One of the cleverest diversionary tactics in the Catholic arsenal is the direct acknowledgment of the scandalous foolishness or arbitrariness of the Catholic faith. One finds this implied in the gospels ("Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."), stated explicitly in Paul ("God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise."), and perhaps most pithily in the slogan of Tertullian, "Credo quia absurdum." The function of this strategy is to disarm objections based on the absurdities of the faith by transforming them into something numinously intended which we are meant to admire.
It's something akin (but not identical) to Roland Barthes's "Operation Margarine"—a propaganda strategy that emphasizes the defects of a thing in order to then say "and nonetheless...." and conclude with some romantic, sentimental, or patriotic appeal, thereby implicitly excusing all the mentioned defects without actually addressing them. Instead of being scandalized by the ridiculous particularity of the god-man being a jewish carpenter born on the fringe of the Empire to a minor ethnic group, we learn to appreciate the pleasing juxtaposition of necessity and contingency, power and weakness, etc., and see this as an impressive and beautiful truth, rather than something ridiculous. After all, "God chose the foolish things of the world", etc.
Similarly, one observes the perennial corruption of the Church, the heresies and moral enormities of its ministers. One presents Alexander VI and John XXII and in extreme cases refers to the institution as "the whore of Babylon" so as to emphasize the sheer wickedness of it all. And then one trots out the saving inversion: That an institution so riddled with error and corruption could have survived this long despite the best efforts of its ministers to destroy it is a sure sign of its divine origin. At this, one is meant to forget how corrupt the Church is as an institution and instead see all its enormities as paradoxical evidence of its incorruptibility.
The appeal to foolishness or the inversion of expectations is a kind of argument from unfittingness. The real magic happens when these appeals to unfittingness are paired with more classical philosophical arguments from necessity or fittingness. In the Catholic theological tradition one will have long chains of reasoning about the nature of God based on Aristotelian and Platonic thinking about the first cause, the One, its supreme perfections, its providence, its wisdom, its eternity, and then these are paired with long chains of reasoning about how the same God was humiliated, tortured, betrayed, and executed like a common criminal. It is somewhat unexpected in the order of the universe implied by the former conception that the latter would ever take place, much less that it would be the chosen means by which God manifested his will to mankind for all of history. The scandal of the particularity of it is enough in itself, let alone the degradation and so on.
I am not interested in exploring here why people believe in Christianity, but I think it's interesting how this mechanism seems to add to the perceived credibility of the faith. Where possible, classical reasoning is used, arguments from necessity and philosophical principle, etc. When scandal occurs in the doctrinal fabric of Christianity, or actual historical fact introduces something scandalous, the appeal to foolishness is made, or the scandalous event is held up as part of a broader picture—"God chose the foolish things of the world", etc.
The result is that everything can be accounted for using this two-pronged approach. Is your bishop a pedophile? Is your pastor a fount of heresies? Ah, well, we must honor them in their priestly office despite their personal defects, since the Church is holy in spite of the corruption of its ministers. Is your bishop performing his duties with a modicum of integrity and a mediocre level of success? Of course he is, because he is holy and upright and this is given by the grace of his office. Are you confused by the historical arbitrariness of the Incarnation? Well it was ordained to be so in order to make mighty things low. Notice, however, that when Peter died at Rome it was fitting not because Rome was weak, but because it was the seat of power for the world's greatest empire, and an artery for the dispersal of the new religion. Does some aspect of the faith bemuse you because it seems arbitrary and historically conditioned? Oh, the scandal of particularity is a great sacred mystery of Catholicism. But if another one does? Ah, here we provide a chain of arguments in its defense. And so on.
None of my observations here constitute a real objection to this strategy. What I intend is to simply observe that the strategy forms a clever mechanism for eliminating a wide range of difficulties paradoxically by highlighting them and sacralizing their absurdity, when some alternate and more reasonable approach to resolving them is unavailable.