Site Seeing - David Palm

Pizza, Chicks and Truth in Small Bytes
Your road map for exploring Catholic Web sites on the information superhighway.

Christefideles Pizza and
Theology Society
http://www.cpats.org

A fun name befits a fun and interesting Web page. This page is a showplace for a good idea, namely, getting faithful Catholics together in local apologetics groups.

Catholics need this desperately. With so much active dissent coupled with even more apathy in the Church, it's easy to feel isolated if you really seek to be faithful to Catholic teaching. Getting together even every other month with like-minded Catholics is a huge boost for morale.

The Christefideles Pizza and Theology Society is one such group in the Boston area.

The site has a nifty ongoing discussion group that will give you a flavor of the kind of thing you could do live and in person in your own home. And for those with questions about the Catholic Faith, there's a panel of lay apologists ready to take your questions via e-mail on topics such as Scripture, liturgy, sacraments, cults and salvation outside the Church. Just send them your question and get a personal response.

This is a great idea; some Catholic apologetics organizations are simply swamped with questions, so spread 'em out a little and give these pizza guys a chance to help you out.



Una Fides/Jack Chick Comics
http://net2.netacc.net/~mafg/
jtchick/jtc01.htm

As anti-Catholic material goes, nothing scrapes the bottom of the barrel quite like a Jack Chick tract. This is truly poisonous stuff, packaged in a seemingly innocent genre — comic books. While neither substantive nor accurate, one cannot underestimate the negative impact this "literature" can have on non-Catholics and Catholics alike; it deserves a weighty response, and thankfully, it has one on the Web.

Michael Gallagher first became interested in apologetics when a teacher at a Protestant high school began handing out Jack Chick comics to his students, including Gallagher's daughter. He thought this sort of stuff, shot through with half-truths and outright lies, required a response.

Set opposite snapshots of the tracts themselves, Gallagher provides page-by-page critique and rebuttal of Chick's material, which includes such Chick jewels as Are Roman Catholics Christians? (you can probably guess his answer), Why Is Mary Crying? (his answer: because Catholics are worshipping her), and The Death Cookie (a crude disparagement of the Holy Eucharist).

If you have any friends who've gotten hold of a Jack Chick tract, make sure they get the other side of the story here.



The Beggar King
http://webusers.anet-stl.com/~nosmo/index.html

One can get a bit jaded after hitting a few dozen Catholic apologetics sites. The material can tend to be pretty predictable after a while. Hence, I always appreciate personal Web pages that feature fresh, original writing. The Beggar King (the name is inspired by the great Catholic sovereign, St. Louis IX), hosted by Larry Nolte, provides just that.

Nolte's writing style is winsome and engaging, sprinkled with good humor and brimming with significant content. Patrology in Small Bytes is a nice beginner's tutorial on the early Church Fathers. A very interesting item is a point-by-point rebuttal of an anti-Catholic tract written by an anonymous fundamentalist Protestant.

The site features a nifty selection of patristic citations on a wide variety of topics. And The Beggar King site also includes one of the best selections of Catholic Web links around. My only request to the author: More, please.

Be sure to check out David Palm's Web site at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/djpalm.