In an email a friend (Catholic) expressed his distaste for apologetics. And I have proverbial mixed emotions. On the one hand, apologetics is a beautiful thing for Catholics. When I started reading Scott Hahn & Karl Keating, it'd been as if I'd discovered a lost, buried treasure of incomprehensible value.
On the other, I can see how it might be off-putting to those outside the fold. I think my friend Ham of Bone was more impressed by the Pope's apology a few years (concerning the Crusades) than any apologetic material I've sent his way. Apologetics is mainly for Catholics, in order to defend our faith and appreciate it and learn about it. Relatedly, I liked this from Envoy Magazine concerning the CCC:
Anyone coming to the Church, or seeking instruction in the faith, cannot help but be impressed, and perhaps even sometimes awed, by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Like one of the Church ’s majestic medieval cathedrals, every element in the harmonious design of the whole fits together in it proper place; each detail fills a specific space in the overall soaring and splendid whole. Inquirers coming to the faith from unbelief might sometimes have a hard time accepting all that the Church teaches as true, but nobody can deny that it all holds together marvelously in the Catechism. -Kenneth Whitehead
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