Wait just a minute. What’s this about presenting “the scoop on Catholic Answers” under the guise of a self-interview? Isn’t that a little, well, peculiar?
Maybe so, but why not a self-interview? Who knows better than I what the most frequently asked questions about Catholic Answers are? Why not ask them myself instead of pretending someone else is asking them?
Sounds Jesuitical to me, but let’s move along. Let’s talk about your calling to be an apologist.
I never received a calling, if you mean hearing a voice ordering me to engage in apologetics. This is just something I backed into.
What do you mean?
Catholic Answers began as a lark.
As a lark? That doesn’t sound very impressive.
Let’s say the beginning was modest. About a dozen years ago I came across an anti-Catholic flyer distributed outside my parish. The flyer angered me–it was misinformation and logical bloopers–so I decided on a counterstrike.
You blew up something?
Only figuratively. In reply I wrote a wordy tract intended to present the whole corpus of Catholic belief on two sides of one sheet of paper.
Sounds like you had to cram it in.
The typeface was microscopic, the layout was execrable, but the exercise was fun.
What did you do with the flyer?
I distributed it at the church I blamed for the anti-Catholic flyer. Since I wanted my reply to be taken seriously, I made up the name of an organization (“Catholic Answers” sounded good) and rented a post office box, and then I forgot the whole thing, until one day I went to the post office and found a slew of letters.
What did they say?
Some of it isn’t printable, but the positive letters said, “This is great. Do you have other tracts?” Sure, I replied–and started to write them. I ended up with twelve, all that Catholic Answers had to offer for several years.
Still doesn’t sound very impressive.
Of course not. It was just a side thing, not my real work.
What was your real work?
I practiced law.
That must have prepared you well for work in apologetics.
Practicing law didn’t help at all. I was a desk attorney, not a courtroom attorney. I pushed pencils; I didn’t argue cases. I generated the deadly prose attorneys use in petitions and briefs. If transferred into apologetics, that kind of English would empty the pews in no time.
So then what happened?
I wrote for the Catholic press some articles–in real English–about the clash between Fundamentalists and Catholics. The articles got a good response. I realized there was a constituency for this information, so in 1986 I started a monthly called Catholic Answers Newsletter. It was published until December, 1989, when it was superseded by This Rock.
How many of you produced the newsletter?
I was on my own until early 1988. For a year and a half the newsletter was pasted up in my home, later in my law office. I found myself spending less time with law and more time with apologetics. It was a slow but easy transition out of a vocation I didn’t enjoy into one I did. I had the luxury of not having to jump into this cold. Four years ago I gave up law entirely, opened Catholic Answers’ first office, and brought on two staffers.
What kind of organization is Catholic Answers, legally speaking?
In 1982 it was incorporated in California as a non-profit, religious corporation. It has a board of trustees, but no shareholders because there are no shares. Both the IRS and the State of California have granted Catholic Answers tax-exempt status, which is important to us because tax-exemption is important to donors.
Do you pay your employees?
Sure. We don’t operate on the basis of slave labor, you know. My coworkers have families and rent payments, just like everyone else, so all the permanent staff members take a salary–not as much as I’d like to see them get and not as much as they deserve, but enough to get by. We try to work on the principle of the family wage.
What’s that?
A principle enunciated by the popes in the social encyclicals. It says employers, in setting wages, should take into account the size and peculiar needs of their employees’ families.
Sounds vaguely illegal nowadays.
So what? That’s how we operate.
Catholic Answers is an apostolate, so don’t you think the people who work for it should volunteer their time?
You mean work for no pay? That would be fine if we were all independently wealthy, but not a single one of us is even dependently wealthy, and most of us are mostly broke. We aren’t hermit-monks, relying for sustenance on handouts from passers by. That may work if you don’t have vendors to pay, but handouts can’t pay for printing and postage (our biggest costs), and they don’t pay for pediatricians or orthodontics work (which workers with children are saddled with, but hermits aren’t).
How much of your budget goes toward salaries?
In 1991, only a third, which is quite good considering this is labor-intensive work–and I want to emphasize “labor-intensive.” Catholic Answers’ workers get paid a modest salary for a 40-hour week, but many of them routinely put in 50 hours or more.
How many hours do you put in?
I average about 60, but have put in as many as 100. Being on the far side of 25, I can’t put in marathon weeks like that very often, of course.
So much for hours. Where does the rest of Catholic Answers’ income go?
Mainly for printing, postage, and the purchase of tapes and books for resale. About a tenth of the budget goes for office rent, utilities, and equipment leases.
What do you mean by equipment leases?
We have lease/purchase agreements on our telephone system and on most of our computers and furniture. We couldn’t afford to buy those things outright.
How much subsidy do you get from the Church?
Zero. We’ve never asked the Church for a subsidy and never will. When we speak at parishes we receive honoraria, and our travel and lodging expenses are paid by our sponsors. Many parishes purchase our apologetics materials for their literature racks. You could say, I suppose, that in these ways we receive money from the Church indirectly, but we’ve never received or solicited an outright contribution from the Church.
Why not? Sounds like you’re wasting a revenue source.
Maybe so, but dioceses are underfunded as it is; they don’t need our noses in the trough. We work on the principle that Catholic Answers is a lay-run apostolate dealing with lay problems. If what we’re doing pleases God, Catholic lay people will support us; if not, they won’t, and we’ll close down.
Are you implying you’re about to go under?
I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint our anti-Catholic acquaintances on that one. Catholic Answers is becoming stronger and more effective by the month.
So the bottom line’s good, eh?
Depends what “good” is. We’re never flush with money. Meeting bills is always a struggle. Think of it as your home budget, but with an extra zero or two at the end. God’s been good to us, and so have our supporters, many of whom make real sacrifices to help us get by.
Give one example.
The most poignant note we ever received came from an elderly man who sent a single dollar bill. He apologized for not sending more, but he was living on a pension of $180 a month. This was an example of a widower’s mite.
You keep sending out appeal letters. How come?
Because we need the money. About a third of our budget comes from donations. Without the support of thousands of Catholics, we’d have been forced to stop this work long ago.
What’s your attitude toward asking for money?
I dislike it intensely and would prefer not to do it, though I suspect a spiritual advisor might say the exercise is good for my soul. All I know for sure is that it’s necessary for the apostolate.
It seems you should make a profit on what you’re doing and shouldn’t have to ask for donations.
If we confined ourselves only to the profitable.aspects of the operation, that would be true, but this is an apostolate. Much of what we do isn’t income generating. Some of our activities lose money hand over fist, as they should.
For instance?
Consider our prison outreach. We give complimentary subscriptions, tracts, and books to prisoners. A prisoner may deserve to lose his freedom, but he doesn’t deserve to lose his faith, and America’s prisons are hotbeds of Fundamentalist proselytizing. Catholic inmates have little access to chaplains or good Catholic books, so we help when asked. Ditto for poor people. When they ask for help, we send what they need. We distribute lots of material at no charge to Catholics and non-Catholics in this country and abroad. Each week, for instance, we get letters from Africans–priests, seminarians, catechists–begging for help. The Church in Africa is growing rapidly, but opposition exists from American-backed Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, from Muslims, from animists.
Shouldn’t we take care of our own first?
Why not take care of our own plus help elsewhere? We shouldn’t take an insular view and help only our immediate neighbors. The Church is universal (that’s what “Catholic” means), after all. Besides, someday America will be importing missionaries, so we’re indirectly helping to evangelize our own country by helping the Church overseas to grow.
There’s also a business.aspect to Catholic Answers, isn’t there?
Sure. There are two.aspects to the operation. It’s both an apostolate and a business, but first it’s an apostolate. The reason we’re here is that we think there’s a need to disseminate the truth of the Catholic faith, and we’re trying to use a variety of means to do that. But to be an effective apostolate Catholic Answers needs to be a well-run business. The better we are as the one, the better we will be as the other. For example, recently we found a way to save nearly half on the cost of envelopes.
Doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
It is when you use more than 100,000 envelopes a month. By becoming smarter in purchasing envelopes, we save money which can underwrite a seminar in a poor parish which otherwise couldn’t host us. That kind of thing.
Do you have a lot of big donors?
Distressingly few. We divide donations into three categories: small (under $100), medium ($100 to $1,000), and large ($1,000 and over). Fewer than five percent of the gifts that arrive are $100 or larger, and the number over $1,000 has been a tiny percentage–but thousands of people contribute to our work. I said before that about a third of our annual income arises from donations, and most of that comes from donations of around $25. Fortunately, many people give $25 several times a year.
Wouldn’t you like to have a Daddy Warbucks or two?
We’d like dozens, and we hope someday to obtain really large donations–other Catholic groups can, so why not us?–but we intend to use big donations only for special projects, not for day-to-day expenses, because there’s no telling when another large grant may arrive. It’s foolish to anticipate a steady influx of large chunks of cash. The backbone of our funding always will be the large number of smaller but steady donations.
Now let’s turn to the staff. How many people work at Catholic Answers?
About half.
You stole that line from Pope John XXIII, didn’t you? Give me a number.
We had as many as 19 in the summer, counting interns. Now we’re down to a dozen regular staffers, plus several volunteers.
Any immediate plans on hiring?
Not right away. We want to become efficient using the manpower we have first, but we hope to bring new people on later in the year.
What’s the upper limit on staffers?
Our offices can hold a maximum of 22. We can’t squeeze in any more desks than that.
When you reach the maximum, are you going to open branch offices in the U.S.?
We have no plans to open any, but we’re not excluding the possibility. First we need to justify the cost of a branch office. Then we need to have enough qualified personnel to man it. Last, we need to collect start-up costs.
There must be many people interested in working with you in their own parts of the country.
We get inquiries regularly. But we’ve already made one policy decision: Anyone wanting to work at a branch office as a speaker or writer or question-answerer will have to work out of our main office for a year first. Much must be learned, both about the faith and about running the apostolate, and you can’t learn it long-distance. Besides, we need to size up the people who will work at the branch offices. To do that, we have to see them operating on a daily basis.
Why not hire likely prospects and see what happens? If they fail, nothing’s lost.
Wrong. Lots may be lost, including souls. We can’t have representing Catholic Answers someone ignorant of the faith or working on a private agenda or displaying a wrong attitude.
One step at a time. It’s clear you’ve got to have solid Catholics who know the faith and can explain it intelligently, but what do you mean by people “working on a private agenda”?
Sometimes solid Catholics have private interests they want to further–not that these interests are bad, mind you, but they shouldn’t be held out as something other Catholics, to be good Catholics, must endorse.
For instance?
Let’s say someone is “fanatical” about a particular Marian apparition–let’s say Our Lady of Hoboken.
Never heard of it.
Just made it up. Even if the apparition is authentic, you don’t want someone to be so taken with it that he transforms himself from an apologist for the faith in general into an apologist for Our Lady of Hoboken, especially if he gives the impression something’s wrong with folks unless they believe in the apparition.
Okay, so that’s what you mean by a private agenda. What about attitude? You said someone might display “a wrong attitude.”
I mean you can know all the doctrines, all the arguments, yet not be able to pass them along to others. You might, for instance, be so enthralled with arguing that winning is all that matters to you–and you may not even realize it. You might be oblivious to the harm you do. In trying hard to win arguments you could drive people away from the Church by driving them away from your annoying personality.
You say you have no immediate plans for branch offices, but what about establishing independent groups similar to Catholic Answers?
Already some of our friends have begun their own groups, mostly at the parish or diocesan level. We’ll do whatever we can to help them get along. However large Catholic Answers grows, it will never, on its own, be big enough to do what needs to be done. That’s why we see it as a trainer of others. We can give a weekend seminar at a parish, but we can’t give a year-long, intensive course–yet such a course is precisely what’s needed to train the parishioners well. This is where local groups come in. Our seminars can be catalysts, but the locals have to do the long-term work. We’d like nothing better than to see a dozen groups like Catholic Answers and a thousand parish-based organization explaining and defending the faith at a grass-roots level.
Let’s change the subject. Do you answer all the letters that come in?
Personally? No. Most letters aren’t addressed to anyone in particular, so we divvy them up. Even then, many letters don’t require answers. Often people just send comments and don’t expect replies. But eventually we respond to all the letters that seem to require responses.
You’ve never missed answering any?
Of course we have, but what we miss mostly is timeliness. Sometimes letters lie around for months, though that isn’t too common. We get several thousand letters a year, which means the backlog can be daunting at times. If our speakers have a heavy schedule one month, they can return to desks piled high with letters. At the moment the pile on my own desk is down to about thirty letters–a small stack for me. Sometimes we’ve each had a hundred on our desks.
Doesn’t it bother you that you don’t personally answer every letter that comes in and don’t answer all the letters right away?
“No” and “a qualified yes.” As I said, most letters aren’t addressed to me, and even many that are can be handled by someone else. If I answered all the ones with my name on the envelope, I’d have little time for anything else. But I do read each letter sent to my attention, even if I give it to someone else to answer. And, yes, the tardiness bothers me, but we try to balance our tasks; we could answers all letters promptly, or give extra seminars, or do a splendid job on the magazine, but we can’t do all three all the time, though as we grow in staff we should do each task better.
Is not answering every letter addressed to you one of the perks of being the boss?
No, just one of the realities of a harried schedule. I enjoy answering letters, but don’t have enough time to answer more than a few a week. I do a lot of speaking and a lot of writing–my publishers are annoyed with me for late manuscripts as it is–and I have administrative duties too. (That’s one of the disabilities of being the boss.) And there’s my family to pay attention to, of course.
What’s been your biggest disappointment with Catholic Answers?
The way we’ve let down a lot of our customers through slowness in filling book and tape orders. Usually it’s a matter of being out of a particular item, but sometimes it’s simply a logjam in the shipping department. People who purchase from us know this is an apostolate first, a business second, but they still deserve prompt attention, and often we haven’t given it. In the spring we’ll be up (finally) on a new mail order program which promises to cut in half the man-hours used in filling orders while reducing mistakes to almost zero. We’ve been using a largely manual system which is slow and error-prone, so the change should be striking.
If that’s been your biggest disappointment, what’s been your biggest satisfaction?
Seeing how much good can be done with just a little effort. Newspaper editors have a rule of thumb: One letter to the editor means there are a hundred readers who think the same way on the issue. If that can be carried over to our work, then the letters we get each day attesting to the help gained from a book, tape, or seminar multiply into thousands of people who have come closer to (or back to) the Church over the last few years.
Those are your biggest disappointment and satisfaction, what about your biggest needs?
Our biggest single need is always the same–for more prayer on behalf of our work.
That sounds very nice–but also very expected (just as people always say their favorite book is the Bible, even if they never read it). What about needs in a more material sense?
We do have material needs, but they aren’t going to be met unless prayer is there first.
Specifics, please.
Okay. We need three more computers (two of our people are computerless, and one uses a computer which seems to have undergone a prefrontal lobotomy), three printers, a photocopier, an answering machine, two more telephones, and a general reduction in our debt to vendors.
Last question. You give various talks, each with several anecdotes. Which is your favorite anecdote–and why?
Undoubtedly the story of the Church in Japan. It’s my favorite for three reasons–because the story illustrates the real meaning of fidelity to the faith (the persecution of the Church in Japan was the worst persecution in history), because the story moves the audience (sometimes to tears), and because my wife, Teruko, is Japanese, and I appreciate her spiritual heritage. But reason number one is fidelity–that’s what Catholic Answers is all about.