We need to not only defend the church's teachings, but also expose the
falsehoods and fallacies in the doctrines of other belief systems,
especially protestant faiths. This is different from Catholic Answers
(catholic.com), Catholics Come Home (catholicscomehome.org), and Word on
Fire (wordonfire.org) because rather than offering a database for
searching answers to questions, or collection of inspiring catholic
homilies, talks, and media, this site will seek to use evidence-based
reasoning to prove every element of the catholic and convince the user
that it is worth the effort (read: friction) to go through the process to
come into the Catholic Church. The main differentiator is that this service takes the answers TO the user, rather than the user having to search and find answers on their own.
One use case is that any catholic could punch in the
beliefs of someone who may be ideologically very far from the church and
quickly get a clear path of how they can logically guide that person to the truth.
It's not practical or feasible to expect every catholic to know and understand the
catholic church's teachings inside out. Most of us trust the magisterium; we trust the church's teachings to be correct without necessarily
understanding every ounce of reasoning behind them.
This is why we need a system like this, a complete, ordered, step-by-step
guide to logically bring someone to the Catholic faith, from atheism to
theism, from theism to christianity, from christianity to
catholicism.
Faith is ultimately very logical. Evangelization efforts of adults and
teenagers that attempt to inspire faith by "encountering jesus", or
"having a personal experience" seem ludicrous to the people outside the
catholic bubble. Yes, to the faithful catholic personal experience is the
greatest proof, but this is not the case for those who don't already
believe. For those who don't already believe, asking them to pray in order
to "personally experience" god seems ludicrous. It's too easy for them to point out
how the music and community inspire groupthink and how easily our emotions
can be manipulated... and how easily an emotional experience can masquerade as
a spiritual one. Furthermore, I can't use my own personal experience to logically convince someone else that the Church is the truth.
The reason so many young people leave the Catholic Church is because they were never taught WHY to believe. They were never taught the logic, depth, and reasoning behind the catholic faith, and they may never have had the urgency to go find those answers. Once these young people get out into the real world, they no longer need to be catholic "because their family is catholic," and soon enough, an atheist (like Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion) convinces them than catholicism is a silly notion of a friendly god in the sky, and they don't need to say no to the temptations of the world, and that life would be so much better if they weren't being held back by a silly religion. This is how much of the non-religious world views catholics.
Part of the solution is to teach the reasoning and logic and evidence behind every element of the catholic faith in religious education classes, especially for high schoolers. This will require the teens to think seriously about the truth for a little while and hopefully internalize it.
The other aspect is to have a resource like this web app, that allows the user to see exactly what arguments need to be made, what evidence to bring up, etc, in order to show others the truth.
Truly, if we believe that the Catholic Faith is THE TRUTH, then we should
not fear logic or reason or evidence. We should have nothing to hide, for
the truth is on our side.