Over on Mr. David Griffey’s blog, someone who calls himself “Anonymous” (it could be “herself,” for all I know) demands: “Who nominated [Henry] Scott Alt as an ‘Apologist’ anyway?” In reply, Griffey spends a weird sentence or two comparing me to Sancho Panza before deciding that the “Internet Age” did it. Blame the Internet Age for Alt’s nomination! Mr. Griffey doesn’t mention that the same “Internet Age” permits him to declaim from his blog with no editor or peer review, and the same “Internet Age” permits thousands upon thousands of self-described conservatives to dispense medical advice without a license. But I didn’t come here to talk about all of that. Instead, I want to talk about who nominated all Christians to be apologists.
A defense of defense: On the necessity of apologetics.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 5, 2023 • Apologetics
Fake Site News promotes Fr. Gerald Murray’s latest fit against the pope on Warmed Over With Raymond Arroyo. Murray and Fake Site are huge promoters of what they call “anti-sodomy laws.” They don’t say they want gays to be executed. They don’t say they don’t want gays to be executed. They don’t bring it up at all, as though it wasn’t the context of the pope’s remarks in his interview with the Associated Press. But it was the context. I confess I don’t know how you can neglect that context when discussing the pope’s insistence that homosexuality is “not a crime.” But they don’t mention it. At best this is sloppy.
Jason Engwer at Triablogue revives this common argument in a blog post of January 15. Typically a Protestant will claim that it’s incongruous for Jesus to give Peter authority over the whole Church only to turn around five verses later and rebuke him and call him “Satan.” But Alt! the Protestant will say. Am I really supposed to believe Christ gives Peter infallibility, and the very first thing he does with it is to claim that Jesus will never be killed and rise from the dead? My answer is you’re conflating two separate questions.
“Another month, another papal interview, another spate of confusion,” Mr. Lawler writes at his usual platform, Catholic Culture. There’s not a papal statement under the sun that doesn’t befuddle him. Some people are addicted to anger, some to confusion. This time, the pope’s words were a model of clarity. “It’s not a crime,” Francis said (referring to homosexual acts). “Yes, but it’s a sin. Fine, but let’s first distinguish between a sin and a crime.” In fact, this is so simple it’s banal. If I cheat on my wife with the next-door neighbor, I’ve committed a sin. But no one’s going to arrest me for it. This everyday concept confuses Mr. Lawler. Read his article; you will marvel, not at how confusing the pope is, but at how much effort Mr. Lawler makes to be confused.
I say this in public because I’ve done this in public. A few years back Dave Armstrong and I, who were friends (he and his wife even came to my wedding), had a huge public fight. The merits of that fight, who was right and wrong on the substance, don’t matter. No one cares. In anger I said intemperate things. In anger I said things I didn’t even mean. I don’t agree with Dave about everything, but so what? He really is one of the best Catholic apologists around. And I was unfair to him. I apologize.
Bill Donohue’s argument is that a marriage between two men (or two women) is impossible in natural law. Another way of putting that is to say that marriage has an ontological character such that two people of the same sex can not enter into it, any more than a square can enter into roundness. The law can declare a square round and make it henceforth “legally round,” but the square remains angular in fact. That’s Donohue’s point. If Fr. Martin wants to disagree, let him do so, but he should disagree with what Donohue is actually arguing. 
I am afraid the answer to the question is yes, but first let me fill in the background. What happened is that Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg was on Fox News with Brett Baier and, during a conversation about travel expenses for business, noted that he had often brought his “husband” (Chasten Glezman) with him. That prompted Bill Donohue to post an entire article at the Catholic League, denying that Buttigieg has a husband. Donohue admits that Buttigieg and Glezman are “legally married,” but goes on to construct an entirely orthodox natural law argument against the possibility that any two men (or two women) could be married before God.
When CNA reported that the Vatican had defrocked Mr. Pavone, he complained that he had no idea. “How did CNA learn about this before I did?” he cried. He wants us to believe he rose one morning in the pink of innocence, said the Office, made his coffee and got online, read CNA, and sat there astonied. Apparently the Vatican defrocked him and decided not to tell him. That’s credible. But now, Pavone tells CNA that it may have gotten lost in the stacks and stacks of mail that come in to Priests for Life. “I have no idea what they sent me,” said the befuddled Pavone. “The communication broke down a long time ago. They may indeed have sent something. I simply didn’t see it.”
So the Court overturned Roe. The price was far too high. The 1/6 insurrectionists and those who support or condone them still loom over future elections, and the same Trump who made 1/6 possible, who egged those traitors on, and who pals around with anti-Semites, still holds the GOP and GOP voters hostage to his ego and his desire for power. The GOP has been overtaken by nationalists, which is just a polite word for fascists. Anti-abortion states lust to exact retributive justice on women who, once upon a time before Roe, were understood to be victims in need of compassion. I’d rather have Roe back and lose all those other things. Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Forgive my title; they’re not my words, but David Griffey’s. In his post on January 9, Mr. Griffey tells us that it’s a new year, and in this new year he’s grown tired of blogging about issues and politics. He, Mr. Griffey, is “no writer,” he says. He’s not “invested” in it. But Mark Shea, once upon a time before he became a mean and angry heretic, suggested that Griffey start a blog; and Griffey did; and his blog took off, even though it involved a lot of hitting his head against a brick wall. He wanted to quit many times, but political controversy drew him back in—and a pity too, because political controversy amounts to nothing more than people calling each other Hitler. And after explaining all this to us in a remarkable ramble, Griffey finally gets around to talking about—who else?—Dave Armstrong!
Candida Moss is a popularizer who is given to making wild claims that the stubborn text of the New Testament won’t support. Her Ph.D. is from Yale, in religious studies, and that should give her some heft on biblical questions; but you can easily refute her with Google, a lexicon, and some elementary knowledge of the Bible and Greek. In her latest performance, on January 1 at the Daily Beast, CM promotes the revisionist work of Dr. Mitzi Smith in a scholarly collection entitled Bitter the Chastening Rod. I like the title. “Some readers,” Dr. Moss says, “will be shocked by Smith’s suggestion. How could we think that Mary was enslaved?”
Amarillo bishop Patrick Zurek makes the charge about exhumation a letter to Pavone dated May 5, 2017. The purpose of the letter was to demand that Pavone ask to be laicized. If Pavone did not request it himself, Bishop Zurek would ask Pope Francis to laicize him involuntarily. In the letter, Zurek cites two grounds for this course of action: (1) Pavone’s “incorrigible” disobedience; (2) Pavone’s exploitation of a dead baby for partisan political purposes. In the middle of all that, Zurek includes an extraordinary paragraph.
I wrote on March 23, 2022, on Facebook, that the problem with claiming Benedict XVI was still the pope (as people like Patrick Coffin, formerly of Catholic Answers, claimed) was that, as an attempt to avoid sedevacantism, it led you into an inevitable trap. All that had to happen Mr. Coffin to become a sedevacantist was for Benedict XVI to die. And now he has, by his own confession on Twitter. Told you so.
It has been ten years since I published my first blog article, and it is no longer the same blog, I am no longer the same blogger, nor the same person, I was ten years ago. As though I could have been. There exist a glut of “ten things I learned in ten years of blogging” posts, and I’m skeptical of such things, but what the hell, I’m going to write one too—because I can. (And I also say a few words about Benedict XVI and my changed byline.)
It all started because Prof. Esolen, living in the pure wilds of New Hampshire, peered out the window of his study long enough to contemplate the decline of Western civilization and work himself into a pique. This time he was upset about Maya Angelou’s black countenance staring at him from a quarter, and he got on Facebook and wrote: “I hear that Maya Angelou (nee Marguerite Johnson) will be gracing the US quarter — or one such, such as we’ve done with the states, and other things. It’s fitting, I guess, because neither the quarter nor her poems are worth two bits. All’s political, and all’s sloganeering.”