Triggered by Trads

Karl Keating's dislike for Latin-loving traditionalists is well known. He formed his cadre of apologists at Catholic Answers according to his own preferences during his long tenure as president. In his retirement he has published a full-length book about the imminent danger posed by geocentrists and many smaller collections of essays on apologetics and hiking. While his public Facebook page has been filled mostly with thoughts on hiking and self-publishing, most recently he could not help himself from dancing on the fresh graves of a few traddy friendships:

Louis Verrecchio, who once made a living explaining and defending Vatican II at parishes around the country, now decries the council, calling it heretical, and thinks the current pontiff and his immediate predecessors have been heretics. 

But he finds heretics elsewhere, too, such as in the Fatima movement. He says the Fatima Center, which was headed by the late Fr. Nicholas Gruner, has gone off the rails since Gruner's 2015 death. It has betrayed Verrecchio's understanding of the Fatima message. 

As a result, he has castigated the group and in return has been criticized by its supporters, such as Christopher Ferrara, a long-time associate of Gruner. In a post at the Fatima Center's website, Ferrara faulted the group's opponents without naming Verrecchio, though it was clear he had Verrecchio in mind. (He referred to "a grandstanding Catholic blogger.") 

In turn, Verrecchio has responded, saying that, under Gruner, the Fatima Center never would have had nice things to say about a "celebrity cardinal"--a reference to Cardinal Raymond Burke. And so on....

[F]issionble material keeps fissioning. Uranium 238, when it's done fissioning, ends up as lead. That may be a trope for what's happening among a good chunk of the Traditionalist movement. 

The unchristian glee Keating takes in the fallout of friendships among fringe figures is especially aggravating considering the fission among Catholics "in good standing" that he spent his career sweeping under the rug. The man who could never find anything negative worth saying about Cdl. Mahoney's reign of bad taste and bad doctrine never found himself short of words against doctrinally sound if intemperate traditionalists.

Today's Catholic Answers radio show regularly tackles tough, troubling questions like "Why do nuns but not priests take vows of poverty?", "Is it really a sin to vote in favor of homosexual marriage?", and "Why do Catholics pray to saints?" His apologists condemn the iconoclasm of mobs attacking statues of St. Joan, but never the iconoclasm practiced by the clergy. Mediocrity with a sheen of intellectual pretension is Keating's major legacy to American Catholic apologetics; swiftness to wrath against trads his minor legacy. I am convinced this man has done more damage to the traditionalist movement in America than many bishops combined:

In many ways he reminds me of E. Michael Jones, a man who prides himself on properly interpreting arcane aspects of canon law concerning the criticism of bishops while loudly slandering and defaming everyone else in sight. Karl similarly is very intelligent about a small set of outdated apologetics and extremely modern ecclesiastical legislation, while lacking a broader wisdom about the life of the Church as a whole. He is a more learned version of Mark Shea, who once had his feelings hurt by trads long ago and, just like a good Christian, never forgave and forgot.

What future is there for Catholic apologetics? If it is to pull itself out of the depths of irrelevance, it must engage with the more urgent questions of the age. I agree with Dr. Edward Feser that atheism and insufficient philosophies of being are some of the greatest threats to the Faith, but one cannot expect niche-burrowers like Keating or intellectual lightweights like his apprentices to bother engaging with these in any tangible way. Total faithlessness is on the rise, and who will stand against it? Much easier to shoot the easy targets of Protestants and Trads than to mount a defense against a real menace.

Giving and Taking Offense

Fr. Longenecker's latest complain-o-gram on Patheos includes a few noteworthy bits:

Traditionalist Catholics are constantly getting on their high horse. Then its the feminist and homosexualists who are stomping off in high dudgeon. Next it is the Liberals or the Eastern Orthodox or the Lutherans or the college students or the environmentalists.[...]

That’s why we have these college “safe spaces” and the fear of free speech–because other people’s truth is a threat and makes you feel bad.

The irony of criticizing safe spaces while shutting down his own comment box is almost too obvious to point out, but I cannot seem to help myself. Last year, "Fr. Dwight" was deeply offended by any objection to Mother Teresa's canonization, and he frequently displays the same thin skin as most Patheos/Aleteia/NCR/WordOnFire ephemerists. His casual calumnies of everyone who is not exactly him are too boorish to be attended in any great detail.

Still, the basic conceit of the article—that Catholics should grow a sense of humor and thick skin—is solid enough. It is no virtue to be quick to anger at every little thing, nor to be habituated towards emotional rather than intellectual arguments.

One simply wishes that the good padre would take his own advice.

On the Misuse of C.S. Lewis

Lewis, pictured with concubine.

The popularity of C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis among Protestants and modern Catholics rarely extends beyond his writings of apologetics and children’s stories. Sometimes his science fiction—or “scientifiction,” as he called it—gets some attention, but his body of work was quite varied and vast, branching into multiple intellectual fields.

I was recently re-reading the beginning of Lewis’s allegorical memoirs The Pilgrim’s Regress, and observing how oddly opaque so much of its content would be to most readers. Much of it was confounding to me, as well, and I had to rely on the occasional notations of online glosses. Professor Lewis was a well-read and well-rounded man, and not just in the Chestertonian sense. In his youth he wrote narrative poetry that was dense with allegory, and his fascination with medieval poetic tropes would find interesting expression in later fiction. He was learned in multiple languages, though perhaps not with as much enthusiasm as his friend John Tolkien. He wrote treatises on medieval and renaissance poetry that still stand up to academic standards. His apologetics work was, all things considered, more of a hobby or unfortunate necessity than a heartfelt vocation.

Of all his works of Protestant apologetics, Mere Christianity probably remains the most accessible and effective. Some of his other religious books like Miracles and The Problem of Pain are too philosophically abstract for modern readers, and his essays in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory are not structured enough, even though these remain heavily quoted when people find a passage that catches their attention. Some of his religious books are outright ignored by Evangelicals, such as his Reflections on the Psalms, where he called the imprecatory psalms a “festering, gloating, undisguised” collection of wicked hatred. Try aligning that bit of anti-Hebraic rhetoric with Sola Scriptura!

It is a real pity that Catholic writers so often have to rely on Lewis to explain their observations on the Christian religion in a more literary manner. We see this frequently in the engagement of Catholic apologists with the larger culture. The orthodox apologists of old were not literary types, and reading their work today is often quite painful. Even the seminal apologetical work of St. Francis de Sales is bombastic in a way that is tied to the problems of the day, and it does not translate well into modern times. Lewis attempted, at his best, a rhetoric that would outlast his own time, although it must be admitted that many of his essays are too enmeshed with mid-20th century concerns to be universal. World War II, for instance, no longer exists in the popular mind as the imminent threat of London bombings and wartime efforts, but rather as a perpetual stream of aesthetically grimy big-budget films.

Lewis was not a Christian apologist, but a Protestant apologist with pseudo-Catholic and quasi-Patristic leanings. At times he sounds almost Catholic, but then shocks the reader into remembering his Anglican loyalties. His learned rhetoric fools many Catholics into considering him a mostly orthodox commentator. “He was so close to the true Faith,” they say, “surely he was saved in the end.” Impossible to say for sure, but the evidence is not far from damning.

If apologists want to sound as good as Lewis in the public square, they will need to imitate his education, not the surface of his rhetoric. They must read widely, study languages, understand classical logic, and immerse themselves in western history. They must stop watching so many television shows, reading so much Protestant literature, and being so tied to modern thought (religious or secular) by chronological snobbery. And you can thank Prof. Lewis for that last, colorful term. Stop writing poor imitations of The Screwtape Letters, and see how your own education leads you.

"It all began with a picture..."

Do We Need Full-Time Apologists?

Every so often I peruse the New Advent website for the latest from the neo-conservative Catholic clique. Between the Fr. Longenecker and Fr. Zuhl posts, and the “Everything in the Vatican is Fine” stories, one occasionally finds a new article from the retired president of Catholic Answers, Karl Keating. Most recently, he has been writing about why Fundamentalist Protestants should be okay with sacramentals, and how they hypocritically use them even while denying this.

It all seems rather overbearingly redundant. Keating has written so many of the same types of books and articles against Fundamentalists that I’m surprised the CA blog editors haven’t just republished his old work. In spite of his international travels and hiking expeditions—all publicized on Facebook—he seems to be bored enough to scribble out more tracts against dying heretical sects. It feels obsessive, much like the fact that he took the time in his later years to write a 366-page complaint against a fellow who used too much soy sauce with his meal.

All of which brings me to my major question: Should people be treating apologetics as a full-time job? I am not questioning the necessity of apologetics nor the need of learned people to be taking significant amounts of time engaging intellectually with attacks against the Faith, but the decision of laymen to devote much or most of their time to such engagements appears to be a recent phenomenon. Ever since the creation of the Catholic Evidence Guild in 1918, their peculiar method of public interaction with anti-Catholic rhetoric has been the norm in apologetics circles.

The work of apologetics used to be shouldered by men who lived primarily other avocations. They engaged in apologetics as necessary, but not as a full-time career, whether that be in the form of public speakers in Hyde Park, radio broadcasters, or bloggers. Many of the best apologists were not just apologists—Augustine was a bishop, Thomas Aquinas a monk and philosopher, Blaise Pascal a mathematician and inventor, G.K. Chesterton a journalist and novelist, Ronald Knox a priest and schoolmaster, Peter Kreeft a university professor, and so on. Even C.S. Lewis, the best Protestant apologist of recent memory, was chiefly a scholar, professor, poet, and novelist.

The greatest apologists were men who lived lives of broad interest and learning, who made their livings in other ways, much as how St. Paul paid for his own expenses by tentmaking. The men who focus all their intellect and livelihood on the defense of the Faith are apt to end up with middling obsessions. One needs only to look at current figures like E. Michael Jones, Michael Voris, Mark Shea, Karl Keating, and a thousand full-time bloggers to see the proof of this. I always worry when a Catholic blogger announces he has decided to devote all his time to defending the Church against atheists/neo-Catholics/Democrats/rad-trads/Fundamentalists/Choose-Your-Poison; within five years I expect him to be foaming at the mouth with a tiny readership, yelling in an unseemly way at his chosen target.

Go outside. Read a novel. Plant a garden. Visit Europe. Go fishing. Write a poem. Play a video game. Find something else to occupy your time in between your job and your intermittent apologetical engagements. Chesterton could not have written Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man without losing his sense of humor had he not spent his leisure time drinking wine, wandering the streets of London, and smoking good cigars. Full-time apologists end up either as obsessed extremists or as religious businessmen, which is what usually happens in the Protestant world (as with Francis Schaeffer, Norman Geisler, Lee Strobel, and Hank Hanegraaff). When apologists start selling tickets to “Learn Your Faith” sea cruises, simony has found its foothold.

Extra Ecclesiam

One of the Catholic doctrines most alien to a convert, but also the most urgent spur for conversion, is the long-disused extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. It is a cause for wonder, a mystery almost as deep as that of predestination. Fear of dying outside the Church, a society seemingly necessary for salvation, is one of the greatest motivators for leaving one’s non-Catholic life behind. The Church is the pearl of great price, the barque of Peter, the city of God, all worth more than any measly treasures that can be found outside its confines. Without the terrible suspicion that extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is true, many would never convert at all.

So what a shock it is to the convert who has sold all he has in order to obtain this pearl, to realize that few within Peter’s barque actually care about this doctrine. Even those who believe it are strangely apathetic in defending or promulgating it. The fewer who both believe and insist upon this doctrine are considered mad if not schismatic—Fr. Feeney’s disciples, sedevacantists, and a few others—which is greatly ironic if not humorous.

I am not here making any historical arguments for or against this doctrine, nor any argument concerning a particular method of interpretation. Rather, I am noting the existential crisis this necessarily causes in the soul of the convert. He has been told that he must do A (convert) in order to achieve positive consequence B (Heaven) and avoid the negative consequence C (Hell). While C is still possible after doing A, it is not avoidable without A. However, once A is complete, he is suddenly told that he might have achieved B without A, but now that A is done he can no longer achieve B if he repudiates A.

There’s a lie in here, somewhere, and the convert knows it. He knows he’s been lied to, but unsure at what point the lie occurs. Is it a lie that nobody outside the Church is saved? Is it a lie that the Catholic Church is the “Church” referred to in this doctrine? Is the lie that he could have remained blissfully ignorant of all things Catholic and floated into Heaven on his mere good intentions?

The answer, if one is given at all, is usually that “outside,” “Church,” and “no” are fuzzy concepts that admit to multiple interpretations. After listening to this half-baked sophistry for an hour or two, the convert inevitably asks the question: Did I need to convert to be saved? Heaven help him if he asks a Balthasarian. At least the Feeneyite will try to keep him Catholic.

The exclusivity of the Catholic doctrine is nearly unknown among Protestant denominations. Most of them will acknowledge the basic acceptability of other broadly Christian creedal communities, in spite of doctrinal and practical disagreements. Islam is one of the few world religions to also profess exclusivism, which is probably one of the reasons why they have opposed Catholicism so vociferously for centuries.

I am not suggesting that the proper interpretation of extra Ecclesiam is a simple or easy one, but it has to mean something, and the apologists drop the ball explaining the doctrine even while practically acting as though the interpretation ought to be strict. After all, they insist that everyone who is capable of understanding the teachings of the Church must investigate them and then strive to become her members. Their salvation, supposedly, depends on it. Which is why the apologists scurry into the cracks once they are queried about John Paul’s praise of other religions, Mother Theresa’s indifferentism towards the pagans under her care, and Cdl. Ratzinger’s assurance to a Lutheran that she could safely remain non-Catholic.

The terrifying attrition rate of Catholic converts should give us pause. Many converts feel that they have been lied to on their way in, and that the extra Ecclesiam doctrine is used as a bully stick to keep them from leaving. Nobody likes to feel trapped, and those who apostatize often do so out of a sense of desperation rather than boredom or malice.

As I’ve said before, a healthy dose of realism is necessary for those shepherding new converts into the One Fold. They need to be realistic about the failings of the Church today, and brutally honest towards those they are godfathering or sponsoring. The Church on Earth is the Church Militant, but militant not only towards the non-Catholic world and the Devil; the Catholic must also be on his guard against the many threats within the Church. It has always been this way, and if 1950s-triumphalism is responsible for any great evil it was the dulling of the wit towards internal threats.

(José Benlliure y Gil)

Apollonius the Compassionate Apologist

Today marks the traditional commemoration of a certain St. Apollonius (one of many bearing that name), a Roman senator sentenced to death under the Emperor Commodus in the late second century after he had been betrayed by a servant. St. Jerome writes a brief hagiography in his De Viris Illustribus:

Apollonius, a Roman senator under the emperor Commodus, having been denounced by a slave as a Christian, gained permission to give a reason for his faith and wrote a remarkable volume which he read in the senate, yet none the less, by the will of the senate, he was beheaded for Christ by virtue of an ancient law among them, that Christians who had once been brought before their judgment seat should not be dismissed unless they recanted. (ch. 42)

Eusebius also has a slightly longer entry in his Ecclesiastical History (V.21). While Apollonius’ Apologia was apparently lost after the patristic age, an account of his martyrdom purporting to be original was discovered and published in the 19th century. It can be read below.



Apollonius is a patron saint, presumably, of apologetics. The Apologia recounted above shows his deep love for Christ, the Faith, and even for his opponents. His accusations against paganism would be echoed later in Augustine’s City of God, as are his more benevolent references to that greatest of pagan thinkers, Socrates. The exchange at the very end also shows his willingness to let go of the argument once his opponent becomes obstinate:

The magistrate said—“I thought that thou wast changed in the night from that mind of thine.”

Apollonius said—“And I expected that thy thoughts would be changed in the night and the eyes of thy spirit be opened by my answer: and that thy heart would bear fruit, and that thou wouldst worship God, the Creator of all, and unto Him continually offer thy prayers by means of compassion; for compassion shown to men by men is a bloodless sacrifice and holy unto God.” (43-44)

There is a wide gulf between the Christian defense of Apollonius and the bloodlessly logical approach to apologetics in today’s Anglosphere. The Randian “A is A” will convert no one but heartless pedants, and them only in the most shallow manner.

Unrelated image.

Keating’s Parthian Shots

One year ago Karl Keating, Esq. stepped down as president of the apologetics apostolate Catholic Answers. He founded the group in 1982 after plucking some unpleasantly anti-Catholic tracts out from beneath his windshield wiper blades. He became a full-time apologist in 1988 with the written endorsement of Archbishop Roger Mahony. Deciding that Fundamentalists were the greatest immediate threat to American Catholicism, he published the nearly 400-page Catholicism and Fundamentalism through Ignatius Press and focused his organization on correcting Fundamentalist-style Protestant objections to the Faith.

Ever since his retirement, Keating has focused his energies on his old loves of hiking, travel, and writing about the people who annoy him most. The last year and a half has proven to be a fruitful literary period for Keating, and his output already includes such extended essays as No Apology, Jeremiah’s Lament, and Anti-Catholic Junk Food, and two more full-length books (in excess of 300 pages each): Apologetics the English Way and The New Geocentrists. His book The Ultimate Catholic Quiz—“intended both for the individual reader (that means you) and for parish-based adult-education and RCIA programs” (source)—is due to be published next month.

Giving the bishop a pass?

Keating’s writing and speaking style has always been dry, bordering on the pedantic, and usually lacking any but the most abstract kind of humor. He wears an uncomfortable smile in most photographs, and in interviews he gives the impression of having a low-level obsessive personality disorder. His Catholicism and Fundamentalism is so boorishly focused on the history of American Evangelicalism that the reader is shocked when he actually starts talking about the theological errors supposedly under discussion.

In addition to being annoyed by Fundamentalists, Keating has a long-running dislike for Catholic Traditionalists. He and his Catholic Answers crew have focused many assaults on the traddy fringe for decades, inferring if not implying that to have any part of the Traditionalist movement is to be on a slippery slope down into anti-Semitism, sedevacantism, Feeneyism, and all around extremism. It is well known that the “Traditional Catholicism” forum on the Catholic Answers website has been ruled with an iron fist ever since its introduction about a decade ago.

His retirement has given Keating the time to gather his notes about the rad trads (no affiliation), especially his favorite traddy target, Robert Sungenis, M.A.

Agitation and Propagation

“And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias; that he may turn the hearts of the fathers unto the children, and the incredulous to the wisdom of the just, to prepare unto the Lord a perfect people.” (Lk. i)

“And when it was now noon, Elias jested at them, saying: Cry with a louder voice: for he is a god, and perhaps he is talking, or is in an inn, or on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep, and must be awaked!” (1 Kg. xviii)

Say what you will about the tenants of the Bolshevist revolutionaries, at least they got things done. Their promulgation techniques were brutalistically effective, using posters and traveling theatre to disseminate the communist message throughout the better part of a continent. Using the techniques of the Marxist Georgy Plekhanov, propaganda is the dissemination of many ideas to a small group through reason and discourse, while agitation is the dissemination of one idea to a large mass of people through emotional and often irrational means. In other words, propaganda is for the smarties, and agitation is for the dummies. Both means have the same end: conformity to the state philosophy. Refusal to conform has the same end in each case: imprisonment or execution, depending on which is most convenient.

Or worse, deletion from history.

The Soviets were not the first to use agitprop. Indeed, most societies throughout history have used something along these lines in order to disseminate their ideals. When presenting philosophies, ideas, or doctrines to the unconvinced, it has always been practical to use a two-pronged approach for the various intellectual classes. Most governments use some form of agitprop for rallying the troops, if not for more nefarious ends.

On Nostalgia, Apologetics, and Apostasy

“I don’t think this was covered in Mass Confusion.”

“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt freely: the cucumbers come into our mind, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. Our soul is dry, our eyes behold nothing else but manna.” (Numbers 11)

In addition to his series on nostalgia, His Traddiness has brought up the strange case of Michael Coren’s recent apostasy. This is assuredly a sad event and one for which we ought to offer up our prayers and fasts. It is also part of the ongoing statistical trend of Catholics leaving the Faith, or at least the practice of it, that has been happening for decades. Cradle Catholics are leaving because they are too smart not to perceive the irrelevance of what they see and hear from their prelates every week. Converts leave for these and many other reasons, not the least of which is the budding suspicion that they have been seriously deceived by the apologists who argued them into the Church.

Not all converts come in through the agency of apologetics. Some marry into the Faith, others are entranced by the beauty of our art and music, and a few just want to be a part of the same philosophical school as Thomas Aquinas. For all these, apologetics plays a secondary role, and the arguments for and against the minutiae of the Faith are not terribly worth considering. One thinks of Rex Mottram’s impatience with Fr. Mowbray’s attempts to catechize this poor, simple fellow in Brideshead Revisited.

I have indeed imparted my opinion to His Traddiness that the Catholic Answers crowd and their countless imitators on EWTN and other publishing imprints do a poor job keeping discontented Catholics in the Church. Back when I was yet unconfirmed, I must credit Catholic Answers particularly for clearing out a lot of the heretical rubble that had been keeping me from understanding what the Church actually taught. I appreciate what their staff writers and speakers did for me all those years ago, so I criticize them with no small measure of sadness.

Karl Keating, founder and occasional president of Catholic Answers, shrugged off Coren’s apostasy in a recent article, saying, “I’m not surprised to see people bouncing from one religious position to another. I’m not surprised about it, and I don’t get worked up about it.” Well, why get worked up about the loss of one of the ninety-nine sheep? All that really matters is the truth, not people: “I do get worked up about truth in advertising,” he says.

Keating is a cradle Catholic, and as such does not have a feeling for the pull that Egypt has on those who have left that pagan nation for the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. The version of the Catholic Church promised by today’s apologists is basically the Arcadian land of 1950s triumphalism, with plenty of Vatican II quotations added in for good measure. The ur-text for Catholic Answers and other apologists is Frank Sheed’s Catholic Evidence Training Outlines, a 1925 manual with extensive instructions about how to speak publicly and deal with hecklers (easily modified for radio shows and blogging), followed by even more detailed outlines of the kinds of subjects a Catholic soapboxer in Hyde Park would have had to opine upon. The Outlines take some inspiration from St. Francis de Sales’ tracts written against the Calvinists back when that heresy was young. When Mr. Sheed was arguing petulant Anglicans into the Catholic fold, they were being received into something solid and stubbornly unprotean, with a community of fellow believers who knew what they knew and knew what they were doing. When Keating and his staff use the same arguments to push the indecisive into the twenty-first century Church, these converts are left unprepared for the pandemonium and disorientation that is about to confront them.

What happens when these CA-converted rabble call in to the radio show to point out the very obvious ecclesiastical problems, well-nigh begging for clarity and encouragement? All too often the caller is told that the priests or bishops in question are “trying their best” to deal with modern problems, that said caller should take comfort in this fact, and thank you for your call. This passive-aggressive, “Everything is Fine” approach to the confused borders on the wicked. These apologists make vocations out of the spiritual works of instructing the ignorant and counseling the doubtful (outside the Church), but fail to comfort the afflicted and counsel the doubtful within the Church.

Is it any wonder that Catholic converts apostatize, that close to one-half of them leave the Church within a year of their confirmation? The Keating answer is simply, “Oh, well. They knew the truth, and couldn’t handle it.” But in reality, these converts are undermined at every step by their parish priest, by their bishop, by their fellow Catholic, most of whom don’t believe even half of what Catholic Answers has triumphantly claimed to be the teaching and practice of the Church.

When our apologists are little more than truth-bots doling out programmed responses to every possible query, then Catholic apologetics have truly reached their final disintegration. All head and no heart, the apologist shrugs as the apostate limps back through the desert to Egypt, bruised and bloodied from the beating his supposed friends have given him. The convert nostalgically remembers his old life—being asked over to dinner to someone’s house every week after church, charitably arguing about the interpretation of some obscure Bible passage with friends at the coffee shop, not being scowled at by all of his relatives—and wonders why he is settling for scraping manna off the ground while Aaron comes by every five minutes to kick him in the ribs.

The Israelites in the desert were scourged for their own infidelity and idolatry. The Catholic convert is scourged to cover up the infidelity and idolatry of others.