EPISTLES

In this fascinating discussion, Raymond Arroyo delves into the personal faith journey of commentator Michael Knowles, specifically focusing on the moment he stepped away from his faith and the intellectual and providential circumstances that led to the profound experience of Michael Knowles’ Conversion.

Knowles return wasn’t merely emotional, but an intellectual reawakening sparked by philosophical argument and guided by a serendipitous encounter with a great man of the Church, Fr. George Rutler. Rutler is a prominent Catholic commentator known for being an EWTN speaker, a columnist for Crisis Magazine, and a highly regarded Catholic wit.

Raymond Arroyo: I want to talk about faith to bring this full circle. You fall away from your faith at 13, right after your confirmation. What happened and what brought you back?

Michael Knowles: Well, I have to correct you, Raymond. I fell away just before my confirmation.

Raymond Arroyo: Before your confirmation. Okay, that makes it a little better, actually.

Michael Knowles: I said to my mother, “I don’t believe. I’m an atheist. Christopher Hitchens is really cool. Whatever.” And she said, “Uh, you’re going through a phase. You’ll get over it eventually. You should not…”

Raymond Arroyo: She force you to do the confirmation.

Michael Knowles: It’s not that she… she wouldn’t have forced me, but she said, “I recommend you receive your confirmation. You’ve received your sacraments. You’ve done your religious education. You’re going through a stupid phase. You should be confirmed in the faith.”

And I trusted her. I said, “Ah, fair enough. Okay, whatever.” So, I did. And I effectively apostasized. And I thought I was a very clever 13-year-old little boy. I was much smarter than, you know, St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, of course.

Michael Knowles: The short version of the story is I meet a bunch of people who are a lot smarter than me, and, uh, most of them are atheists, but the very smartest ones were theistic.

Randomly—or providentially—assigned roommate presented me with one of the arguments for God, the Ontological Argument by St. Anselm of Canterbury. St. Thomas Aquinas kind of… he doesn’t like the argument. He doesn’t say it’s a wrong argument. He just doesn’t like it for various reasons.

But in any case, it got me. And, you know, this is a very important point on evangelism, I think. What got me about the argument was in part that it’s a sound argument. Even Bertrand Russell, the great logician of the 20th century, atheist, he said the ontological argument is sound. It’s a fine argument.

But what really got me is I fell away because of intellectual hubris, and I thought that religion was for dummies and atheism was for the smart people. What brought me back was maybe the substance of the argument or maybe just the fact that I now saw that smart people could be religious. It was a kind of permission.

And not everyone is going to be drawn in by that. Some people are going to fall away from religion because they’re, I don’t know, emotionally damaged or because they suffered a trauma or because whatever. There are plenty of reasons. And I think the way that you have to pull people back in is to speak to that, to speak to whatever deficit they’re feeling, to lead them to the truth—what is ultimately the truth every ancient ever knew.

The discussion concludes with the unexpected but essential role of Father George Rutler in confirming Knowles’ return to the Church.

Raymond Arroyo: Yeah. Tell me about the impact Father George Rutler had on your return to Catholicism, quickly.

Michael Knowles: Absolutely inestimable, because as I’m seriously considering returning to faith, I’m 23 or so—23, 24—I’m in New York and I’m at a show business event. It was a political show business event actually.

It was for conservatives who were in show business, a group called the Friends of Abe. And coincidentally—providentially—I’m at a restaurant that was owned by my friend’s father. They were having the meeting there, and I see some books on the table: perfectly fine polemics by Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter and what you know.

Then there was this little weird book called Coincidentally, and the epigraph was from Alexander Pope, and it said, “All nature is but art, unknown to thee; all chance, direction which thou canst not see.” I look down—it says by George Rutler. I look on the back—first blurb is from William F. Buckley Jr. I had just been the William Buckley student fellow at Yale. It says, “Save this as a valuable Rutler first edition.” I open up the book—it’s signed.

I then look in the back, and my mind is swimming with the thought of returning to the faith. I’m in a—I’m almost in a daze at this point. I open up—what do you know? The guy who wrote the book is a Catholic priest. What do you know? It says he’s the pastor of a church just a few blocks away. I said, “This is a weird—it’s a book about coincidences. That’s pretty weird.”

Raymond Arroyo: There you go.

Michael Knowles: I then—I then look him up.

Raymond Arroyo: You’ve been advertising, Michael.

Michael Knowles: Well, the even slightly weirder thing: I look him up. He’s no longer at that church that I saw. He’s been moved, and he’s been moved to a church called St. Michael’s. I said, you know, I think I should go to that church. And there’s a beautiful little stone design, a mosaic, when you walk in, and it says The Truth Above All Things.

I went there. His preaching, his writing, his friendship, frankly, were of simply inestimable value in my return to the faith. And he celebrated the marriage of my wife and me. So it really—you know, wonderful. A great man of the Church, great intellect—you know, just—couldn’t say enough good things about him.

Raymond Arroyo: Yeah. A great, an old friend of mine as well.