On Dealing with Protestant Objectors

An instructed Catholic is simply a giant in knowledge of the Christian religion compared with such men, and he feels uneasy in combat with dwarfs. This is no mere extravagance or affectation, but literal fact.

A Catholic may be unable through want of habit or reading, through indisposition or inability to handle details, to answer readily or clearly to those thousand little petulances which a read adversary may launch by the hour; and a learned Protestant will often fancy he has "shut him up," the real fact being that the Catholic is "shut up" by the stupendous non-acquaintance of his opponent.

He may give some general answer to such popular objections as St. Bartholomew's, or "The Gunpowder Plot"; he may speak wisely on Littledale's "Plain Reasons," "Bishop Strossmayer's speech at the Vatican Council," or "The Impious Utterances" of "St. Ligouri" and "The Raccolta," but, because his creed is a logical synthesis, he feels all the time how superficial it all is, and that what he really has to do is to begin at the beginning, to discuss what is meant by Christianity, and what the very theory of the supernatural involves.

This he cannot do in a moment. (Quigley, Mary the Mother of Christ in Prophecy and its Fulfillment, p. 61)