Forty Answers to “Forty Reasons I Am A Catholic”: The Index

Below is an index to our recently completed, nine-month series in which we examined and responded to Catholic philosopher, Peter Kreeft’s book, “Forty Reasons I Am A Catholic” (2018). I hope this series was helpful in delineating the irreconcilable differences separating Roman Catholicism and Gospel Christianity.

Claim #1: I am a Catholic because I believe Catholicism is true

#2: Because it’s the best of five choices

#3: Because Jesus is really, truly, personally, literally present in every consecrated host in the world

#4: Because the Catholic religion is from God, not just from man

#5: Because of the unprecedented historical fact that the church has never once lowered her standards, never changed her teaching.

#6: For the same reason G.K. Chesterton gives: to get my sins forgiven

#7: Because the Catholic church has been infallibly right about everything she has ever claimed to be infallibly right about

#8: Because of cathedrals

#9: Because the Catholic church is not Christ’s organization but his organism, his body

#10: Because only the Catholic church can save human civilization from spiritual and material destruction

#11: Because of the nouns

#12: Because I want to believe the same things that Jesus taught and that his disciples and their successors and every single Christian in the world believed for fifteen-hundred years

# 13: Because I want the strongest reason to believe the Bible

#14: Because of what the church has not taught as well as because of what she has

#15: Because of one thing that that I know with certainty, that I do not need belief or faith for

#16: Because gratitude is a necessary precondition of all religion

#17: Because of my mother

#18: Because of the angels, and their invisible and anonymous mediation

#19: Because of what the Bible tells me

#20: Because of my friends and my family – my spiritual family

#21: Because of the personality of the church’s saints

#22: Because only the Catholic Church is marked out by the four marks

#23: For the reason Walker Percy gave: “What else is there?”

#24: Because I am greedy

#25: Because Catholics, like their saints, are a little crazy

#26: Because I know I should treat other people as if they were Christ

#27: Because Catholics still do metaphysics

#28: Because the Catholic Church alone in the world today is hard with courage in a world grown soft with self-indulgence, consumerist and sexual

#29: Because I need dogmatic certainty about God, and Christ, and salvation

#30: Because only the Church can whup the devil

#31: To save civilization from its enemies

#32: Because of the movies

#33: Because when I go to confession I want to believe that Adam walks into the confessional and Jesus walks out

#34: Because I don’t want to live in a one-parent supernatural family

#35: Because I need Purgatory

#36: Because, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, no man can live without joy

#37: Because the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, and I need the Holy Spirit to “haunt” me with the very life of God

#38: Because the Church defends all of God’s creations as well as the Creator

#39: Because I value reason

#40: Because Jesus is there, in the church, in his body

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Below are links to indices of my two previous series reviewing Catholic apologetics books:

“The Catholic Verses: 95 Bible Passages That Confound Protestants” (2004) by Catholic apologist, Dave Armstrong.
https://excatholic4christ.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/index-answering-the-alleged-95-catholic-verses/

“Meeting the Protestant Challenge: How to Answer 50 Biblical Objections to Catholic Beliefs” (2019) by Catholic apologist, Karl Broussard.
https://excatholic4christ.wordpress.com/2020/12/04/answering-the-rebuttals-of-a-catholic-apologist-complete-index/

What’s next? Have I given any thought to a subsequent apologetics series? As a matter of fact, I have. Shortly, I’ll be announcing a new series responding to a Roman Catholic apologist.