Welcome back to Catholic Answers Live. I'm Sy Kelly, your host. We're going to do open forum this hour.

I just wanted to take a minute to say welcome and hello to a couple of Australians who made their way here.

All the way from Australia here, which is I'm told not that far travel for you. I will start with you, Dr. Robert Hadad from Sydney. Are you in Sydney?

Yes, Sydney. And one of the great Catholic voices in Australia. I know that Tim Staples knows you well, but when I was down there, I was like, if you put them next to our apologists, you're better than Joe Hashmire, definitely.

I think better than Trent Horn. I don't want to name all the ones that you're talking about.

I thought Catholic Answers people were honest. That was painfully honest.

So just tell me a little bit about your evangelization efforts and your apologetics work in Australia.

What do I do? Actually, I work full time for the church in Catholic education and I'm responsible for what I was head of evangelization, which involves faith formation for teachers and youth ministry and family evangelization.

It's a big job, but what consumes most of my time. But with apologetics, it's been my hobby basically since the mid-80s.

When I had my Catholic conversion, so to speak, and I read this book called The Question Box by Father Conway. It's an old book from the 19th century. Paul has pressed New York.

And that really kicked me off. Then I read Faith of Our Father, and I just went from there.

But I incorporated apologetics in my lessons when I started teaching formally as a high school teacher for Year 7 and 8.

And I also, when I started University Chaplaincy, the then Archbishop George Pell, who became Cardinal, he asked me specifically to include apologetics in my campus ministry.

Oh, wonderful. But for myself personally, it's still like a part-time hobby on the side.

Because Cardinal Pell was supposed to be our keynote speaker. And then as Chris Chack loves to say, he got a better offer.

Is that what got you guys thinking about coming here? Is it a completely unrelated and something that came to me as an invitation maybe a year ago?

And it was a great surprise for me, and I just was so honored by it. And it's part of the work, or the next phase of building the work in the Apostle of Perusia Media, with Charble and Kevin, with the prime movers here.

They had invited me to be part of it. I actually wanted to come to America to do something like this since 1998. I first came in 1998 to visit Patrick Madrid in Ohio.

Oh, yeah. And I visited some friends in the seminary at Scranton, Scrant Pennsylvania, and then I went to the Maronite Church at Aladie Lebanon at Youngstown, Ohio.

That was my first visit to Australia, but sorry to America, but since it's only been incidental visits, like passing through to go to World Youth Days in Panama or whatever.

Wait, wait. We're not on the way to Panama.

27 and 19 are passed through the States to go to Panama.

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