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.

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.

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.