1. Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating
This is a modern classic work from the godfather of today’s popular apologetics movement. Not only do you have some of the very best arguments answering the anti-Catholic claims of Fundamentalists, but each well reasoned response is animated by Keating’s incomparable style and wit.
2. Handbook of Catholic Apologetics, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli
The most exhaustive apologetics work ever written and a must-read Catholic book for any apologist. It comes as close to covering the full gamut of apologetics as any book to date. And it does so using arguments that offer “reasons for the hope that lies within” our Catholic faith while also seeking to understand opposing views.
3. Why We’re Catholic, Trent Horn
A top candidate for the “one book” to give to non-Catholics or fallen-away Catholics to help them understand what the Church teaches and why. But even lifelong strong Catholics will find much to learn in this concise, accessible volume and its many helpful charts, lists, and sidebars.
4. The Catholic Controversy, St. Francis de Sales
When the Calvinists of Geneva refused to listen to Francis de Sales preach, he penned short apologetic tracts outlining the truth of the Catholic faith and the errors of the Reformation. His arguments are brilliant (many of them not found anywhere else) and written with the clarity and gentle spirit of the “Doctor of Charity” and one of the patron saints of apologetics.
5. Theology and Sanity, Frank Sheed
Sheed was one of the founders of the Catholic Evidence Guild, a seminal apologetics apostolate in the first half of the twentieth century. Of his many top Catholic books, this one stands out for its readability, its strength of argument, and its ability to help the reader form and communicate a coherent theological universe in which Catholic teachings fit together in a beautiful and compelling whole.
6. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
Lewis never became a Catholic, but the Chronicles of Narnia author was his day’s best expositor of the fundamentals of faith that all Christians share. And this is the best example of his lucid, patient, flawlessly rational approach to showing doubters and seekers how Christianity makes sense.
7. Faith of Our Fathers, James Cardinal Gibbons
Cardinal Gibbons was the archbishop of Baltimore in the latter half the nineteenth century, and this book reflects the fruits of his life’s work as a pastor in the anti-Catholic milieu of the American South in that era. Subtitled A Plain Exposition and Vindication of the Church Founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, it prefigured the renewal of Catholic apologetics in the English-speaking world a generation later.
8. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
Written before his conversion from Anglicanism, Orthodoxy might be considered by some to be an inferior apologetics work to Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. But what it lacks in length and breadth, it makes up for in singular charm. Showcasing G.K.’s love of paradox and ability to turn pithy phrases, it succeeds like no other Catholic book at capturing Christianity’s marriage of the mundane with the transcendent.
9. Radio Replies, Fr. Leslie Rumble
The casual, snobbish anti-Catholicism infecting the Anglosphere at the dawn of the twentieth century did not spare Australia. To combat it, Fr. Leslie Rumble decided to do something new: take questions and challenges to Catholicism and answer them on a weekly radio broadcast. Not only did this effort create a new media template for apologetics—it produced a collection of answers that is still relevant and powerful today.
10. The Fathers Know Best, Jimmy Akin
After Scripture, the writings of the early Christian leaders and teachers known as the Fathers of the Church provide the richest reference point for anyone seeking to defend the truth of Catholicism. In this must-have reference, veteran apologist Jimmy Akin combs through their voluminous writings and culls useful passages establishing the Catholicity of the early Church, on everything from the papacy to the Eucharist to salvation to sex.
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