You may have heard about—and may have attended—the national apologetics conferences that Catholic Answers has hosted the past few years in San Diego.
Most people don’t know that they weren’t the first such conferences for us. Our first was held a quarter-century ago in Long Beach.
The theme of that three-day 1990 conference was “Go Forth and Teach.” It proved to be a great success in all ways except financial. We didn’t make much of a profit, and we learned that putting on a conference takes an extraordinary amount of preparation—more time than a small staff could afford to invest. We concluded it would be prudent to hold off doing another conference until Catholic Answers had matured sufficiently. It turned out to be a long wait.
The Long Beach conference had a stellar cast. Joining me from the Catholic Answers staff were Patrick Madrid and Mark Brumley. Patrick’s talk was on “Techniques for Dealing with Mormons” and Mark’s was on “How to Handle Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
I gave three presentations. The first was the introduction to the conference: “What is Apologetics—and Why Should We Care?” My main talk was “Using the Bible with Bible Christians.” On the final day I gave a “concluding summary” that was called “What Now?”
By the mid-1990s, Patrick and Mark had left Catholic Answers. They went on to distinguished careers on behalf of the Church.
While he was with us, Patrick had success with a book he edited on the side, Surprised by Truth. He wanted to try his hand at further books and a magazine. He founded Basilica Press, which published Envoy, a splashy publication that never quite found its financial legs. Patrick wrote many other books and became well known as a Catholic speaker and radio program host.
Mark left us to join the staff of the Diocese of San Diego. (Another person who worked there and who later would make a name for himself: canonist Ed Peters.) Mark worked for the diocese for a few years and then headed north to Ignatius Press, where he rose to become president of what long has been the nation’s premier Catholic publishing house.
There were other speakers at that first conference who would achieve prominence.
In 1990, Deal Hudson was teaching at Fordham. He later would edit Crisis magazine. At the conference Deal spoke about “The Rhetoric of Apologetics.”
Scott Hahn was at the College of St. Francis. He had not yet transferred to Franciscan University in Steubenville, but his popularity as a speaker already was evident. His topic was “How to Talk with Evangelicals (as Distinguished from Fundamentalists).”
Fr. Mitch Pacwa was on the faculty of Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit institution. He would achieve prominence at EWTN, first for occasional appearances and ultimately as Mother Angelica’s successor as host of the network’s chief program. In the 1990s, Fr. Mitch specialized in the New Age movement. His talk for us was “New Age Spirituality Lite: No Fault, No Guilt, No Hassle.”
There were several other speakers at the conference. One proved to be a bit awkward for us. William Reichert gave his conversion story in “The Rocky Road to Rome.” His moving account appeared as the cover story in This Rock magazine. Not long after that, he left the Church and went back to being an Episcopalian. Oops!
The conference featured two bishops from Los Angeles. Archbishop Roger Mahony celebrated the Sunday Mass. Carl Fisher, an auxiliary bishop, celebrated the Friday Mass. I remember Fisher as an engaging man with a wide smile. Sadly, he died from cancer three years later at age 48. In its obituary, the New York Times described him as “the first black Roman Catholic bishop in the western United States.”
We had several hundred guests at the conference. There were many priests and many nuns, particularly a large contingent of the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart, whose convent is in Alhambra. They are known for their many vocations and for their traditional habits.
There also were other, less identifiable women religious at the conference. It might be fair to say that they had a somewhat different charism. You could tell they were sisters because they had short gray hair and wore cardigan sweaters with small crosses on the lapels.
Probably they had signed up because they saw that Archbishop Mahony and Bishop Fisher were on the program. I suspect they didn’t recognize any of the other speakers, had never heard of Catholic Answers, and had no idea of the orthodoxy of the conference.
At any rate, one of our speakers—I will leave him nameless—had an amusing, if slightly impolitic, encounter with a trio of them.
During an intermission he had been making the rounds, introducing himself to guests and exchanging small talk. When he came to the three unhabited sisters, he greeted them warmly, feigned that he didn’t know who they were, and said something like this:
“Isn’t this a great conference? Look at all the people! Look at all the priests and religious! Isn’t it great to see so many Roman collars and to see those Carmelite sisters in their habits?” Turning to one of the three, he asked, “And your name is Mrs. —?”