In an intra-office e-mail, one of our staff apologists asked my thoughts about a letter written to us by one of our donors. The donor, whom in this article I will call Mr. Z, was upset that Catholic Answers is sponsoring a cruise in the Caribbean. “With the world situation as it is,” he wrote, “I don’t understand how Catholic Christians could go on such a cruise and keep their consciences clear.” He thought those signing up for the cruise should give their money to charities instead. His complaint gave some pause to my colleague, whom I answered as follows.
Some years ago an American archbishop got a bum rap, I thought, when liberals complained that he accepted the use of a helicopter. The archbishop, a helicopter pilot, intended to use the helicopter to get around his large archdiocese more easily. The helicopter expenses were underwritten by a group of wealthy businessmen, not by funds donated to the archdiocese.
The National Catholic Reporter said the businessmen’s money could have been given directly to the poor. True, but the use they were making of their money was intended to benefit Catholics throughout the region, including the poor ones, even if only indirectly. They could have decided to keep their money in the bank.
The incident was a fine example of how the best can be the enemy of the good.
How a person distributes his largesse is up to him. One always can say there are better ways a donation could be funneled: “It would have been better to donate to X than to Y.” Maybe so, but good still is done when one donates to Y. I think much good can come from the Catholic Answers cruise. Yes, it partly is a vacation for those who book passage. (And so what if that is how they wish to spend this year’s vacation?) But it also will be educational for them.
When the ship is at sea, there will be several talks daily. As you know, aside from myself, the speakers will be Rosalind Moss and James Akin of our staff and three personalities from the Eternal Word Television Network—Marcus Grodi (host of The Journey Home), Jeff Cavins (host of Life on the Rock), and Fr. Mitch Pacwa (host of Mother Angelica Live). The six of us will be available for individual and small-group discussions throughout the cruise. This will give our guests access to “name” apologists in a way not possible otherwise, and I think this will be of much benefit to everyone.
Some guests will be inspired to return home and become more active in evangelization. Some will decide to funnel more of their wealth toward worthy Catholic activities (maybe including ours!). In other cases, the only result may be an invigorated private faith, which itself is a good thing. And a few may decide—after having had time with well-known apologists—that apologetics is something they want to devote their lives to, and that could result in the salvation of many souls.
There always will be people such as Mr. Z who think one’s priorities are wrong or how one puts things is wrong.
I can assure you that each time you speak in public there is someone in the audience who thinks you have done the Church a disservice. That person will not come up to you. He will not elbow his way through the crowds that rush the dais to congratulate you. But he is there, in the back, stewing. You could be the Archangel Gabriel, and he still would be stewing.
Not that he is a bad man, but he sees things through different spectacles. You never will be able to show him that your approach to presenting the faith is a good one. He will think it is too intellectual or not intellectual enough, too affective or not affective enough. He will think your methodology is wrong because you have not done things his way.
This is the human condition. If you were to let that one man’s disgruntlement guide you, you would end up in paralysis, which would be doing a disservice to the others in the audience. Yes, you would like to bring him along; you would like to have him see through your spectacles. But he does not and will not, and there is nothing you can do about it, except to leave things up to God.
So it is with the cruise—and with everything else we do. You are not privy to most of the letters we get complaining about our priorities. We do not get many, but we get a few.
Some people say that no one working for Catholic Answers should be paid a salary because “you are doing God’s work.” (Yes, but “the laborer is worth his hire” [Luke 10:7].) Some say we should focus only on the young because it is too late to recapture anyone over thirty. Others say it is a waste of time to spend money on projects targeting youth. Some say we do not need This Rock because it is over some people’s heads. Others say to junk Be because it is insufficiently intellectual. Some say tracts are useless because they cannot contain the full argument on an issue. Others say the tracts we have are too long and need to be simplified.
When it comes to charitable work, it is not possible to satisfy all the donors all the time. I do not think anyone really expects us to be able to do that, but donors do expect us to be prudent stewards of what they give us, and we try to be. And that reminds me of an important point: We are not dipping into existing funds to underwrite the costs. No money given to Catholic Answers for another purpose is going toward the cruise. The cruise not only is self-sustaining but also generates net income for the apostolate.
If we did not host the cruise, we would not have its net income to use for our work. Our guests on the cruise know that a portion of the ticket cost will end up as “profit” to be used to cover Catholic Answers’ regular apologetics activities. If there were no cruise, would the passengers use the money that otherwise would have gone to their cruise expenses for other charitable work? Maybe, maybe not. They perhaps would use the money to vacation elsewhere or to attend other Catholic conferences.
Mr. Z incorrectly works from the premise that all this is what mathematicians call a zero-sum game. Anything given to A is taken from B. In fact, in cases such as the cruise, anything given to A likely would not have been given to anyone else, and so B is not deprived. What is more, one could say that, at least indirectly, B benefits if A’s work ends up inducing the donor to become a better and more active Catholic and if net proceeds from the cruise end up being employed, in some way, to help B.
I appreciate your sensitivity toward people such as Mr. Z, but, as I said, some people never will be satisfied, and it is not useful to fret about them (it is never useful to fret about anything; fretting is the present-tense version of remorse and is equally spiritually damaging). It is injurious to oneself to get all worked up about trying to please everyone.
The apostle Paul wished to be all things to all men (1 Cor. 9:22). That was his laudable goal, but certainly he did not accomplish it—not because he was insufficiently willing but because of the human condition. It is not possible to be all things to all men because various men want one to be contradictory things. One should not worry about actually achieving such a goal; it is enough to aim for it. Just do the best you can—as I know you already do—and aim for the better, even if the best seems ever just beyond reach.
We have tens of thousands of donors on our list—tens of thousands of distinctive hearts and minds, with each heart wanting to love the faith more and each mind wanting to understand it more. Without these donors, this apostolate would accomplish nothing. Because of them, we have been able to effect some good—not as much as any of us might wish, but not, I think, an insubstantial amount either.
Not all of our donors will be pleased with each.aspect of our work. For all I know, any one donor may have a reservation about this or that initiative we undertake. But I hope all of them, including Mr. Z, know that we are trying, through many means, to strengthen the apostolate so it more effectively might strengthen the faith.