WHY I NO LONGER DEBATE
BEACH ENVY
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Years ago I used to engage in public debates with some frequency, but I haven't been in a debate for a decade. The last one was against Dave Hunt, writer of off-the-wall books excoriating the Catholic Church.
We debated in Detroit in November 1994. The debate had been set up by a local Protestant organization, and nearly all of the people in the large crowd were Protestants.
By the time I met Hunt for that event I had learned how to debate him. The most important thing was not to let him have the last word. I discovered--the hard way--that he wouldn't play fair if given the last word.
He and I had had earlier debates on radio. During the first one he was given the final remarks. He sought to win the listeners to his side with a blunderbuss of a question: "Why should you believe anything said by a church that considered Hitler and Mussolini to be members in good standing?"
And then we went to a commercial. We were off the air but still on the phones and still able to hear one another. I told Hunt what I thought of his cheap shot, and the Protestant moderator joined me in criticism. Hunt was unrepentant. Our debate had had nothing to do with Hitler or Mussolini, but he thought it clever to make his final comment a zinger.
After that, I insisted that Hunt begin our exchanges so that I be the one to speak last, just in case he tried to play the same games (which he did, but in later debates I had a chance to rebut him). By the time of our final debate I had reached the conclusion that debating in general was not a good use of my time.
The first problem was that it takes a lot longer to prepare for a debate than to prepare a lecture. In a lecture your remarks can be as restricted as you wish, but a debate might lead anywhere, so you have to do much more homework. Much of that homework might seem abstruse and unprofitable, but sometimes it comes in handy.
I remember what happened in my very first debate, which was against Bart Brewer, head of Mission to Catholics International. (You will find a chapter about him and his ministry in my book "Catholicism and Fundamentalism.")
That debate really shouldn't have been touted as such. It was two long lectures followed by a question-and-answer session. Brewer went first and spoke interminably (we each had been allotted 50 minutes but he took 90 before being cut off by the moderator, who happened to be his own pastor). Among other whoppers, Brewer claimed that Pope Pius IX, who died in 1878, arranged to have women live with him in the Vatican.
Not long before the debate I read an obscure book about nonsensical anti-Catholic charges, and this was one that the author covered. It turned out that Pius IX indeed arranged to have women live at the Vatican--they were his widowed and impoverished sisters.
Brewer expected that I would have no comeback to his charge, but fortuitously I did. I lucked out, and I learned that for any debate I would have to work up answers to lots of charges that probably would not be made but that might be. It could take two work weeks to prepare for a two-hour exchange.
But I had a deeper reason for losing interest in debates. They didn't seem to do as much good as lectures or as others things to which I could devote my time, such as writing. In terms of efficiency, debates aren't. If one's goal is to win hearts and minds, more can be accomplished by composing articles or by giving talks. Granted, debates can be instructive, but often they are soporific (witness the presidential debates) or just excuses to see fireworks.
Some years after the debate with Dave Hunt I was at a Catholic conference and ran into my friend Steve Ray. He excitedly told me I had to meet Alex Jones because I was "responsible" for his conversion. Alex, said Steve, had been the minister of a Pentecostal church in inner-city Detroit and, with much of his flock, had come over to Rome.
When we were introduced, Alex told me that he had witnessed my debate with Dave Hunt. With a twinkle in his eye and a dart aimed at my ego, he said that not a single thing I said that evening convinced him of the truth of any distinctively Catholic belief or the untruth of any distinctively Protestant belief. (Ouch!)
But, he added, the very last point I made stuck with him. In my closing remarks I left the audience with a rhetorical question: Who was more likely to have understood the teaching of the apostles correctly, those early writers we call the Fathers of the Church or the Protestant Reformers who came on the scene about thirteen centuries after the Fathers?
Alex thought it was a fair point, so he went home and started to read the Fathers. Big mistake, for the Fathers undeniably were Catholic. The more he read them, the more Alex understood that the faith he embraced was not coterminous with the faith of the early Church and therefore could not be the same as that taught by the apostles.
As he absorbed early Christian writings and the Catholic ethos, Alex slowly added to his little church's worship some elements that were unflinchingly Catholic. He ended up with what might be called high-church Pentecostalism. He brought many of his congregants to see what he saw, and at length a good portion of them joined him in becoming Catholic.
So my final debate turned out to have been productive after all, even though all I did was to plant an idea that someone else ran with.
BEACH ENVY
I live three miles from the ocean and seldom go to the beach. When I was young I spent lazy summer afternoons on the sand, but nowadays the sand I visit is in the desert, where I go backpacking in the winter. In the summer I prefer to spend my free time in the solitude of the High Sierra rather than among the crowds at the shore.
So I was amused to find myself classified as a beach bum by the director of Catholic Social Teaching for the Archdiocese of Detroit. In an article that was published yesterday in the "Detroit Free Press," Michael Hovey was said to be "getting calls from confused Catholics about the 'Serious Catholics' guide. He's critical of Keating, saying, 'This guy sits around on the beach ... and writes this stuff.'"
Do I sense jealousy on Mr. Hovey's part? There he is, stuck in downtown Detroit, far from the crashing waves, while I supposedly spend my working hours at the beach, getting a tan, watching pretty girls walk by, and using my laptop to compose things that irk him, such as the "Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics."
For Mr. Hovey, life's a beach.
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