reasonable chances. The often-unspoken fear appears to be that the person is afraid that error is, in itself, sinful, and that a person who is in error in not just wrong on some point but heading toward hell.

Error is not a sin. The only time it can become a sinful situation to be in error is when one is so set in one’s erroneous opinions that the person is not open to correction from properly-constituted authority, such as the Church. For example, a person who innocently believes that Jesus did not found the Catholic Church does not sin by such a belief. Only if that person has reason to believe he should investigate the claims of the Catholic Church to be founded by Christ and refuses to do so does the possibility for culpability for error develop. If he does investigate the claims to the best of his ability, and cannot in good conscience understand those claims to be true, he does not sin even though he is objectively mistaken. But if he comes to the conclusion that the claims are true and refuses to act on those beliefs in the manner to which they should call him, then he may be culpable for his decision not to become Catholic.

You see, the problem is not innocent ignorance or even innocently accepting something as true that is objectively incorrect. The problem is refusing to act upon the knowledge that we have in a manner that is faithful to God. We are not judged on what we know, but on how well we have remained faithful to God through the knowledge we’ve been given. We should seek not to be know-it-alls, but faithful to what we know.

So, to answer the original question. In the words of Christ and the late John Paul II: Be not afraid! In your reading, you may come across ideas that are not entirely orthodox. Your "purity filter" may not catch everything that should be filtered out. You may, in the short term, not have an entirely correct understanding of a particular issue. And that’s okay! So long as you remain open to correction from those you know can provide you with Christian orthodoxy, you need not fear. God will not abandon you and he will bring forth good from the true knowledge that you have. What matters to God is not your expertise but your obedience.

To close, remember the Great Western Schism. There were saints on both sides of the divide who stumped for the various papal contenders. One famous example was St. Vincent Ferrer who supported one of the antipopes. Even when St. Vincent was in error over who was the true pope, he worked miracles and was not directly told by God the identity of the true pope. For many years, St. Vincent’s reputation was bound up with his support of an antipope. The heroic virtue of St. Vincent was that when he realized his error he immediately stopped his support for the antipope and pledged his allegiance to the true pope. He did not seek to justify his past support or rationalize away his knowledge of who the true pope was out of fear for his reputation. He sought only to be faithful. And God rewarded that faithfulness with sanctity even though St. Vincent was not a know-it-all.

St. Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

One of the most frustrating aspects of my work as an apologist is when I am asked to provide an inquirer with a resource on a particular subject that is "one hundred percent faithful to the magisterium of the Catholic Church" and by someone who is "absolutely orthodox." Oftentimes, I may know of a particular resource that would be helpful, but am reluctant to recommend it because it is not "pure" from an orthodox perspective or by someone who can be considered totally orthodox.

Take, for example, John Allen, who is a Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. He is a very good resource for reasonably fair information on current Vatican affairs. As far as I am concerned, his book All the Pope’s Men should be on the required reading list of all aspiring apologists, particularly those seeking to explain why the Vatican takes certain actions that do not seem logical to the ordinary American Catholic. But, because of his credentials and his somewhat center-left approach to Catholicism, I either cannot recommend him much of the time or must load any such recommendation full of caveats. This is not because of a particular flaw in Allen or his work, but to explain to an inquirer exactly what can and cannot be recommended about Allen and his work.

What I have found is that many of the orthodox Catholic inquirers I deal with are very cautious about whom they will listen to or read. A particular author or speaker must offer a book or tape that is either one-hundred-percent orthodox — according, mind you, to this particular person’s perception of orthodoxy — or the resource is anathema. This is an understandable and even noble impulse because the Catholic in question is doing his best to avoid falling into error about the faith. Nevertheless, it is misguided. Let me explain why:

If one limits his exposure to the faith only to those individuals who one is certain largely conform to one’s own understanding of the faith, it is unlikely that such a person will ever grow beyond his own understanding of the faith. Applying "purity tests" to any and all resources that one will consider and automatically rejecting any that fail the exam means that one cannot benefit from the legitimate insights others may offer.

Rather than "purity tests," what orthodox Catholics should consider developing are "purity filters." Learn the faith well enough from orthodox sources to filter out the impurities while still accepting and benefiting from the good stuff an otherwise problematic resource can offer. If there is a question about whether a particular idea or claim is valid or should be trapped by the filter, then call on orthodox resources — such as Catholic Answers — to help figure out what the Church teaches or requires on the subject. A particular resource may end up entirely worthless and be thrown out. Some stuff, though, may be problematic but still useful.

For example, as a Catholic woman who hopes one day to marry and raise a family, I do a lot of personal reading on marriage and parenting. Believe it or not, one of my favorite parenting books is Becoming A Jewish Parent by Daniel Gordis, a Conservative Jewish rabbi. There is, naturally, some information that is either not helpful to me as a potential Catholic parent or follows a more liberal religious approach with which I do not agree. But, as one example of something helpful to Catholic parents in the book, Rabbi Gordis’s approach for teaching parents how to raise their children to marry Jews and raise Jewish families could very easily be adapted by Catholics seeking to raise children who will marry other Catholics and raise Catholic families. A Catholic using a "purity filter" can sort out what is unnecessary for Catholic parenting and take away Rabbi Gordis’s insights that are helpful to any religiously-committed parent.

“Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil. May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:19-23).

In my ever-increasing search for interesting things to blog about, I’ve decided to occasionally discuss how to use the web in your search for answers to apologetics questions.  This particular post will deal with search engines.

Many times people will call the office saying "Where do I find information on [insert obscure subject of your choice]?"  Usually, within five minutes, I have found something online that I can send them.  The trick to doing so is to know how to use search engines effectively.

Most search engines require that you enter key words for it to use in the search.  The more specific the key words, the better.  For example, if the inquirer says "Sister Joan Chittister is speaking at my parish this Sunday.  Do you have any information on whether she is orthodox?" I can go to a search engine, type in "Joan Chittister dissent" and pull up articles that will tell me whether or not the sister in question is orthodox.  (Of course, in this particular case, I already know the answer.  My purpose in running a search in this case would be for links I could send the inquirer documenting Sr. Chittister’s positions on various issues.)

Remember, specific key words are critical.  If you want to information about the Polish Christmas tradition of oplatek and you type "Christmas" into the search engine, you’re going to have to search through a lot of pages to find a recipe for oplatek.  A more fruitful search would use the key words "oplatek recipes."

Where do you find search engines?  The most helpful I’ve found is Google, which has in fact become nearly synonymous with web searching.  Indeed, some unhelpful people will simply tell a novice Internet surfer looking for an obscure bit of trivia to "google it," without explaining what is meant by the term.  If I want to search through a particular site and that site’s own search engine is poor, I use the Google Advanced Search. 

Google will suffice ninety- to ninety-five percent of the time.  For those looking for alternatives, a couple of old reliables are Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! An interesting development in search engines are those that search multiple search engines simultaneously.  A few of them are YaGoohoo!gle (a meld of Yahoo! and Google, natch), DonkeyDo.com, and Dogpile.  (I’m guessing those last two titles might be an intriguing commentary on what must be expected to be found alongside the gems during random Internet searches.)

Once a search engine has spit out a list of results, then one must pan the gold from the silt.  I do this primarily by looking for web URLs with which I am already familiar and know to be from web sites that are orthodox.  Failing that, I must then scan through a prospective article looking for biases and agendas.  Does the writer clearly state only what the Church teaches and use supporting documentation to allow the Church to speak for itself?  Or is the writer stumping for a cause and conscripting the Church’s documents to serve that agenda?

If a new site proves to be especially helpful in providing reasoned, meticulous explanations of the Church’s teachings, I then bookmark it for future reference and send the link off to my inquirer.  If the site has one helpful article but nothing else to recommend it, I may include a caution to the inquirer that the article is helpful but the host site is problematic.

Happy hunting!

A reader writes:

I have an issue that comes up in my classroom often enough. Throughout the year I present and flesh out a list of different reasons to my students why Catholicism is the one, true religion. Included among those reasons are (a) trusting the biblical testimony about Jesus and His miracles, and (b) the collective testimony of 2 billion people today professing belief in Christ and His teachings.

Some students will typically respond that the same two things could be said for Islam–people believe the Qur’an’s testimony about Muhammad and his alleged miracles, and there are alot of Muslims in the world today, too. There question ultimately is: Why should we accept these two reasons when they support Christianity but reject them when they support Islam? I do have a response to this question, but I would be curious to know how you would deal with it.

I would be careful about using the two billion people argument. One might suppose that God has a desire to reach the greatest number of humans and thus would work to see that the true religion is the largest, this argument is subject to a number of significant objections:

• The fact that Christianity is the largest at the moment doesn’t mean that it always was or always will be (indeed, Jesus seems to indicate that it will end up small). Why should we prefer this time period?
• During much of world history, the number of worshippers of the true God has been very, very small. This seems to cast doubt on the supposition used to support the argument.
• To the extent the argument provides evidence for Christianity, it seems to provide half as much evidence for Islam, there being half the number of Muslims in the world that there are Christians.

It thus seems to me that I’d stay away from this argument, at least as here articulated and interpreted. It may have some evidential value, but that seems to be only very limited.

It is possible to argue for the Church as a moral miracle that points to God, but the argument that will need to be made will involve much more than what is presented here.

As to how to defend the first claim, here we are on much firmer ground.

If you read the Qur’an, one of the recurrent themes that comes up with tiresome frequency is the question of why Muhammad can’t perform a miracle. In contrast to Jesus, who performed many miracles in his career, Muhammad seems unable to cough up any. Apparently people were regularly asking Muhammad to perform a miracle so that they might believe what he says (or to prove that he was no prophet at all by his failure to perform them) and he dictated suras explaining why he can’t do so. These suras tend to say the following things (or variations on them) each time the question is raised:

1. Muhammad is only a prophet and so can only do what God lets him.
2. Just look at creation! That’s a miracle!
3. At the end of the world there will be the resurrection of the dead, and that’s a miracle.
4. You’ll get yours for disbelieving God’s prophet!

Not a very convincing set of replies.

The few miracles that are attributed to Muhammad are problematic in various ways: (a) they are not clearly miraculous (e.g., "Hey! We won this battle against our enemies instead of losing it!"), (b) they are based on doubtful interpretations of verses in the Qur’an, or (c) they are based on late sources that do not appear to go back to the time of Muhammad.

By contrast, the evidence for Christianity’s miraculous origin is abundant.

This is not to say that every individual miracle Jesus performed can be verified. In fact, the great majority cannot be at this late date, when all of the eyewitnesses have been dead for so many centuries.

But the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, taken together, are the subject of a very powerful apologetic. Numerous alternatives for these can be tried (the Lord, liar, lunatic trilemma, the testimony of the apostles under pain of death, the failure of alternative explanations), but in the end the evidence supports the fact that Jesus both rose from the dead and then rose from the earth.

Other religions may have reports of miracles, but no other religion has miracles that can withstand the type of cross-examination (no pun intended) that the Resurrection and Ascension can. Therefore, no other religion has the kind of miraculous evidence for its veracity that Christianity does. This gives us a reason to believe in Christianity.

The Center for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine, has an anti-supernatural bias, but occasionally they get on right.

They just did!

(Well, technically they did in their November-December 2004 issue, which just showed up onlin.)

HERE’S A PIECE DEBUNKING THAT WHOLE DA VINCI CODE, HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL NONSENSE ABOUT THE RENNES-LE-CHATEAU, THE PRIORY OF ZION, THE MEROVINGIAN KING LINE BEING DESCENDED FROM JESUS, WHO WAS MARRIED TO MARY MAGDALENE, ETC.

(I wonder if everyone on their staff is a P-10. Sure would be helpful in ferreting out information for their magazine.)

Just did a half-hour radio show (Catholic Spotlight) on KWKY in Des Moines, Iowa. (Unfortunatley, the shows aren’t archived online anywhere–I asked.)

It’s a Catholic show on a Protestant station, and they sometimes get Protestant callers. One such caller tonight was very interested in Bible prophecy. Unfortunatley, she was reading some not-that-great authors on this subject (and was a big fan of The Bible Code), so I tried as charitably as I could to recommend that she not put much faith in some of the stuff she was reading.

For example: She read a passage from a book that claimed the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was what was referred to in Revelation 8:10-11, which prophesies the fall of the star Wormwood and the making bitter of a third of the rivers, killing a bunch of people. She suggested that St. John had no way to recognize a nuclear explosion and thus described it as a star. Confirmation of this interpretation was found in the fact that the Ukrainian word for "wormwood" is "chernobyl."

Well, it ain’t.

I was immediately suspicious of this claim and noted that such rumors often get started and find their ways into people’s books and they survive because people don’t take the trouble to check the original language, which isn’t that hard to do.

I also pointed out that the Chernobyl plant did not have a nuclear explosion (as I later verified, it had a steam explosion, followed by a graphite fire), and so St. John–had he foreseen the event–would not have seen a star falling from the sky or a nuclear explosion. (In fact, he apparently would have seen a nuclear power plant blow off its lid and vent steam and then, depending on the angle of his view, he would have seen a graphite fire start).

To illustrate how easy it is to check language claims of the type made above, I promised to look up the meaning of the word "Chernobyl" after the show and report back.

Here’s what I found . . .

Continue reading “Checking Suspicious Claims”

PROSE PIECE.

FATHERS PIECE.