[Introductory note: On April 15, 1997, at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California (Archdiocese of Los Angeles), I gave the final lecture in a four-part series on apologetics. My predecessors were Rev. Robert Barron, assistant professor of philosophy and theology at Mundelein Seminary; Bishop Stephen E. Blaire, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles; and Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. Fr. Rausch used his lecture to blast “the new apologists,” and he named names: Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Peter Kreeft, Dale Vree, Thomas Howard, the late Sheldon Vanauken. He reserved a disproportionate amount of his ire for me. Naturally enough, his comments forced me to modify the focus of my remarks, which were to be on how to respond to the Fundamentalist challenge. Below is the text that I delivered.]
To be assigned the last slot in a lecture series carries advantages and disadvantages. You have the luxury of the last word and, if necessary, the consolation of having a chance to explain and defend yourself—something I propose to do momentarily—but you also find that your theme and possibly even your style have been determined for you by your predecessors. This I unhappily learned last year. I brought to a conference a typescript about which I was especially proud. My remarks were framed—rather cleverly, I thought—in the style of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Imagine my dismay when a preceding speaker, Peter Kreeft, used the same motif for his remarks. I realized at once that I would be unable to trump him—the letter I had composed was supposedly from an apprentice tempter, but his was from Lucifer himself. I was forced to discard my typescript and speak extemporaneously.
I do not feel in such desperate straits today, yet I find that my topic, which concerns the proper way to deal with Protestant Fundamentalism, already has been reshaped in part by each of the three preceding speakers. It is unnecessary for me to pass along ground already trod by them. I propose, therefore, to emphasize not so much the necessity of evangelization, as delineated in Redemptoris Missio and Ut Unum Sint, but rather the very legitimacy of the evangelization movement that has developed in large part in response to the success enjoyed by Fundamentalists who have sought to pull Catholics from the religion of their upbringing. Today this movement is by no means restricted to dealing with the Fundamentalist challenge, although, ten years ago, that was its chief focus. Today the movement, almost entirely lay-run, attempts to explain Catholicism not just to self-styled “Bible Christians,” but to people of no particular religion and even to those many Catholics who are unsure of their own faith or who rebel against it.
Two of my predecessors in this series, Bishop Stephen E. Blaire and Fr. Thomas P. Rausch, have used the term “new apologetics” to label this movement. One might begin by noting that this is not a new label. The phrase “a new apologetic” was used by Msgr. Ronald Knox as the subtitle to his never-completed book Proving God, which he worked on more than forty years ago, and even then the phrase was not new. It was used by Catholic apologists of the twenties and thirties, the heyday of the Catholic Evidence Guild, to label an apologetic movement that sought to deal with questions that actually were on the minds of non-Catholic inquirers (as distinguished from questions that were only in the minds of textbook writers).
Looked at one way, the term “new apologetics” conveys barely more than chronology: It is the latest form of apologetics, whatever form that might be. Using this connotation it would be right to say that at one time Justin Martyr engaged in the new apologetics. Later, Augustine was a new apologist, as were Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, and, in this country, Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker. But this merely chronological connotation empties the term of useful meaning and is not really the sense in which the term is used today—at least not by those who publicly oppose what they label “the new apologetics.”
Of course, not everyone uses the term pejoratively; in these remarks I will use it neutrally. But those who do use it pejoratively designate by it something they consider wrong-headed and possibly dangerous. They think that the new apologists not only have an unnuanced understanding of the Catholic faith and little familiarity with modern Catholic theologizing, but that their methodologies are ineffective or even counterproductive. Some of the critics fear that the new apologists will injure ecumenical relations. Others worry that the new apologists will sap their own work of needed vitality. (They do not say this in so many words, but this seems to be a major concern.)
Some opponents of the new apologetics cite the conclusion of a study prepared for the American bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Proselytism. The study concluded that there “is little empirical evidence” to support the theory that one of the key reasons for defections “is proselytism on the part of other churches.” On the contrary, other churches “may be attracting Catholics because of their warm evangelization, rather than because of coercive techniques.”
This sets up a straw man. Coercive techniques are almost never used when Catholics are proselytized. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and self-described “Bible Christians” twist no arms, make no threats, suggest no violence. On the other hand, Catholics do not leave the Church of their upbringing solely because these other churches carry on “warm evangelization”—that is, they do not leave solely for social or emotional reasons. Such reasons may move them to investigate these other churches—encouragement by a Fundamentalist neighbor may induce a Catholic to attend a Bible study, for example—but Catholics do not join these churches unless they subscribe to their distinctive doctrinal positions. No one becomes a Mormon unless he believes in the historicity of Joseph Smith’s revelations. No one becomes a Jehovah’s Witness unless he concludes that Jesus Christ is not divine and that hell does not exist. No one becomes a Fundamentalist unless he holds that the Bible is the sole rule of faith.
The process that brings Catholics out of the Church and into other religions almost always includes appeals to the intellect. Calls these appeals what you will—proselytism, proof texting, or just plain arguing—the appeals work, and they work because they are couched in terms of the duty of Catholics to apply reason to their faith. These Catholics, many of them habitual Mass-goers, have received little intellectual sustenance from their parishes. They are effectively uncatechized. In not a few cases they have been decatechized: Private doubts have been thrust upon them, and they quietly wonder why they should remain in a church whose leaders issue contradictory messages from the pulpit and in the confessional.
So how should we deal with Catholics who are on their way out of the Church and with people who are encouraging them to leave and to join “Bible believing” churches? And how should we deal with those Catholics, even more numerous, who are not tempted to join such churches but who simply fall away from the active practice of the faith or who reject portions of it?
Bishop Blaire suggests that “the proper modality for apologetics as we enter the new millennium is one of persuasion through dialogue.” In this I believe he is exactly right, and this happens to be the approach that the new apologists have been using with considerable effect. The dialogue may be conducted privately, over a considerable period of time, or publicly, in a single evening. It need not be oral; it may be in the form of letters, pamphlets, or books. It may be conducted across the airwaves. Recently it has been conducted through e-mail and in Internet newsgroups. However it is manifested, it consists in a reciprocal sharing of perspectives, of beliefs, of differences—always, one hopes, in an atmosphere of charity.
While I concur with Bishop Blaire in the necessity of dialogue, I must demur when he says that “[r]esearch suggests that it is not theological argument which is going to bring people back.” I find the research to which he alludes faulty in that it does not take into account the testimony of those who actually engage in apologetics as a vocation or a profession. Our experience is all to the contrary: Theological argument, while not a universal salve, has brought many back to the Church or into the Church for the first time. This is especially true of former Fundamentalists, many of whom once were Catholic, many of whom never were Catholic but were nourished on anti-Catholic prejudices. I have yet to meet a Fundamentalist-turned-Catholic who came into the Church without engaging in—and without expecting to be engaged in—argumentation. Nearly always, in fact, it is the Fundamentalist who brings up disputed points, long before he has any suspicion that the Catholic faith is an option for him.
True, no one can be argued into faith, but the act of faith may be impossible for those whose way to the Church is strewn with stumbling blocks. The apologist’s task is to remove the stumbling blocks or, at least, to help inquirers see around them. Are popes sinners? Indeed, as are we all, but the inquirer needs to learn that the absence of papal impeccability tells us nothing about the existence of papal infallibility. Do Catholics worship Mary? Of course not, but it is not enough to wave one’s hand dismissively, as though the question is beneath consideration. The charge must be answered as forthrightly as it is made. To do less is to show little respect for the non-Catholic, who, understandably enough, will go away thinking that an unanswered question is an unanswerable question.
I agree with Bishop Blaire that, in the case of fallen-away Catholics, all that may be necessary for a resumption of active participation in the Church is a friendly invitation to return to Mass and the sacraments. Sometimes it surprises one to see how little coaxing it takes to bring the lethargic to their spiritual senses. But a mere invitation is never enough if we are dealing with Catholics who have difficulties or doubts about what the Church teaches on faith or morals, or with Christians who belong to other churches precisely because they disagree with Catholic beliefs, or with the unchurched, who will see no point in accepting an invitation if they cannot take Christianity seriously in the first place.
Many people harbor a fear of controversy. Dialogue is fine, they say, so long as there is little focus on differences. Nothing good can come from argument, no matter how civilly it may be conducted. But such an attitude strips dialogue of its usefulness. A disinclination to argue about differences implies a lack of respect for the other person, an unwillingness to consider his views important. As Rabbi Jacob Neusner has written, “[W]e can argue only if we take one another seriously . . . [W]e can enter into dialogue only if we honor both ourselves and the other.”
If we are unwilling to deal with Fundamentalists and others on their own terms, we should not be surprised if we see little ecumenical progress being made with them. However necessary it is for scholars to work in remote acreages of the mind—and undoubtedly that is necessary—we avoid an authentically ecumenical engagement if we decline to fashion an apologetic that approaches people on a popular level and treats their concerns seriously. It is likely that no one has ever been brought from atheism to theism merely by an application of Aquinas’s five proofs, and it is equally likely that no one has ever been brought from nominal Christianity to fervent Christianity by a deconstruction of biblical texts.
The new apologists are criticized for harboring skepticism regarding some of today’s theologizing. Fr. Rausch says, “Whatever their primary motivation, these new apologists are deeply suspicious of modern scholarship.” He sees “a lack of sympathy for mainstream Roman Catholic theology.” The new apologists suffer from “an inability to reconcile faith with critical reason,” and they “appear unable to enter into a real dialogue with modernity, with the critical questions it raises for faith.”
If I may be so bold as to criticize these comments, I would note first that “contemporary Catholic theology” is not of one cloth. William May is not Charles Curran. Joseph Ratzinger is not Edward Schillebeeckx. Bernard Orchard is not Raymond Brown. Each of these men is a Catholic theologian writing today, and thus each produces “contemporary Catholic theology.” If the new apologists are unsympathetic to the thought of the second man in each pairing, it is no more and no less accurate to say that the opponents of the new apologists are unsympathetic to the thought of the first man in each pairing. Thus, it would be equally accurate—and equally meaningless—for the new apologists to say of their detractors that they are unsympathetic to that half of “contemporary Catholic theology” which is the one more closely aligned with the thought of John Paul II.
Fr. Rausch claims that the new apologists “are relentlessly hostile to contemporary Catholic theology precisely because it is critical.” This is incorrect, on two grounds. The new apologists use much contemporary Catholic theology, such as that produced by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Avery Dulles, Aidan Nichols, and even Francis Sullivan (the latter with occasional reservations, admittedly). To the extent the new apologists are “hostile” to “contemporary Catholic theology,” their “hostility” is either to heterodoxy, as exemplified in the promotion of priestly ordination for women or in the rejection of Humanae Vitae, or to poorly reasoned positions, such as those adduced in favor of the late dating of the New Testament books.
Let us grant that “hostility” toward some “contemporary Catholic theology” exists (though I think it might better be described as “skepticism”). What is the origin of it? Fr. Rausch says the new apologists dislike what he identifies as mainstream theology because it is critical and they are not. But much of that theology is critical only in a certain sense. It is critical in that it criticizes what has been the received teaching or understanding. But it is often quite uncritical when looking at itself.
One of its greatest failings—and this is shown most especially in biblical studies—is that many scholars have misappropriated the methodology of statistics and frame their arguments in terms of probabilities. Probabilities are piled upon probabilities, with little appreciation that, as intermediate probabilities multiply, the final probability rapidly shrinks in size, often to the point of impossibility. Something that is “more likely than not” is said to be dependent upon something that “in all likelihood is so,” which is turn arises out of something else that is “nearly certain.” In the hands of these exegetes, the result is not what a mathematician would expect—virtually zero—but instead is hailed as one of the “assured results of modern critical scholarship.” As J. A. Baird has noted:
“[O]ne has only to pick up almost any commentary and read at random: “without a doubt,” “there can be no question,” “it is obvious that,” “it is absolutely certain.” There is no field of human thought further from scientific discipline, at this moment, than that of biblical exegesis.”
Credulity has never been considered a virtue, except by those who have a stake in it. Far more blameworthy than a reluctance to embrace all.aspects of modern theology uncritically is the fear, shown by some theologians, of the truly innovative or revolutionary.
Consider the reception given to men engaged not in parroting doctoral dissertations, but in producing original work. In 1976 appeared John A. T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament. Robinson, an Anglican bishop, could not be accused of being a conservative. It was his 1963 book, Honest to God, that ushered in the self-styled New Morality. In Redating the New Testamenthe said he wanted to take a fresh look at the evidence for dating the books of the New Testament.
He said, “Indeed what one looks for in vain in much recent scholarship is any seriously wrestling with the external or internal evidence for the dating of individual books . . . rather than an a prioripattern of theological development into which they are then made to fit.” Robinson cited Norman Perrin as a good bad example of this tendency.
Robinson noted that no book of the New Testament mentions the fall of Jerusalem, which occurred in A.D. 70, as a past fact. “[T]he silence is . . . as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark.” Robinson concludes that the Gospel of Matthew could have been written as early as the year 40 and that Revelation probably was written, not at the close of the century, but in 68. When Robinson’s argument was not pooh-poohed by the critics, it was ignored. Similarly with the later argument of the recently-deceased Claude Tresmontant, professor at the Sorbonne. He concluded that Matthew’s Gospel as we have it, in Greek, must have been a translation of an original in Hebrew, and that original must have been written no later than the year 40 and possibly within a year of the Resurrection of Christ—similarly with the other Gospels.
Tresmontant too has been shunted aside, as was the late Jean Carmignac, a Dead Sea Scrolls translator. He used a distinctive analysis that he described as “principally philological but also historical on occasion,” as distinguished from Robinson’s methodology, which he termed “exclusively historical,” and Tresmontant’s, which he termed “partially historical and partially philological.” Carmignac also concluded that the synoptics were written first in Hebrew and only later were translated into Greek.
Among his arguments was this startling one concerning the Benedictus, which appears in Luke 1:68-79. In the first line of the second strophe is the verb hânan, which is the root of the name John. In the second line is the verb zâkar, which is the root of the name Zachary. In the third line is the verb shâba, which is the root of the name Elizabeth. This triple allusion to the three protagonists appears only if our Greek text is “translated backward” into Hebrew; it does not appear in Greek or in English.
Like Robinson, like Tresmontant, Carmignac was tut-tutted off stage. He had declined to acquiesce to the reigning orthodoxy. He was authentically critical in his research, and the sorry fact is that many theologians—and this is especially true of biblical scholars—are not really very scientific in their work. They are weak where physical scientists tend to be strong. Scientists tend to be ruthlessly self-critical, and they reject hypotheses that fail to stand up to tests to which they have been subjected. The problem with some modern theology is not just that it fails to entertain contrary views, but it persists in holding hypotheses “in favor of which solid and satisfactory evidence has never been adduced.” A good example of this is the supposed existence of the document Q, without which the theory of Markan priority would collapse. No external evidence for Q has ever been located—Papias’s Logia does not really qualify. The argument for Q’s existence depends on the Gospels’ internal evidence, of which there is very little. A great edifice has been built upon Q. The structure and dating of the Gospels are said to be dependent on Q. If so, then Q is the most important document of Christian antiquity, yet no writer in antiquity seems to have heard of it.
In college, in a history of science course, we studied the Ptolemaic theory in detail. We used the celestial measurements taken down by the ancients and worked out the complex mathematical formulas, and we demonstrated how the sun, the planets, and the stars orbited the earth along cycles and epicycles. There was great beauty and deep satisfaction in the way that the Ptolemaic theory, to use the medieval expression, “saved the appearances”—that is, the way it accounted for observations taken by the naked eye. The theory even explained the retrograde motion of some of the planets. Then we turned to the more precise measurements taken by Tycho Brahe in the late sixteenth century; his observations of the planets formed the basis for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. We saw that the Ptolemaic theory had trouble accommodating the new data. Once the telescope was invented a few decades after Brahe’s time, measurements became still more precise, and it became obvious that the Ptolemaic theory no longer worked, no longer “saved the appearances,” and it collapsed. It was a magnificent theory, one on which many scholarly reputations depended, but it disappeared overnight. I often think of the Ptolemaic theory when I think of the theory of Markan priority and Q and how that modern theory is being undermined by advances in biblical knowledge. I would not be surprised to see the latter theory supplanted as quickly as the former was.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary dates Matthew’s Gospel between A.D. 80 and 90 and more likely toward the end of that decade. This seems to be the received opinion, but it is being challenged today not just by the exegetes I have mentioned, but from another direction, that of papyrology. At the end of 1994 Carsten Thiede, a papyrologist who directs the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, Germany, announced his findings concerning three papyrus scraps belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford. The scraps contain phrases from the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. A few decades earlier the scraps had been dated as coming from the end of the second century and therefore were thought uninteresting and were forgotten, but Thiede, literally taking a fresh look by using a newly invented high-power microscope, concluded that the dating was faulty. He said the scraps were written no later than the year 60, which is to say about three decades earlier than the date given in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. As The Times of London said, the finding “provides the first material evidence that the Gospel according to St. Matthew is an eyewitness account written by contemporaries of Christ.”
If Thiede’s finding is accurate—or if the conclusions of Robinson, Tresmontant, or Carmignac are borne out—much recent biblical scholarship will have to be rethought—as, in many quarters, it is being rethought anyway. This is a prospect many contemporary scholars fear, since their life’s work would be proved valueless: Nothing has less currency than a passé theory. The trauma would be comparable to that suffered, in the eighteenth century, by believers in phlogiston, who saw their writings become worthless when the oxygen theory of combustion was promulgated.
Thus it appears that it may not be the new apologists who are uncritical in their positions. It may be that their opinions will be, in a few years’ time, in considerably greater favor than the ones now preferred by their opponents. With that prospect in mind, perhaps I need not take too seriously Fr. Rausch’s complaint that I take “the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6 as the historical words of Jesus rather than as the Eucharistic theology of the Johannine community.” I plead nolo contendere, since I think the evidence points to an early date for the composition of John’s Gospel—at least thirty years earlier than generally thought—and, if so, John must have been the author of the Gospel attributed to him. There would have been no time for any “Johannine community” to arise and to embellish his writings. Thus the words attributed to Jesus in John 6 are likely to be his ipsissima verba, not just his ipsissima vox.
By the way, we must be cautious in attributing much to these communities. As admitted in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary’s discussion of the composition of John’s Gospel, these communities are hypotheses, mere theoretical constructs built up from evaluations of the internal structure of the books in question. There is scant evidence for the communities outside of the New Testament. Martin Hengel’s judgment was that these “community constructions” often seem to be modern fabrications rather than historical realities.
However that may be, I am reminded of the salutary words written by A. H. N. Green-Armytage nearly fifty years ago:
“There is a world—I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit—which is not the world in which I live. In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from facts but always from somebody else’s version of the same story. . . . In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees. In my world, if I read that Mr. Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. In my world we say, “The First World War took place in 1914-1918.” In that world they say, “The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century.” In my world men and women live for a considerable time—seventy, eighty, even a hundred years—and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear) they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they “preserve traces of primitive tradition” about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.”
Then there is the stinging indictment that the new apologists like old books. I have been chided, for example, for recommending the 1914 Catholic Encyclopedia over the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia. In most cases, I think, I am right to do so. The original edition has a third again as many pages, and those pages are set in considerably smaller type. Admittedly, that edition covers fifty fewer years than does the later one, but the difference in format and the missing half century mean that it covers many topics that are not covered at all in the second edition, and those that are covered in both editions are usually covered in much greater depth in the original. I discovered this when writing Catholicism and Fundamentalism. The 1967 edition of the encyclopedia has scant information on Bishop Josip Strossmayer, to whom is attributed, falsely, an anti-papal speech said to have been given at Vatican I. The speech is not even mentioned in the 1967 edition. The 1914 edition’s article on Strossmayer is twice as long and discusses the forgery.
Not only have I been chided for using an encyclopedia written before I was born, but for recommending a book written by a biblical scholar who has the effrontery to believe in the historicity of the infancy narratives. In my reveries I imagine a clerical figure, looking somewhat like Claude Rains in Casablanca, saying, “I am shocked—shocked I say—to learn that a contemporary Catholic scholar believes what no Catholic scholar doubted until the late twentieth century.”
I once knew a deacon who had succumbed to the sin of chronological snobbery. He refused to read any religion book written before 1965, the year that Vatican II ended. Nothing that came before was any longer of value, he said. I did not embarrass him by asking whether he read the Bible. If one were to be so foolish as to mark a date as a cutoff for reading, surely it would be prudent, if choosing 1965, to forswear reading books published later rather than earlier. It is better to give up Hans Küng for Karl Adam, Joyce Carol Oates for Flannery O’Connor, Maya Angelou for Dante Alighieri. The deacon forgot—or maybe never knew—that whoever marries the spirit of the age will be widowed in the next.
But one does not have to make such a choice, and the new apologists do not make it. In their work they draw from the latest Catholic writers, such as John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger, and from the oldest, such as Cyprian and Irenaeus. The new apologists are the only ones, so far as I can see, who, in popular writings and lectures, regularly quote the Fathers of the Church. They are engaged not just in a theoretical, but in a practical ressourcement. With T. S. Eliot they firmly believe that the dead have something to say to us and that “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
I recall speaking at a parish in Los Angeles some years ago and recommending patristic writings to my listeners. That evening our book table sold thirty three-volume sets of the writings of the Fathers. Those sets, which sold for forty-five dollars apiece, were purchased by everyday Catholics who had just been reminded that their faith was not born in 1965 but is two thousand years old. I wonder how many students taught by critics of the new apologetics ever purchase the writings of the Fathers—other than when forced to buy a pocketbook edition for classroom use?
This brings us to a recurring argument of the opponents of the new apologetics. The new apologists must be wrong because, as Fr. Rausch says, “[m]ost theologians would disagree” with them. But this is facile. As David R. Hall notes, “The fact that a line of inquiry begun by Scholar A was developed by a hundred scholars in the next generation does not make that line of inquiry more valid than that of Scholar B whose work is almost forgotten. Scholar A’s work was certainly fruitful in the propagation of doctoral theses, but not necessarily in the propagation of truth.”
We are to believe that, if “most theologians” hold a position on a certain issue, the position must be true. That’s flabby thinking. Recall the movie Twelve Angry Men. It was about how one juror held out for acquittal, turned out to be right, and eventually convinced the other eleven. No one watching that movie would have thought it good if the lone juror had decided to go along with the others merely because “most jurors” initially believed in the defendant’s guilt. Keep in mind that theologians do not enjoy the charism of infallibility. At times “most theologians” simply are wrong about a particular point. We need to examine the point itself, not take a hand count.
Along these lines Henri de Lubac wrote about an incident in the life of Paul Claudel, the French statesman, poet, and playwright. In 1907 Claudel received a letter from Jacques Riviere, “a young intellectual nearly destroyed by the pernicious philosophies of the day.” Riviere wrote, “I can see that Christianity is dying. . . . People no longer know why our towns are still surmounted by spires which are no longer the prayers of any of us; they don’t know what is the point of those great buildings which are now hemmed in by railway stations and hospitals and from which the people themselves have expelled the monks; they don’t know why the graveyards display pretentious stucco crosses of execrable design.” De Lubac remarked, “And Claudel’s answer to that cry of anguish was undoubtedly a good one: ‘Truth is not concerned with how many people it convinces.’”
If relying on numbers does not work, there are other arguments. If I may say so, I found it unhelpful that Fr. Rausch engaged in name calling (such as using “ultra conservative” to describe William Most, a Scripture scholar with whom he disagrees). Regarding people who espoused a position he did not hold, Fr. Rausch said he “wonder[ed] if any of them have read and assimilated” the relevant documents. He seemed unable to imagine that perhaps they had and had found good reasons not to draw his conclusions. It struck me as ungenerous for him to say that “some of the new apologists are genuinely concerned about the loss of Catholics” to Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Only “some”? He forgets that the new apologists are the people who most often write and speak about this exodus out of the Church, and they are the only ones who have been successful in bringing former Catholics back in appreciable numbers.
Another complaint against the new apologists is that they engage in triumphalism—a curious word. It is what philosopher and rhetorician Richard Weaver called a “devil term.” Such terms, he said, “defy any real analysis. That is to say, one cannot explain how they generate their peculiar force of repudiation. One only recognizes them as publicly-agreed-upon devil terms.” It is enough to call the new apologists triumphalistic: No need to define the term or see if it fits. In what do they expect to triumph? In the Church at the end of the world? Yes, at least in that. In the fact that many people who fell away from the Church are now returning to it? Yes, in that fact they are pleased. In their wish, found in Vatican II and shared by every Catholic until just a few decades ago, that non-Catholics might enjoy the fullness of Christian faith as found only within the Catholic Church? Yes, even in that. But if that is what triumphalism is, one should ask more fervently why those opposed to the new apologetics wish to distance themselves from these goals, which have been Catholic goals as long as there has been a Catholic Church. Perhaps the perfervid use of epithets such as “triumphalistic” tells us less about those against whom the epithets are placed than about those who place the epithets.
I wonder: Can’t we, in these internal squabbles, evince a little more charity? Can’t we give the benefit of the doubt to fellow Catholics with whom we happen to disagree? Perhaps a little caution is in order on the part of those who dislike the new apologetics. Although these strictures in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism were addressed to literary critics, they seem applicable to some of these other critics too:
But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a Critic’s noble name,
Be sure yourself and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.
Each of my two immediate predecessors in this series made a comment that seemed to me especially melancholy, though unintentionally so. Bishop Blaire remarked that “the NCCB Committee on Pastoral Practices has contracted with a liturgical and scriptural scholar to prepare reflections which incorporate the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church into the Sunday homily, while maintaining the integrity of the homily” as a reflection on the day’s readings.
I confess that I found this news disconcerting. Have we so declined that parish priests feel themselves incapable of composing good homilies without the supervision of a national committee? If so, then such supervision will not help them. A priest who has not already made the teaching of the Church his own cannot pass along that teaching by parroting the work of a lone “liturgical and scriptural scholar,” even one chosen by the bishops.
Perhaps I am expecting too much in expecting priests to do their own homework and to draw their homilies out of their interior faith—but then I always have thought that presidents should give far fewer speeches and only those that they compose themselves. However effective the words of Ted Sorensen and Peggy Noonan, I still prefer the ipsissima verba of Washington and Lincoln. The Farewell Address and the Gettysburg Address are memorable not just because they are well written, but because in them we see the souls of the speakers—something we have not seen in inaugural addresses for many decades. For a priest to catechize his congregation well, he first must be catechized himself, and a well-catechized priest will have little need for a national committee to oversee his homilies.
In what I found to be his most melancholy remark, Fr. Rausch said that, “after more than twenty years of teaching theology to undergraduates in a Roman Catholic University . . . the language in which we try to present the Good News doesn’t have much meaning to many today, particularly to young adults.” He conceded that his theology and methodology fail to win minds or hearts. But the theology and methodology of the new apologists actually work. At Catholic Answers, for instance, we can show visitors thousands of letters from college students and young adults who received no spiritual sustenance from their nominally Catholic universities but plenty from the kind of apologetics engaged in by the people Fr. Rausch castigates. He complains that “these new apologists will not be able to help contemporary Catholics develop a faith that is at once traditional and critical, able to withstand the challenges of secular modernity.” There is deep irony here in that it has been his own side that has “withstood” secular modernity by collapsing before it. Most of those allied with him cheerfully accept contraception as a positive good, they succumb to pop psychology fads, such as the enneagram, and from their ranks has come not a single major opponent of abortion.
One thinks of Milton, using, in Lycidas, an image from Dante’s Paradiso:
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
How many young people have left nominally Catholic universities with their faith malnourished? How many of them have sought intellectual and spiritual sustenance from their religion courses only to find themselves, like the sheep, taking in nothing more substantial than air? Worse yet, how many of them “rot inwardly” and have gone on to spread confusions—or have forsaken the Catholic Church for another?
Joseph Priestly—the Unitarian philosopher and scientist who ended up being Hilaire Belloc’s maternal great-great-grandfather—wrote in his Memoirs about a debate in Parliament regarding the Test Laws. Lord Sandwich, a naval man and not a theologian, said in frustration, “I have heard frequent use of the words ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ but I confess myself at a loss to know precisely what they mean.” William Warburton, the Anglican bishop of Gloucester, whispered to him, “Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.”
That’s an engaging definition, but not an especially useful one. Let me propose an alternative for our use. It is simple, and it is old: Catholic orthodoxy consists of those teachings affirmed by the popes, and heterodoxy consists of contrary teachings. In our time, as in all times in Church history, truly critical minds and truly effective apologists will recognize that evangelization, if it is to be successful, must be based on right belief, and right belief cannot be reduced to a matter of individual preference or to a lazy acceptance of whichever “doxy” happens to be popular at the moment. From right belief will flow right action. In the absence of right belief, no right action will be forthcoming. No response to the Fundamentalist challenge—or to any other challenge, whether from outside or inside the Church—will prove fruitful unless it is grounded first in Catholic truth. No apologetic, whether denominated “new” or “old,” will win hearts and minds unless it is rooted in doctrinal fidelity, spiritual transparency, and evident charity.