In a talk delivered June 2 before a rapt audience of nearly 300 in New York, Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, O.P., Secretary of the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, went to the heart of key contemporary arguments against the Catholic faith and countered them with the best of Church thinking. Practicing what he called, citing Pope Benedict XVI, "intellectual charity," the Archbishop-a Bronx-born Friar of the Province of St. Joseph, and a former professor of theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.-argued that the most effective way of overcoming challenges to faith in the uniqueness of Christ, or demonstrating the nature of the moral law, is to take the conceptual underpinnings of secularism and pluralism seriously before, in order to better make the intellectual case for Catholic faith and practice. "St. Thomas Aquinas tried so hard to understand positions with which he did not agree that he was said to be able to formulate them more forcefully than their proponents could. Only then did he set out to respond to them. This is what I mean by taking the intellectual challenges to faith seriously."

Please click here to read a full transcript of the talk, which was given at the Yale Club of New York in midtown Manhattan.