100 tough questions for Catholics: Read responsibly!

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 26, 2025 | In Reviews

David Bonagura Jr. recently wrote his first commentary for CatholicCulture.org on the vexing problem of parish involvement, so I was pleased to learn that he has also turned his extensive Catholic teaching experience to excellent use in a new book from Sophia Institute Press: 100 Tough Questions for Catholics. The subtitle is “Common obstacles to Faith today”. After reading the book, I can only praise both the pertinence of the questions and the quality of the answers.

Of course, as with any book of this type, understanding the target audience is vital to properly evaluating the book. This at first created a minor stumbling block for me because, while I have taught apologetics (the defense of the Faith) at Christendom College and also practiced it fairly extensively on CatholicCulture.org, I had to make a mental adjustment in reading Bonagura’s book. My own efforts have been directed largely toward highly-committed students and adults who had no doubts about the teachings of Christ and His Church, with the goal of enabling them to defend the Faith against the slings and arrows of a secular culture. But Bonagura’s target audience is those within the Church who have some attachment to Catholicism but are themselves not yet well instructed—those who have questions that, if answered in the wrong way, could jeopardize their Faith.

Sadly, even when these questions are asked of fellow Catholics, the answers given may be either inadequate or false. And when that is the case, the result will be a declining faith and commitment on the part of the questioner. By selecting a broad range of questions with this precise problem in mind, Bonagura provides intelligent answers that impart the understanding necessary to get on the right track…and keep going deeper into the Faith. To demonstrate the range of the questions, I will list the fourteen sections of the book, each of which contains between six and eleven questions:

1. God, Divine Revelation, Human Beings, and Free Will
2. Catholics and Science
3. Human Life and Life on other Planets
4. God, Good, and Evil
5. Morality and Sin
6. Human Sexuality
7. Catholicism, Other Religions, Spirituality, and Doubt
8. What Jesus Christ Means for the World—and for Me
9. The Bible and Its Interpretation
10. The Church and the Sacraments
11. Calling to God in Prayer
12. Heaven—and Who Goes There
13. What Happens When We Die
14. Getting Back on Track with God

A little contribution of my own

As I have indicated, David Bonagura has done a superb job in clearly and concisely answering these one hundred “tough questions”. But I want to offer an additional thought about that one vexing question we all face: In the final analysis, what ultimately determines who gets to Heaven and who does not?

In addition to considering the cases of lapsed Catholics, non-Catholics, non-Christian believers, and atheists, all of which Bonagura addresses, we have a vast range of differences in both awareness and commitment even among those who consider themselves practicing Catholics. The questions that deal with this problem are covered in Chapter 12, “Who Goes to Heaven”. As is typical of the entire book, Bonagura answers all of them well. But the problem is a large one, since people find themselves in so many different circumstances with respect not only to their opportunity to hear the truth but to their actual ability to be attentive and respond to it.

So we continue to wonder about our fate and the fate of others (for whom we ought also to pray), and we continue (quite rightly) to rely not only on God’s justice but on His mercy. Still, the question invariably arises as to how we can best frame the problem for our own personal evaluation. We know God is a God of love who wants us to enter into that love for all eternity, and we know that we cannot enter into love other than by loving in return. So what is a realistic way to consider how God must invariably judge the reality of our love, that is, to judge us—or to put the question even more personally, to judge me?

Sometime in the last millennium (an expression guaranteed to make many of us feel our age), I hit upon what I think is a handy tool for understanding how God assesses the state of each person’s soul. It comes from the legal concept of holding members of a board of directors responsible for the malfeasance of corporate officers and other employees. To determine whether the directors are culpable, the legal process must, as the expression goes, “pierce the corporate veil”—the veil which normally creates a buffer between the daily actions of those who work for a corporation and those who are legally responsible for the corporation as a whole. The questions that need to be answered to “pierce the corporate veil” and get at the guilt (or innocence) of the directors are essentially these three: (1) What did you know? (2) When did you know it? and (3) What did you do about it?

There is a sense in which we can apply a similar form of analysis to our own “true selves”. Indeed, it seems to me that these questions are very close to what Our Lord’s questions will be when the time comes for Him to judge each and every person who has ever lived, to assess each one’s personal culpability for his or her failure to follow the Natural Law and to accept and live in accordance with Divine Revelation. What did you know? When did you know it? And once you knew, what did you do about it?

Conclusion

Of course, questions of knowledge and responsibility can be very tricky for human persons precisely because our self-knowledge is both incomplete and flawed in ways that only God can fully discern. There can be things that we should have known but actually simply never noticed, or things we have taken for granted without ever realizing how faulty our assumptions were. Or we may have innate or conditioned emotional and intellectual impediments. So these questions of personal intellect and will can really be judged only from deeply within the person—and only God has the advantage of knowing not only the outside but also the inside with absolute fullness and perfection. But from our own point of view, these questions can be used to cut through a great deal of plain old human obfuscation, and also to help us understand the basis for God’s judgment. What did I know? When did I know it? What did I do about it?

For those who have not yet evaluated their own lives in this way, my advice is to hang on to these questions, to be honest about them, and to take responsibility for them. Above all, stop not wanting to know. Then read David Bonagura’s answers to 100 tough questions for Catholics with the strongest possible sense of personal responsibility.

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David G. Bonagura, Jr. 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today: Sophia Institute Press, 2025. 180 pp., ebook $9.99, paperback $17.95.