Helias Catholic H.S. principal releases updated handbook of Catholic apologetics
A book about how to explain even the toughest teachings of the Church
Some of the best discussions about the Catholic faith begin with the foundational questions.
Spencer Allen Ed.D., principal of Helias Catholic High School in Jefferson City, hopes to help facilitate those conversations with his newly updated, expanded handbook for Catholic apologetics.
It’s called The Catholic Defender.
“I hope people who read this are emboldened to start having serious conversations about the faith,” said Dr. Allen.
The 423-page book, distributed under Dr. Allen’s own Redux Publishing nameplate, has 52 chapters organized thematically into seven sections.
Each chapter opens with a quote from the writing of early Christians or other important spiritual sources.
The author then adds a personal touch to help make the Church’s teachings assessible. Stories such as the birth of his children, the death of his father, or the time a bear raided his campsite, create a bond of shared experience between the reader and the author.
From there, he moves into an unvarnished, evidence-based, logical explanation of a timeless truth upheld by the Church and concludes with a handy, bullet-pointed summary.
In this way, moving from general to specific, he lays out and defends the Church’s position that truth is objective, that God created the universe and everything in it, that God sent his only Son into the world to redeem humanity, that the Son “deputized” his Holy Church to reveal and uphold his objective truth on matters of faith and morals, and that all of this has real, eternal consequences for people in this life and in the next.
Dr. Allen sets out to answer questions and objections Catholics will likely encounter in interactions with people of other faith traditions or who profess no faith at all.
He addresses such topics as the one and triune God; the divinity of Christ; the source of authority in the Church; Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist; the ministerial Priesthood; the origin of Sacred Scripture and its relationship to Sacred Tradition; the existence of and need for Purgatory; and devotion to Jesus’s Blessed Mother.
“These are questions we need to answer, and we need to be able to provide some evidence for it,” said Dr. Allen. “Once we know that God exists, once we know that we can trust him, then we can take on faith anything that he tells us.”
“Isaiah says, ‘Come, let us reason together,’” Dr. Allen pointed out. “That’s what we’re called to do.”
He noted how participants in online forums and social media often show an appalling lack of critical thinking skills — “too much emotional response to things that we should be able to discuss logically and objectively.”
“People don’t know how to talk about faith in a non-emotional, objective manner,” he observed. “We compartmentalize people based on who they are and what they believe.”
Of course, emotion does play an important part in committing one’s heart and soul to an Almighty Being.
“But, we have to be able to talk about these things in a way that lets that emotion fill us with the hope that sustains us, and, as we read in 1 Peter 3:35, to be able to explain and defend that in a way that’s respectful.”
A solid defense
Bishop W. Shawn McKnight granted The Catholic Defender his imprimatur, a Church designation that the work conforms to Church teaching and is free of doctrinal error.
The work is a substantially updated version of Dr. Allen’s 2013 apologetics book, which he called Mackerel Snappers.
The whimsical title came from a nickname tossed at Catholics for eating fish on Fridays.
“I wanted a title that didn’t sound stuffy,” he said, “but it wasn’t written to be a book of humor, so the title didn’t fit very well.”
The title of the new book leaves no question about its purpose and tone.
He dedicated both books to his children.
“The dedication of the new book is bigger, because I have two more kids now than I had back then,” he said.
The inscription to them reads: “I wrote this for you, other people found it useful.”
“The intended target audience for the original book was my kids,” Dr. Allen said.
Much of the material came from essays he wrote while serving as principal of St. Joseph Cathedral School in Jefferson City “to help support parents as the first and best educators of their children.”
His purpose for the book is to help adults and teens understand the faith beyond what they got from formal schooling.
“Because what you get through eighth grade and your senior year of high school is just the tip of the iceberg,” he noted.
Catholics need to continue learning about the faith for the rest of their lives.
“I think there are a lot of people who are emotionally Catholic or culturally Catholic or bound-by-family-loyalty Catholic,” said Dr. Allen. “I hope they read this and see that there’s so much more to the Catholic faith than ‘I do this because my Mom and Dad were Catholic.’”
The Catholic Defender begins with a section on how to be a Catholic apologist, followed by “Roadblocks to Defending the Faith,” “Authority,” “the Sacraments,” “Prayer and Worship,” and “Catholic Living.”
“I’ve done some expansion on the ‘Catholic Living’ section,” said Dr. Allen. “It explores some hot-button topics, such as contraception, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, abortion, and whether we should be taking our faith with us to the voting box.”
He said this isn’t a book that needs to be memorized in order for it to help people defend their faith.
“While I have a chapter on almost anything — I mean, there’s so much minutia — I keep going back to a foundational approach,” the author stated.
“You can be having a discussion with someone who’s not Catholic and, and you can both sling Bible verses back and forth at each other, and you’re really not going to get anywhere,” he noted.
It helps to talk about authority, where it comes from and whether one’s own authority is sound.
“You have to keep steering the conversation back to the source of authority,” said Dr. Allen.
Hard-fought conclusions
Some of the book contains arguments the author came up with on his own, but much of it is a compilation of his almost 30 years of study on this topic.
Raised nominally Catholic, Dr. Allen had checked out of belief entirely by the end of high school.
Only after he started dating his wife, Christy, a devout Catholic, did he revisit the subject in earnest.
He undertook a methodical survey of belief systems, reading numerous science, philosophy and religion books and documents — some in favor of religion, others anti-religion, anti-Christian and anti-Catholic.
He carried out the process with intense curiosity, but little emotion.
“And what I found in the end was that the Catholic Church had a much better case than any of the atheistic or anti-Catholic stuff I was reading,” he said.
He emphasized that the delicate art of Catholic apologetics is not about winning a battle.
It’s much more a matter of giving consistently good Christian witness in life, listening attentively and offering respectful, logic-based answers to people’s questions.
It requires knowledge, patience and Christian love.
“No bravado,” Dr. Allen cautioned. “What we need are polite, respectful but reason-guided conversations.”
He’s convinced that because what the Church teaches is rooted in objective, eternal truth, Catholics should have no problem investigating their own faith with confident humility.
“We have to challenge ourselves with healthy skepticism,” he said. “I hope this book shows people how to do that in a way that leads to a greater understanding of the truth.”
He noted that solely Bible-based Christian apologetics amounts to circular reasoning.
“You can’t start by saying that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, just because it says it is,” said Dr. Allen.
“You start by investigating whether it can be considered a reliable historical document,” he said. “Then, even if you don’t think it’s inspired, there are things you can conclude about Jesus and who he is and what he said.
“And we know that he said there is a Church, that he is establishing it to continue his ministry and safeguard the truth. And the Church comes around and says there is divine inspiration in these certain books and not these certain other books.”
Only from that line of reasoning comes a clear picture of the historicity, the credibility of the Bible, he said.
Thought and prayer
Some local parishes are now using The Catholic Defender as an informational resource for people in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults.
A women’s Bible study group is using it to augment its studies.
Dr. Allen hopes parishes, high schools and high school youth groups will make the book available as a study aide.
If there’s enough demand for it, he plans to offer a separate guide for parents and educators who teach from the book.
He’s happy to visit parishes and Catholic gatherings to talk about the book and sell and sign copies of it.
He sees The Catholic Defender as “an invitation to use the minds that God gave us to know him and his Church more deeply.”
“Therefore, I think the best prayer we can ask for is that he opens our minds and removes the distractions in order for us to do that, “he said.
The Catholic Defender is available from Dr. Allen at Helias Catholic High School and at amazon.com.
