Trent sits down with Karl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers, to discuss what got him involved in apologetics and how we should understand the specific brand of fundamentalism that relentlessly attacks the Catholic Church.
Trent Horn: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. Rain or shine, health or sickness.
Trent Horn: Today, it’s sickness. I got a little bit of a bug over the weekend and it’s still following me here in to the week. Not going to have new episodes up here at the beginning of the week because I’m feeling under the weather. So do pray that I do get a little bit better.
Trent Horn: I thought I would share with you, though, an interview I did a while back with Mr. Karl Keating, Founder and President of Catholic Answers–founder and former President of Catholic Answers–on anti-Catholicism. The rise of anti-Catholicism.
Trent Horn: Karl is a wonderful chap. A very warm gentleman, insightful, smart guy. I was really glad to get to know him during my start here at Catholic Answers when he was still President, when he finished out his term before he went into retirement.
Trent Horn: It was a fun interview we had so I thought I would share that with you today and tomorrow and, hopefully, after that, I will be full of vim and vigor and back to full strength to broadcast new episodes to all of you.
Trent Horn: So without further ado, here is my interview with one, Mr. Karl Keating.
Trent Horn: Hello, I’m Trent Horn and apologist and speaker with Catholic Answers. Today, I’m here with Karl Keating. Karl is the Founder of Catholic Answers and still serves as a Senior fellow with the organization and we’re going to be talking today about anti-Catholicism. So, Karl, welcome.
Karl Keating: Thank you, Trent. Good to be with you.
Trent Horn: Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be involved in the world of Catholic apologetics, essentially?
Karl Keating: Well, I suppose I could say I backed into it. I was practicing as an attorney for some years when one Sunday, my wife and I came out of mass here in a parish in San Diego and discovered, on the cars in the parking lot, tracts that had been put under the windshield wipers these tracts were against the priesthood and against the Eucharist, and they had been published by a fundamentalist church located just a mile away, an independent outfit that occupied what once had been a theater.
Karl Keating: So I read through these tracts and was just appalled at the misinformation in them and I looked around and I saw nobody seemed to be inclined to do anything about this, so I said “Well, what the heck, you know, I’m a Catholic, maybe I have a responsibility to do something.”
Trent Horn: So it starts with “Somebody’s got to do this” and when you look around and it’s nobody then it turns into “Looks like I’ve got to do something about this”.
Karl Keating: Yeah I guess it’s a bit about “Who wants to volunteer?” and everyone else steps backwards.
Trent Horn: And you’re right there? Okay, so you figured you have to do something about these misinformed tracts that have been left behind.
Karl Keating: Right. So I ended up writing a counter-tract which I ultimately distributed at that church down the road, I didn’t want to put my name on it because I was nobody, and I wanted it to sound somewhat authoritative, so well I needed to invent the name of a group, here I am Catholic, giving answers, ah! Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: And it’s born.
Karl Keating: And it was born. And of course I didn’t want to put my home address on the thing.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm.
Karl Keating: Fearful of that, while I was at work, my wife would be accosted by upset Fundamentalists at the door. So I rented a P.O. box and as I say worked up my tract, and this is in the pre-PC days, so it was actually done on an electric typewriter, had it copied at a copy shop and then I put it on the cars in the parking lot of that Fundamentalist church a few Sundays later.
Karl Keating: My one image that I still have of it was standing across the street after the conclusion of the services there, seeing the people starting to stream out. Especially their deacons or Elders coming first discovering that my tract on their cars, those fellas tried to remove it as quickly as they could but unsuccessfully because their people came out and saw it.
Trent Horn: Right. So they don’t like a taste of their own medicine?
Karl Keating: Yeah they didn’t, and that was it, I had done my good deed.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: That was it, I was gonna go back and do my work but it had occurred to me some days later “I ought to go to the post office just to see if there’s been some reply.”.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm.
Karl Keating: Okay? And I did and the box was full of letters, and strangely some were from Catholics, I don’t know how they got the tract but, the Catholics said “Oh this is great stuff, send us your catalog.” I wrote back and said well “Unfortunately everything is out of print at the moment,” and, by doing that I more or less committed myself to writing more.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm.
Karl Keating: And so over the next few years I wrote more tracts and I ended up liking the field of apologetics, but, when I first went into it even at that event, at that occurrence, I wasn’t especially knowledgeable in how to do apologetics. I knew these folks were wrong, I had to do homework, crack open some books to compose my tract.
Trent Horn: And this is a lot of work to do cause now I think –
Karl Keating: Yeah.
Trent Horn: We really take for granted like when we were presented with an objection to the faith, we can power up the computer just search on Google and it’s not as hard to go and really find these answers, but you literally have to go and sift through just a lot of books, some of them are probably out of print and –
Karl Keating: Yes, yes. I had to collect books that were in and out of print, I had to actually read them and take notes –
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: Compose my thoughts, so it was a slow process and it was one that continued over years. And now I tell people that the first time you commit an overt apologetical act, whether it’s something I did or more usually, responding to the missionary that comes to the door, the first time you do that, and you succeed in having a good answer to the question, at least to one of the questions that is posed to you, the good thing for you is that you develop a sense of confidence, and it suddenly occurs to you, “Huh, all right I got that one down. If I can learn that one point I can learn ten, if I can learn ten I can learn 100”, see?
Trent Horn: And it starts to grow.
Karl Keating: It grows.
Trent Horn: So after that you’ve put out the tracts of the people who are looking for more materials from you, you’re writing more tracts but then eventually this becomes something, instead of a part time hobby it ends up being essentially a full-time apostolate.
Karl Keating: Yes, and it was eating into my work-time considerably, certainly, my home-time, evenings and weekends were consumed with writing, responding individually to people, and eventually in 1986, publishing a newsletter–that was a precursor to Catholic Answers Magazine, which came around some years later. But at that point I was still practicing law, and there came a day when my wife kind of suggested that perhaps I would like to take this activity elsewhere, out of the house. And I followed that suggestion, and ultimately went in to apologetics work full-time.
Trent Horn: So lets talk a little bit about the impact of some of that work, I think that a lot of your work in the late 70’s, back in the 1980’s, was really a turning point for a renaissance in Catholic Apologetics, especially to combat anti-Catholicism, to combat those that are trying to siphon away Catholics to these Fundamental churches.
Karl Keating: Yes and that was a big problem at the time. When I was doing this work, starting in the late 70’s through the 80’s, even through the first half of the 90’s, a very big problem for the Church here in the U.S. was that every year about 100,000 Catholics left the Church to join a Fundamentalist church, they go down the street they leave Saint Miscellaneous and go to Good Book Baptist, okay, and that was almost a one-way street. You almost never heard of people coming the other direction, and that’s what my particular focus was at that time. Partly set off by what happened at my parish that one time, but my interest focused that way, I’ve always enjoyed a good argument and having a back and forth with people, and certainly Protestant Fundamentalists like to argue, and so there was a kind of symbiosis there, but there was a real problem, Trent, in that, so many Catholics were leaving; I knew of churches where the majority of the membership was ex-Catholic.
Trent Horn: Oh wow, in these Fundamentalist churches?
Karl Keating: That’s right.
Trent Horn: Wow.
Karl Keating: And there were a few where every single person was an ex-Catholic. So there was a real problem, fortunately that situation’s been largely changed in the years following, but in those years, thirty years ago say, we had a real exodus. And much of that was based on a very Anti-Catholic mindset, but I think we need to draw a distinction here.
Trent Horn: Yeah tell us more, what do you mean when you talk about Anti-Catholicism?
Karl Keating: I don’t mean someone who disagrees with the tenets of the Catholic faith. Someone who says “Well, I understand your position, I don’t believe in the real presents” or, “I don’t believe in the Authority of the Papacy” or even “I don’t think that Christ established the Catholic Church. So none of that is Anti-Catholic expect in a very nominal way.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: What I mean by anti-Catholic is a kind of attitude, often based on prejudice, certainly on misinformation, that is antagonistic, that doesn’t give the Catholic a chance to explain, doesn’t give the Catholic church credit really for anything, that often will perceive the Catholic faith as something opposed to real Christianity rather than a part of real Christianity.
Trent Horn: Yeah instead of just saying that “Oh I’m a Lutheran, my Presbyterian friends are mistaken but they’re still a part of this whole Christian congregation,” this is the idea that the Catholics are kind of the enemy.
Karl Keating: That’s right, that Lutheran doesn’t say “Every place that the Presbyterians disagree with Lutherans, they’re wrong because A, they’re being misled by their pastors or B, they’re evil or what have you.” But of course there’s no such thing as anti-Presbyterianism or anti-Lutheranism in the same way that there is anti-Catholicism.
Trent Horn: Just the kind of vitriol that we see –
Karl Keating: The vitriol yes, and in some times often it’s not really vitriol, I wouldn’t say that it gets to the level of hatred. There have been, among the many Anti-Catholics I’ve met in the decades, there have been only a hand-full of people that I can say really hated the Catholic church or hated Catholics. Very few. And they would have their personal problems that underlay all that kind of thing.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: But no, the average anti-Catholic in the way I’m using that word, in the way I use that term in my book Catholicism and Fundamentalism, doesn’t hate Catholics, wouldn’t hate the Catholic Church if he understood what it really taught, but has come, perhaps to such a low opinion of the Catholic Church because he’s been misinformed in various ways what the Catholic church teaches, what it’s history has been, how it understands the Bible and so forth.
Trent Horn: Well let’s talk then a little bit during this time period when you wrote Catholicism and Fundamentalism, you’ve put together a lot of these tracts, essays that you’ve written, and a lot of them were written in response to very popular anti-Catholic writers of that time; so who were some of these people and what are some of the things that are unique about their arguments? I think the first one that comes to my mind that would be fun to talk about would be Loraine Boettner.
Karl Keating: Boettner, yes, long-deceased now was a prominent Protestant writer. Not a scholar, but he has a wide popularity among various denominations that had a prejudice in any way against the Catholic church. And he wrote what I end up calling the “Source Book of Anti-Catholicism,” and his book came out in 1962. For many years it was the one to which anti-Catholics would go back when they wanted to substantiate their claims or charges against the Church.
Trent Horn: And the book is called Roman Catholicism?
Karl Keating: Roman Catholicism. Yeah. Still in print, I don’t know that it’s ever been out of print.
Trent Horn: Well what’s amazing to me is the reach it’s had. I mean, yes, the book is approaching on being 50-60 years old now, but I’ll still watch YouTube videos from Fundamentalists, and they won’t cite Boettner but I notice particular phrases or accusations and say “Oh that’s straight out of Boettner” saying that “Auricular confession was invented by the Church in the year 800,” these very specific things, and you say “Wait wait wait, you can go right back to–” and then you ask them “Where does this come from?”, it just kind of comes from this one source-book. But I appreciate in your own book on this subject pointing out that Boettner isn’t very good on his sources.
Karl Keating: No he’s not, he misunderstands a lot of Christian history. And he’ll often say that “Such and so belief or practice of the Catholic church” first shows up, say, in the early 800 or the middle-ages or what have you, when it’s so easy, actually to trace it back to the earliest years of the Church.
Karl Keating: He wasn’t a man, obviously who was a scholar in the true sense, he didn’t go back, check primary sources. He relied on prior people who had their own misconceptions and prejudices but the genius of Boettner, if I may put it that way, is that he gathered all this stuff together, made it a seemingly coherent whole, and ended up with the Summa Theologiae of the anti-Catholic movement in the U.S.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: And so even after his passing, people still go back to him, and whatever little research he did, those who came later even tended to do even less. They would only go back to him, and of course they wouldn’t always even quote him correctly, so you end up over the decades a kind of intellectual decline in the level of anti-Catholicism among a good number of people. I mean, you got another strain of anti-Catholics who in fact have done more homework and have developed arguments that are more solid, still not to my mind convincing. But, those folks never have the cache that Boettner achieved, probably accidentally. I have no reason to think that he was trying to gather to himself a following or anything, he just put together a book that he thought needed to be put together. Anyway, Boettner was the fundamental source I use in Catholicism and Fundamentalism to talk about other folks in movements and there were a number of others that I mention in that book, some are still living, others have passed on.
Trent Horn: Well there’s two that I talk about, one is still around, it’s almost formed kind of a dynasty of its own among Protestant Fundamentalists, and that would be the Swaggarts.
Karl Keating: Yes, even though interestingly, to me Swaggart isn’t quite properly called Fundamentalist.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: Because he’s Pentecostal. But when it comes to the Catholic church, his points of view are not really distinguishable from Loraine Boettner’s reformed point-of-view, or the Baptist point-of-view or whatever, which is why I included him in the book. Jimmy Swaggart is still around, but he has very much less influence, of course, than he did 30 years ago, for various reasons. One of the most poignant figures that I mention is a late Bart Brewer.
Trent Horn: Yes that’s the other person I wanted to mention.
Karl Keating: Brewer, whom I knew, Boettner died before I really got to know much about him, Swaggart I’ve not met, but Brewer I knew, and in fact my first public debate was against Brewer, but Bart had been a Discalced Carmelite Priest, ordained in the 1950’s. He was sent off to the Philippines, got in some girl trouble, was kicked out of the Philippines, came back to this country, ended up leaving the priesthood, and ultimately getting married to somebody else. But in the process, I think what happened was that his wife who came from a Seventh Day Adventist background at that time, was very Anti-Catholic, because historically that church, her church the Adventists, had been very anti-Catholic going back to the 19th century.
Karl Keating: So Bart imbibed that attitude and built on it and although he came from Philadelphia he ended up, throughout his professional career, affecting a kind of Southern drawl that you would expect of a kind of Elmer Gantry character.
Trent Horn: Right, yes.
Karl Keating: But Bart was an activist more so than most Anti-Catholics, in that he actually toured the country and he would actually take a weird – he called it a “Mass Kit” in a way. He would go to a Baptist church and lay out on the table, items that a Priest would have in the alter. So there was the patent, and the chalice, an unconsecrated host, other things like those, and he would regale these Baptist audiences with stories about the shenanigans perpetrated by the Catholic Church.
Karl Keating: Unfortunately Bart was quite bitter, regarding the Church. You find that, unfortunately, quite commonly in people who lead the Church for whatever reason and then think they need to talk about the Church, the bitterness really came through. And, well however that may be. Bart had his ministry, Mission to Catholics International, and as I said, would go around the country regularly, speaking before audiences large and small, and passing along to them his own misconceptions about the Catholic faith.
Trent Horn: And then you found opportunities to engage him, you even engaged him in a debate.
Karl Keating: That’s right, it was actually in that way not really a debate in that the arrangement was that we would each have a 45 minute talk –
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Karl Keating: This was at his church. He wasn’t the Pastor of his church, he was a congregant, but it was his church, his pastor was the moderator, the audience was almost exclusively the membership of that church. He selected the topic, and he decided, more or less, the format. So I felt it was an even game. I went first, I felt a built guilty because I went over the 45 minutes by about 5 minutes, then I sat down, and I was a little curious that the Moderator wasn’t giving me time signals and wasn’t trying to get me off from the microphone as the time expired. So anyway, I wrapped up my argument and I sat down. Bart got up. He spoke for his 45 minutes, and he was about on the second of his five points at that point, and he went on and he went on, he ended up speaking an hour and a half, the Moderator did nothing to moderate.
Trent Horn: Oh wow.
Karl Keating: After all this was Bart’s pastor in front of him, and only when some Catholics in the audience stood up and started complaining that Bart had already taken twice the time I had taken did the Moderator get up from his stupor and tell Bart to bring it to a close.
Trent Horn: Right.
Karl Keating: This was all followed by a long question-and-answer period, and then the long evening was over. And I came from it not only learning something about debating, because as I said this had been my first public debate, at least on religion, but I came away rather encouraged, first of all, when we concluded the Q&A, the audience came up and the Protestants in the audience were thanking me for coming, and they said “We really appreciate it, we never heard that that’s what the Catholic Church taught.” But there’s something else I overheard that was even more of a lesson to me. I heard one woman say to her friend, they were members of that church apparently, she said to her friend, “After the way Bart conducted himself, I’m not going to fellowship here anymore”.
Trent Horn: Oh wow.
Karl Keating: Yeah, and I learned at that point that using histrionics and falsehoods about what your opponent believes, his church’s position, his religions position, that can backfire even among your friends in a severe way. So, at that particular event, of course I was just trying to mind my P’s and Q’s because I was outnumbered there were hundreds of Protestants and a handful of Catholics. But it confirmed to me, and this is something that Catholic Answers has always followed since, that we need to keep our cool and we need to play fair when we’re in public, and that’s very important. And it’s all right to say, and I had to say in some of the questions that I had, it’s all right to say “I don’t know,” and “I’ll get back to you with an answer.” And saying you don’t know is fine; pretending you know or trying to make it look like you know everything, that’s seen through by people.
Trent Horn: And that can be helpful for our listeners who, these Fundamentalists, these anti-Catholic arguments, they’re zombies from the grave that rise from time and time again, and they’ll be confronted with them and may not know how to answer some of them, and your advice for them would be just to be honest and go to a place like Catholic Answers to find the answers.
Karl Keating: Exactly. Yeah, the most convincing thing you can say to an inquirer, whether it’s the missionary at the door or your coworker or a fellow student, whatever it might be, the most effective way to bring that person to begin to appreciate the Catholic faith is to say “On that issue, I don’t know the answer, I will do my homework, I will get back to you” and then get back to the person and say “Here’s the answer.” And that person is gonna say “This Catholic took enough interest in me to do this homework, that says something good about him and his Church. Maybe it deserves a second look.” You know, that’s actually a better thing to do than to have the answer at the time.
Trent Horn: Right, cause they saw you’re willing to put that effort in for them.
Karl Keating: For them, yes, and that makes all the difference. I remember a case here, let me share this with you; we had an in-house Apologist, a woman, on staff, who, received a call from an irate woman who was an anti-Catholic, and her husband who was a fallen-away Catholic when they married, and who had joined her church and had been living that way for some years, he became a Catholic because he was listening to Catholic Answers live.
Trent Horn: Oh wow.
Karl Keating: And the wife was very upset, and the family lived in Southern California, not that far from here, and she was, as I said, just irate and called into our staff apologist who said, very calmly, “Let me understand what you’re saying and work with this person,” and said, “Why don’t you come down and we’ll get together, I’ll spend as much time with you as you need,” and this irate woman decided to march right down here and set those Catholics straight.
Karl Keating: So she came in, spent hours with our apologist and the upshot was not only did she become resolved and acquiescent to her husband becoming a Catholic, she became one too later on. But it wasn’t so much the argumentation; it was that the Catholic apologist was willing to take the time to work through everything with her. See, that’s the key.
Trent Horn: Amen to that.
Speaker 1: If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member-only content. For more information visit TrentHornPodcast.com.