The great temptation of the Catholic . . . is the temptation to intellectual pride. It is so obvious that most of his critics are talking without in the least knowing what they are talking about, that he is sometimes a little provoked towards the very un-Christian logic of answering a fool according to his folly. He is a little bit disposed to luxuriate in secret, as it were, over the much greater subtlety and richness of the philosophy he inherits; and only answer a bewildered barbarian so as to bewilder him still more. He is tempted to ironical agreements or even to disguising himself as a dunce.

(The Thing, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1929, 134)

So many people are at once preoccupied with it and prejudiced against it. It is queer to observe so much ignorance with so little indifference. They love talking about it and they hate hearing about it . . . I fancy there is more than meets the eye in this curious controversial attitude; the desire to ask rhetorical questions and not to ask real questions; the wish to heckle and not to hear.

(Ibid., 81-82)

I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced . . . Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all . . . It puzzled me very much . . . to imagine why people . . . should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw in this random way on their own imagination . . . I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I knew that its accusers, for some reason or other, were curiously inaccurate.

(The Catholic Church and Conversion, New York: Macmillan, 1926, 36-38)

. . . rags and tatters of stale slander and muddleheadedness . . . the official policy of the opposition to the Church . . . When a man really sees the Church, even if he dislikes what he sees, he does not see what he had expected to dislike. Even if he wants to slay it he is no longer able to slander it . . . There drops from him the holy armor of his invincible ignorance; he can never be so stupid again.

(Ibid., 49-50)

Proverbs 26:4-5  Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own eyes.