Books for the Catholic Apologist

This is a post for the young adults who are attending my talk in Melbourne on "Defending Your Catholic Faith." Rather than hand out a book list, I thought it would be more efficient to post some links here.

I suggested that you should have a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a basic reference book for Catholic doctrine. You can get this for $11 from St Pauls. You can also read the text online at the Vatican website.

As I said, there is a vast number of books on apologetics. Here is a list of some good ones: Popular Catholic Apologetics Books.

Here is a good introduction by Carl Olsen: Be a Catholic Apologist Without Apology

Many books written in the USA are aimed at apologetics in the face of Protestant objections to the faith. This is something that Americans have to do more than we do in England or Australia where we will more often face objections to the faith from a secularist point of view.


An excellent short pamphlet is Apologia by Fr Marcus Holden and Fr Andrew Pinsent. (Credo by the same authors is also useful as a pamphlet-sized introduction to Catholic doctrine.) "Lumen" is another one, looking at the Catholic gift to civilisation, a powerful answer to the debate question "Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?" It's not listed at St Paul's but you can see it at the CTS website.

(I will post a copy of the talk in due course.)

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