Apologetics alone is never enough

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 11, 2025

Catholic apologetics—that is, the careful argumentation for the veracity of the Catholic faith—is an important tool in spreading the Gospel, but by itself it is rarely enough to convert anyone. This frustrating reality presents a challenge that we may not always know how to meet. Let’s take a few minutes to understand the nature of the problem.

First, let me explain the concept of “apologetics”—a word that sounds to modern ears something like an apology. But the meaning of “apologetics” is not an apology but rather an explanation, a defense, and even a justification. We may well be annoyed by those who, under the guise of saying they are sorry, actually seek to justify themselves. Apologies that proceed by making excuses are never popular! But the word “apologetics” derives from the Greek “apologia”, which means “a speech in one’s own defense”, a meaning that was preserved when the word was also adopted in Latin.

This was still understood in the nineteenth century, when St. John Henry Newman defended himself against persistent charges of “Catholic duplicity” in the matter of his conversion, entitling his book Apologia pro vita sua (essentially, “A defense of his life” by John Henry Newman). By extension, the word has long been used in the context of a defense of the Faith—a practice and a study which is still called “apologetics”.

Elements of apologetics

There are many considerations to keep in mind when “doing apologetics”. It has been traditional to distinguish three main elements or characteristics or aspects that the successful “apologist” must master to be effective, which have been named once again with the assistance of Greek. First, of course, there is “logos”, which is the mastery of the various arguments themselves. Second comes “pathos”, which is the ability of the apologist to make his message attractive and appealing to the sensibilities of his audience. And third we have “ethos”, which denotes the personal integrity in the apologist which should be apparent in the way he speaks and writes and lives.

Without these three characteristics, any would-be apologist would have great difficulty in connecting positively with his audience. Nonetheless, we must also identify the fundamental content of Catholic apologetics. This is most easily divided into three categories:

1. The natural, philosophical arguments for both the existence of God and the existence and nature of the human rational soul. While these arguments do not depend on Divine Revelation, they are helpful in that those to whom the Christian message is explained should be made aware of the solid philosophical arguments for the existence of God, without whom the existence lesser things cannot plausibly be explained. Similarly, it is important for human persons to understand how they can be certain they have spiritual (non-material) intellective souls, which cannot cease to exist through any internal process of degeneration, such as their material bodies can.
2. The essentially historical arguments for the existence of Christ, the claims that He made about Himself, and the fact that He did indeed rise from the dead after being executed by crucifixion—making him unique among all men who have ever lived, one who was both foretold by the prophets and acknowledged by the witnesses to his Resurrection, often under extreme duress.
3. The historical and logical arguments for Christ’s establishment of what we now call the Catholic Church to carry on His mission authoritatively after He returned to the Father, along with a treatment of the structure of that Church, its sacramental ministry, and its essential teaching authority, guaranteed by Christ, which has now demonstrated its super-human consistency for some two thousand years.

And yet this is not enough

Of course, we all know by now that being aware of the basic arguments is not enough. A great many people throughout Christian history, and certainly in our own day, have had at least a general idea of the nature of the overall argument, even though the vast majority have not been taken through it in any sort of systematic way. No matter how strong the logical arguments are for the Divinity of Christ and His sacred and protected foundation of the Catholic Church, very few people care enough to wonder seriously whether they are true and, if so, whether they should change the way a person should live.

In other words, when it comes to being attracted by God, we must typically overcome a great force of human inertia—the spiritual analogues of what physicists call inertia of motion and inertia of rest. On the one hand, we are all typically going in the direction which our “attachments” choose for us—a direction or trajectory of life determined primarily by our feelings, our affections, which of course may be seriously misguided and even irrational. In this sense, our inertia of motion very often leads us away from God, tending toward various human “satisfactions” which dominate our lives.

Moreover, if we are, with respect to Divine things, essentially uninterested, we might say we are experiencing spiritually something akin to inertia of rest. It takes energy and will-power to overcome this habitual preference for letting our own sleeping dogs lie, so to speak. Only rarely are we interested in making the somewhat painful and definitely more energetic effort to slough off our usual habits of mind and pay genuine attention to the actual extent and depth of our grasp of reality.

In other words, everything I have mentioned here about apologetics is very definitely not enough without some impetus within each person that must, no matter how stimulated, emerge from within. This means there is far more that needs to be said about how we Catholics can go beyond what we might call mere apologetics. Among other things, there is an additional and even more comprehensive element of personal witness which, while not ignoring speech, very definitely goes beyond it. I hope to explore this “something more” over the next few weeks.