Twenty years ago I engaged in my first public debate. My opponent was Bart Brewer of Mission to Catholics International. He once had served as a Catholic priest but now was a Fundamentalist heading an anti-Catholic ministry.
Brewer was ordained in 1957 for the Discalced Carmelites. According to an autobiographical writing, he was assigned to the Philippines, got romantically involved with a high school girl, and was sent packing by his bishop. He left the Carmelites and became a secular priest, working at a parish in San Diego.
Later he worked as a Navy chaplain in Long Beach, going home each night to his mother’s apartment. The two of them listened nightly to Fundamentalist radio preachers. His mother was baptized in a Protestant church, and, when Brewer’s stint in the Navy was over, they moved to San Francisco. He simply walked out on the priesthood.
Brewer’s mother joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and so did he, becoming a pastor and finding a wife. Soon disaffected with Adventist theology, he resigned and returned to San Diego, where he founded Mission to Catholics International and joined an independent Baptist church. His ministry’s office was located on the church’s property, and it was at the church that I debated him.
The format of the debate was determined by Brewer. The topic was of his choosing. The audience was his congregation. The moderator was his pastor. I figured it was a fair fight.
It turned out to be Brewer’s first and last debate. We each had been allotted forty-five minutes to speak. I went first, went a few minutes over, and felt guilty. Brewer spoke next—and spoke and spoke. When ninety minutes had passed, one of the few Catholics in the audience stood up and complained to the moderator that Brewer already had taken twice the allotted time and yet was only part-way through the points he said he wanted to address. The moderator, who had not stirred at all during Brewer’s remarks, walked over to him and told him to wrap it up.
There followed a question-and-answer session and then a late adjournment. I overheard more than one congregant complain about the highhandedness shown by Brewer and the bias shown by the moderator. One woman even declared to a friend, “I won’t fellowship here anymore.”
In later years I did not see Brewer much. I once visited him at his office. He had a single, small bookcase, filled mainly with anti-Catholic screeds of the lowest sort, but he also had a few books of substance. I commented favorably on one of them, and he waved off my remark. He did not need to read such books, he said. “All I need to read is the Bible.”
For about three decades Brewer headed one of the more effective anti-Catholic ministries. He took credit for assisting several priests and nuns and many lay people in transitioning into Fundamentalism. He seemed inordinately pleased that I devoted a chapter to him in Catholicism and Fundamentalism. (For a while he even marketed my book, perhaps because I was the first Catholic to take him seriously.)
Several years ago Brewer suffered a stroke. He no longer could tour Fundamentalist churches and regale audiences with stories of Catholic iniquities. His ministry became a shell. In September 2005 he died.
I wonder whether he had any regrets, any qualms of conscience, in his final years. Did he suspect that he had made a colossal mistake, leaving the true Church for a simulacrum? In his last days did he repent of what he had done, especially his leading so many astray over so many years? I have no way of knowing, but I do know that Bart Brewer, whatever his present state, now knows that he opposed the truth and, therefore, the Truth. Please keep him and those he influenced in prayer.