On the Restoration of Catholic Culture

which takes priority over apologetics, because is the ground and wellspring for the sorts of thinkers and thoughts which can then defend the faith.  In other words, culture incarnates the faith in such a form as to make it worth living.  Someone with a good mother is more apt to be able to defend motherhood.  David Mills explains.  Excerpts follow:

...In the culture of the past few decades, because the catechesis has been so bad, “Catholics have been forced to turn to apologetic resources, staffed disproportionately by converts.” These do very good work, but usually “fail to pass on the cultural foundations on which the intellect builds.” They never mention holy cards, for one thing.

The problems comes for Catholics “when the apologetics subculture becomes a substitute for an authentic Catholic culture.”

Knowing one's faith and explaining it is very important, but just as important is the preservation and passing along of our Catholic culture, and in that department we are in dire straits, up to and including very educated and apologetically-minded Catholics. There are legitimate reasons why this happens, not all of them bad, and the intentions are benign. However, it is a problem, and it unquestionably erodes our identity as Catholics.

This analysis applies, I should say, to almost any Christian body or tradition. Just look at how many young Evangelicals leave Evangelicalism or Christianity entirely....

Culture precedes apologetics—or maybe it would be more accurate to say apologetics only matters for the believer when it leads him to a greater comfort with or confidence in the culture that has formed and continues to form him, freeing him from doubts so that the culture can mold him more deeply. (Critical reflection on that culture and argument is the job of theology, and theology may, of course, suggest doubts. It’s complicated, as they say in movies.)

Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees might apply to many of us, cut rate Gnostics that we are, who assume—partly, perhaps, because we like to argue and think we’re good at it—that knowledge and particularly success in argument is the essence of the Faith. We could easily be found praying “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that poor guy over there with his holy cards, who wouldn’t know what to say to Richard Dawkins,” when he is having a lively and intimate conversation with Our Lord, His Mother, and several saints with whom we are not yet on speaking terms.

Pride goes before a fall, as Proverbs notes. Accepting an argument is not conviction, even when you think the argument final and conclusive. You may change your life or your life may be changed and suddenly the argument doesn’t seem so final and conclusive any more...
But a culture, a culture has more power to hold you, to restrain you, to make you see and feel the real costs of moral decisions, since they may tear you away from the world you know and love. It presents you with something you want, which is something you can lose. (This argues for much better church discipline than any church now offers.) In that, culture works apologetically. It makes an argument for the Faith, if the argument is only, “This is a life worth living, and you know that because you have lived it.”

There is much more to be said for the necessity of a specifically Catholic (or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Methodist) culture. But to put it simply, the Church, and therefore the world, would be better off if more Catholics had holy cards and knew what to do with them, even if that meant they didn't know the arguments quite as well.