Catechetical and Pastoral Emphasis in the Apologetics of Frank Sheed | James Iovino | HPR
Vatican II calls the laity to take a more active role in not just the worshipping life of the Church, but the teaching life, too. While Sheed agrees … we evangelize best principally through a pastorally oriented and properly formed apologetics
Despite falling into disfavor in the middle of the 20th century, apologetics has had a long and storied history in the life of the Catholic Church. 1 As an increasingly confident and hostile secularism exerts a massive influence in the daily lives of both the faithful and unbeliever alike, Church leaders have urged a renewal of the apologetic discipline in the life of the Church to cultivate future generations of confident Catholic evangelists and meet the challenges of secularism. Pope John Paul II, in 1999, called for a “new apologetics, geared for the needs of today” while a decade later the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Levada, argued that an urgent new apologetics was “the principle task of (the Church’s) mission at the beginning of the third millennium of Christianity.” 2 Implicit in the calls for a new apologetics is not simply a return to doing apologetics, but rather fashioning new and different ways to explain, defend, and make relevant the Catholic Faith. However, in formulating the new apologetics, today’s Catholic apologists would do well to revisit the theories and methods of Frank Sheed, one of the 20th century’s most prolific defenders of the Catholic Faith. An examination of Sheed’s apologetics, and its relevance to today’s new formulation, is especially fruitful because Sheed was a prolific writer who left an extensive corpus of apologetic materials with clear views on methodological best practices. He also worked within the cultural context of both a great Catholic intellectual renaissance (the 1920s and 1930s) and a dark period of religious decline (1960s and 1970s). While specific recommendations for the “new apologetics” is beyond the scope of this paper, I will examine Sheed’s apologetics, and argue that his explanation and defense of Catholicism were never divorced from solid catechesis, and were always tied to an explicit and urgent pastoral mission, two essential aspects of any successful “new apologetics.”
Catechesis is absolutely central to Sheed’s understanding of apologetics, beginning with the apologist’s own relationship with God. 3 While he acknowledges that God desires a loving relationship with us, and that we are saved through love of him, Sheed argues that we cannot love him adequately if we first do not know him well. Sheed understands the relationship of catechesis to apologetics in three stages: knowledge, possession, and saturation. Knowledge of God is important because “knowledge serves love … in one way by removing misunderstandings which are in the way of love (and) because each new thing learned about God is a new reason for loving him.” 4 By knowing more about God, we do not just love him more; we love him better. God would be a strange God, indeed, if he could be loved better by being known less. 5
Mere knowledge, however, is not enough for successful apologetics. Thus, Sheed emphasizes a robust catechesis wherein the apologist possesses what the Church teaches by its doctrines and dogmas. Central to this catechesis is the development of certain catechetical habits: “We must live with the idea, make it our own, learn to handle it comfortably.” 6 But proper apologetic formation does not end with possession of the great dogmas and doctrine, nor even when we have made them our own. Sheed complains that most Catholics of his day knew the Catechism answers, but fell into deep trouble when asked the meaning of the answers.
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