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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 6
 June 1994 
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The topic of the lecture is what draws people
to seminars about the faith, but it's in the question-and-answer period
that the most good is done. That's where folks get to ask what's really
on their minds.
Well, at least some of them do. Others are too embarrassed
to ask.
At Catholic Answers' seminars questions are taken from
the floor immediately after the lecture. Everyone can see who is asking
what. But when I spoke recently at a conference on defending the faith,
questions weren't taken from the floor. They were written down and
stuffed into a ballot box during the twelve hours preceding my session
(which consisted of no lecture and all Q&A). I was surprised to see
how different the questions were from the ones asked at regular seminars.
One example: Of the nearly 300 questions submitted,
a tenth were about annulments. Yes, the topic comes up at regular
seminars, but maybe once in fifty questions, not once in ten. Yet
here were 30 people, in an audience of orthodox Catholics, asking
about annulments--and cloaking their asking in anonymity. This
suggests more than an academic interest in the issue.
Your heart has to go out to them. You wonder why they
haven't asked their parish priests about such things, and you're left
with the apprehension that maybe they don't trust their priests to
give them a straight answer. How sad that Catholics have to travel
across several state lines to hear a laymen tell them what the Church
teaches.
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Catholic Answers
