Grad Student's Apostolate Encourages Dialogue
by Matt Grady

While the enterprises and activities of Ave Maria University's undergraduates have received frequent attention since the school's opening in 2003, there is no lack of initiative among the AMU graduate students. Damian Lenshek, a second-year master's student at AMU, is the director of Project Dominic, a group dedicated to informed and charitable discussion of the Catholic Faith.

Founded in 2004 by Lenshek and a group of like-minded friends, Project Dominic has already produced two books refuting anti-Catholic arguments and is working on a third.

Project Dominic had its beginnings at a Philadelphia pizza shop when Lenshek, a seminarian at the time, arrived with other seminarians and priests to dialogue with Dr. Noe Acosta, a Reformed Baptist seminary instructor who had written his 1999 doctoral dissertation on conflicts between the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Bible. Acosta was giving a presentation entitled "The Errors of Catholic Doctrine" to members of local Protestant churches at the restaurant. One of the restaurant's waiters, a friend of Lenshek's, had informed Lenshek about the gathering some time earlier.

"After a night of charitable debate and discussion, I was very fired up and read a copy of Dr. Acosta's dissertation overnight," Lenshek said.

Lenshek and his friends were intrigued by the idea of continuing the conversation about Acosta's dissertation and related issues in the same charitable yet candid vein, and Project Dominic was born.

Gradually however, Lenshek became less enthused about refuting the dissertation and almost forgot about it.

"Except for the zeal of my friends who wanted to refute Acosta's dissertation in writing, there would be no Project Dominic today," Lenshek said.

The group chose the name Project Dominic because of the story concerning St. Dominic's conversation with an Albigensian innkeeper that lasted all night and ended with the Albigensian's return to the Church. Project Dominic's goal, according to its Web site, is "to publish two books each year responding to particular published critiques of Catholicism." While not all of the group's members have formal backgrounds in Catholic theology, Lenshek taps several priests and professors of the theology to help vet the material before it is published in book form.

Twenty-two contributors combined their efforts with Lenshek, who provided some guidelines on writing effective yet charitable essays, to produce Project Dominic's first book, entitled, "The Bible Versus the Catechism?" Each essay tackles a different aspect of Acosta's dissertation, explaining and defending Catholic teaching on subjects like papal authority, the sacraments and veneration of Mary.

Informal is the best word to describe many of Project Dominic's proceedings, and the Internet plays a large part in all of them. A homepage exists explaining the group's mission as well as past and current projects (www.projectdominic.org), and Lenshek moderates a Yahoo! Group message board which allows members to keep in contact.

"Friends donate their internet skills for the Web site, members in the Yahoo! Group research and write essays and the essays go through several rounds of editing for fidelity, charity, and flow," Lenshek said.

Keeping to its mission, Project Dominic recently released its second book, "How Catholics Read the Bible," which takes on Mike Gendron's anti-Catholic essay, "Catholic Hermeneutics."

"The second book was written in response to an email conversation with a Protestant fundamentalist who claimed that tradition and the Magisterium prevent Catholics from reading the Bible correctly," Lenshek said.

The group's third book is already is the works and is due to be released summer of 2006. Entitled, "Repeating the Sin of Eve," the newest release will address feminism and the Catholic Church.

When asked about Project Dominic's unique approach to evangelization and the good he hopes the group will accomplish, Lenshek responded: "Besides hoping to help convert our anti-Catholic interlocutors, there are a number of other avenues that our books open up. For example, it is more personal to give a family member who has fallen out of the Faith a book you have contributed to yourself. There is also a better chance they will read it, rather than throwing it away. Besides, you never know who will read a book."