I was once telling my wife how sad it was to me how many young people were leaving the Church on account of not knowing about how intellectually compelling, deep and beautiful Catholic philosophy and theology can be.

It seemed to me that children were learning little more than childish caricatures of what the Church believes, caricatures that pale in comparison to the rigorous education students receive in all the other subjects. It seemed that the other disciplines were like giants strolling around in the minds of teenagers while Church teaching was like a little bug running desperately to avoid the footfalls of the enormous beings that might trample them. That, at least, was an image from my own mind as a young person.

These little metaphorical insects, of course, are nothing more than straw-men versions of the faith and the philosophy that assists it. Later in life, during my conversion, it was overwhelming to learn about the faith and Catholic philosophy at a higher intellectual level. All the answers to all of life’s big questions are addressed with satisfactory and elegant explanations, but all of that is completely missed if students are not woken up to what is there.

The Church not only answers the question, “Why am I here?” but also gives an answer that moves the heart: God made you, and he made you out of sheer gratuitous and merciful love that will forgive any sin. The Church affirms Aristotle’s claim that truth is worth knowing for its own sake, and adds that truth is worth knowing because God is truth.

As G.K. Chesterton writes, it is clear that St. Thomas Aquinas understood all the most logical parts of Aristotle, but it is doubtful that Aristotle would have understood all the most spiritual parts of Aquinas. Not only does the Church answer the question, “What is the nature of man?” but affirms the goodness of both the body and the soul. So true, and so satisfying. Instead of explaining away reality, as so many modern philosophies do like sophists, the Church gives solid and substantial explanations of everything.

And so I was expressing all of this to my wife, and I told her that someone should write a book at something like a middle-school level just introducing students to the very basics (ideas that feel like common sense but shed light on so much of life!) of Catholic philosophy so they could begin to see that the real giant in the room, the father of them all, was the intellectual tradition of the Church.

She said to me, “Why don’t you write that book?”

I had a rough draft written within 10 days.

I restricted myself to philosophy because that is where my education lies, and I titled the book A Fool’s Errand based on the wisdom of Socrates that we have to recognize first that we are fools, that we do not have the vital insight into the nature of things that we would like to have, before we can take up and value the adventure of philosophy, the errand of a self-recognized fool to become wise. I made it short and as simple and informal as I possibly could so that it is accessible and won’t scare away anybody.

To anyone else who has undergone the same kind of conversion as I did, these ideas will feel very familiar. We ask ourselves the question, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” (There is the very real possibility that I was told, but I just wasn’t listening or just didn’t understand the depth and the beauty of what I was being told.) We had grown up with the impression that Catholicism is intellectually weak and flimsy, when in reality the Church has the oldest intellectual tradition in history.

G.K. Chesterton sums it up well in his essay Why I Am a Catholic:

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors.

Somehow, the idea that the Church is anti-intellectual and anti-science has lodged itself in the popular consciousness. Such an idea could not be further from the truth. If Galileo found opposition to his ideas, it is because academics always experience challenges within the context of intellectual institutions, and Galileo was just one of many academics and scholars at one of the many intellectual institutions throughout Europe invented and sustained by the Church for the purpose of intellectual and academic pursuits. The example cited by so many to prove the Church’s closed-mindedness actually proves the opposite when viewed from the larger vantage point: Galileo found work and community as a scholar because the Church consistently supported scholarship.

There has been no more consistent support of intellectual activity and the pursuit of truth than the Catholic Church, and it is important that we remember it.