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U p F r o n t
Damned If You Do…
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 11, Number 5-6
 May/June 2000 
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I visited Amazon.com to see how my books were doing. While there I filled out an author’s profile (Question: What do you like to listen to when writing? Answer: I like to listen to silence.) I also filled out a statement describing each of my books. As you may know, Amazon provides visitors an opportunity to write reviews about books they have read, and authors have a chance to preface the reviews with their own statements about their books.
Before writing my statements I browsed the reviews. Most people said they liked my books, but a few reviews were decidedly negative. What others saw as strengths some saw as weaknesses. I have the suspicion that some of the negative reviews were composed by people on a mission: If a book defends the Catholic faith, it must be wrong, and the world needs to know about it.
I found especially amusing a fellow who complained that in Catholicism and Fundamentalism I said Loraine Boettner’s book Roman Catholicism (which I called the "bible" of the anti-Catholic movement) had a lot of weaknesses. The reviewer said I failed to mention any. It had been a long time since I wrote my critique of Boettner, so I went back to my book. Yes, just as I remembered: 24 pages of commentary, 32 footnotes, and discussions of dozens of failings in Boettner’s book. I hardly could have been clearer, I think, unless I devoted the whole of my book to refuting his. The Archangel Gabriel could write a book about the hereafter, yet some people would ask him, "Well, what makes you think you know anything about heaven?"
As I went through the reviews I noted that some people faulted me for not writing the books they would have written. I tried to anticipate this in the first pages of Catholicism and Fundamentalism: "There is little more frustrating for a writer than to be accused of badly handling a topic he had no intention of discussing anyway." One man, who complained about What Catholics Really Believe, evidently did not read that preface. He wanted my second book to be a compendium of the faith, some sort of Thomistic summa in 150 pages. He seems not to have made it even to the subtitle: 52 Answers to Common Misconceptions about the Catholic Faith. That should have clued him in. Had he read the book’s introduction, he would have seen that the 52 topics "are representative of confusions Catholics have about their own faith.
My two more recent books—Nothing But the Truth, which was published in November, and The Usual Suspects, which was published in March—are too new to have acquired many reviews. Catholicism and Fundamentalism has about 50 reviews at Amazon, but then it has been out since 1988 (and still selling very well, thank you). To forestall some of the confused reviews the new books might otherwise get, I tried to explain, in my author’s statements, why I wrote each one. That may clear things up for some readers, but I have no real expectation that dedicated anti-Catholics will be moved by my remarks. After all, they already know that I am wrong precisely because I am a Catholic. What more needs to be said?
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