English heretics. The newly formed Jesuits became active in apologetical
work throughout most of Europe, led by the example of St. Peter Canisius.
By the end of the sixteenth century, another Jesuit, St. Robert Bellarmine,
provided the Church with an arsenal to combat all the main Protestant
heresies with his Controversies of the Christian Faith against the Heretics
of Our Time. St. Francis de Sales, through great courage and charity, would
challenge the Calvinists in their very heartland of Switzerland and convert
tens of thousands of them through his apologetical pamphlets and writings.
The rising tide of rationalism soon came to dominate intellectual life in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Led by anti-Christian philosophers
such as Rousseau and Voltaire, it asserted that there was no divine
Revelation, and that all that we know or need to know can be gauged from
human reason rightly used. Hence, the teaching and sanctifying mission of
Christ and the Church has no relevance. In opposition to such, the First
Vatican Council declared that the learning of all religious and moral truths
necessary for the right ordering of human life is derived both from natural
reason and divine revelation, and that in the present condition of the human
race even naturally known truths cannot be known readily by all with firm
certitude and complete accuracy.
The history of Catholic apologetics in the twentieth century was a
checkered one. The first half of the century witnessed the creation and work
of the Catholic Evidence Guild. Begun in England by Frank Sheed and
Maisie Ward, it was to bear fruit on behalf of the Catholic Church
throughout the English-speaking world for many decades. Unfortunately,
since the Second Vatican Council, the word and idea of apologetics has
gone the way of the dinosaurs for many, particularly those imbued with
modernist notions of ecclesiology and universal salvation. Nevertheless,
calls for its revival have been heard, including one from a 1981 edition of
L’Osservatore Romano under the headline “Apologia for Apologetics.”
Furthermore, since the mid-1980’s a series of astonishing conversions of
Fundamentalist ministers and clergy to the Catholic Church in the United
States has led to a dramatic revival of interest in apologetics, leading to the
establishment of a number of strong and committed new organizations
specializing in countering the aggressive work of the modern-day anti-
Catholic.
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