A voice from the past—my own!
I was cleaning out a storage closet at the office and discovered an early letter I wrote to two friends. It began: “This will bring you up to date on the status of Catholic Answers.”
What a change from then until now, and what a reminder of how much I have forgotten, such as the original proposal for the work of Catholic Answers!
The letter is dated July 27, 1984. That’s three-and-a-half years before I went into apologetics work full time. Back then, Catholic Answers was a one-man operation. It was run out of my home and out of my law office. By January 1988 I had set aside my law practice, had gotten Catholic Answers its own office, and had cajoled Patrick Madrid and the late Charlie Harvey to join me.
In the 1984 letter I reported that, in the year-and-a-half since the company was incorporated, its total income was a whopping $1,384. Of that, $400 was a donation from a physician who wanted to underwrite a lecture by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (whom I wrote about in this blog on June 22), and another $775 came from my own pocket. Today, Catholic Answers’ budget is a little over $7 million.
After the financial report, I began the update on the apostolate’s proposed activities:
“As you recall, at first it seemed that a [pre-recorded] radio program would be the way to go. That proved too expensive, about $5,000 yearly for a minimal effort. Aside from money, there was the matter of time. Producing a decent script (I tried my hand at several) simply took too long, and a fifteen-minute script would have to be done every week. This is a project for the future.”
I had forgotten that I was the one who first came up with the idea of doing a radio program—it would have been a weekly quarter-hour on a local Protestant station, there being no local Catholic station at the time. When, more than a decade later, we made plans for launching Catholic Answers Live, someone else got the credit for the idea. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I then told my friends that it looked like the best thing to do—at least the affordable thing to do—would be to publish tracts:
“For about five years I have been studying anti-Catholic materials and have been corresponding, off and on, with both Fundamentalists and Catholics who were once Fundamentalists. This has given me what I think is a good feel for the thrust of the argument put by Fundamentalists. . . . My contacts have come in a variety of ways, and some of the correspondence has been lengthy. Much of it came from someone coming across the ‘Fundamentalist or Catholic?’ tract that I did up before Catholic Answers was incorporated. [That tract was retired long ago.]
“For instance, a trio of Fundamentalists near Toledo wrote a lengthy critique of the piece for a friend of mine in that area. She sent the critique to me, and I answered the three with a 35-page letter. Of course, most of the correspondence has been far shorter than that, but there have been other lengthy exchanges.
“Based on what I have learned writing to these people, I concluded the way to go was to develop a series of tracts. Some would be on particular Catholic beliefs, others would look at historical questions, and still others would go on the attack against the Fundamentalists. These first six tracts include a little of each.”
That Ohio friend mentioned Catholic Answers’ address in a letter that was published in a Catholic magazine.
“In response came about 75 inquiries. Unfortunately, they came after the ‘Fundamentalist or Catholic?’ tract was out of print and before any of the new ones were even started. The six which I am enclosing with this letter were printed only last week, and a set of them went to each of the 75 along with a cover letter apologizing for the delay, telling a little about Catholic Answers (mainly that we need money), and giving a price list for quantities of the tracts.”
Then I reported that I had received a call from the priest who had been the rector of the San Diego diocesan seminary and who, at the time of the call, was on the marriage tribunal.
“He asked that I send him copies of the typescripts before having any tracts printed. I complied, seeing no reason to raise hackles and knowing that I was in my rights to refuse any changes he demanded; I knew there would be no question about doctrine but feared he might squawk about [the tracts] being ‘pre-Vatican II.’ He approved the pieces, saying he showed them to the bishop, but did say that he thought the tract on St. Peter and the papacy was a bit ‘simplistic,’ which, of course, it necessarily has to be.
“We are still on good terms, but I think you should know the diocese is aware of things and so far approves. Apparently the bishop [the late Leo T. Maher] was worried we’d go off the deep end (the first priest I spoke to from the chancery asked me darkly whether I belonged to Opus Dei), and [the former rector] wanted to make sure the tracts made it clear there is no connection between the diocese and Catholic Answers. He seems satisfied with the way things have turned out.”
Not only had I forgotten entirely about early plans for a radio program, but now I see my memory was wrong regarding the tracts. I thought this first batch of six had been written some years earlier, but I guess not. Until 1984 I had just my original tract, “Fundamentalist or Catholic?”, which, I believe, was a variant of the very first tract I wrote, back in 1979. If so, then for five years I operated with only one tract but with plenty of private correspondence.
That correspondence, often intensive and often long (or long-winded), was my education in apologetics. It gave me the grounding for those early tracts, which soon multiplied from six to forty-eight. Two years after this letter was written, I began Catholic Answers Newsletter. That monthly publication eventually became This Rock Magazine (now called Catholic Answers Magazine).
In those earliest years, the income for Catholic Answers averaged only $70 per month (less than half of that, if my own donation is ignored). Today the monthly income is 9,000 times as much.
Given its wide range of current activities, I’m sure the apostolate is doing far more than 9,000 times as much good as it was doing in the early 1980s. Of course, I have to leave the final determination to a Much Higher Authority, but I’m optimistic about the answer.