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  • Kolbe Report 10/1/22

    Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center, Glory to Jesus Christ! I would like to thank the countless number of readers who wrote and promised prayers for my recovery from emergency surgery less than a week ago.  There is no doubt that your prayers are being answered, and I am deeply indebted to all of you for your kindness.  It will be a little while before I can travel again, but I am already able to resume handling my own correspondence as well as the writing of this newsletter. In the first days of my recovery, I re-read a biography of one of my favorite saints, St. Robert Bellarmine, and was struck by one particular incident in his life which I would like to share with you.  As you know from a previous newsletter, the Baltimore Catechism, mandated for use throughout the United States by the U.S. Bishops at the end of the nineteenth century, was modeled on the 1597 Catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine—a catechism which taught that God created all things by fiat in six 24-hour days.  St. Robert was perhaps the greatest controversialist of his age and his work the Controversies remains perhaps the standard refutation of all …

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  • Kolbe Report 9/15/22

    Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center, Glory to Jesus Christ! One of the highlights of our recent leadership retreat was the performance of the play “Wife, Mother and Mystic,” on the life and times of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi.  It was during Blessed Anna Maria’s lifetime, that the false philosophy of the Enlightenment began to make serious inroads within Catholic academia. This, in turn, led to a big push within Catholic academia to allow the publication and circulation of heliocentric books without any mention of the authoritative condemnations of 1616 and 1633.  As censor librorum of Rome, the heroic Dominican friar Fr. Anfossi resisted the attempts of these “progressive elements” within the Vatican and refused to grant the imprimatur to heliocentric books that did not remind readers of the prior Magisterial condemnations of works which promoted heliocentrism as a description of reality and not just as a scientific hypothesis. In doing the background research for the play, we were amazed to discover how deeply the false uniformitarian naturalism of Descartes and Immanuel Kant had penetrated the thinking of Catholic intellectuals, both clergy and laity by the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a scene that had to be cut from …

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  • Kolbe Report 9/10/22

    Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center, Pax Christi! In a recent debate between Dr. Kevin Mark and myself and two atheists on the Modern-Day Debates website, one of the main arguments that one of the atheists used to refute special creation was that organisms exhibit numerous examples of poor design, such as wisdom teeth and the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN), which prove that they could not be the products of intelligent design.  As a dentist, Dr. Kevin was easily able to rebut the claim of dysfunctional wisdom teeth, but to rebut the claim in regard to the RLN nerve required some research—which could not be done until after the debate. Thanks to our separated brethren at the Institute of Creation Research, I was able to find an excellent article by Dr. Jerry Bergman entitled “Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Is Not Evidence of Poor Design,” which thoroughly debunks the claim of “poor design.”  Dr. Bergman explains that the RLN controls the mammalian larynx (voice box) muscles, but, in the words of evolutionist paleontologist Donald Prothero: This nerve avoids the direct route between brain and throat and instead descends into the chest, loops around the aorta near the heart, then returns to the …

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  • Kolbe Report 8/20/22

    Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center, Pax Christi! Today, August 20, we celebrate the Feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church.  One of the most remarkable foreshadowings of the modernist revolt against the true doctrine of creation took place almost one thousand years ago when St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached against several heresies which bore many similarities to modern errors. One of the plays produced at a Kolbe leadership retreat focused on the confrontation between St. Bernard and Abbot Peter Abelard which anticipated the ongoing struggle between a humanist worldview whose starting point is skepticism and human science and the Catholic worldview whose starting point is the certitude of Faith and theological science. (The play “To Soar Above Reason” can be viewed at this link with the password kolbeplays) Abbot Abelard anticipated the theistic evolutionist mentality by denying the original holiness of Adam, the effects of Original Sin, and the necessity of Our Lord's work of Redemption to restore human nature. Peter Abelard: Striving by Reason to go Beyond Reason   When Abbot Abelard was called to appear before the King of France, several Bishops, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Bernard confronted him with a number …

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Metaphysical Principles

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Creation Providence

09:15
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Character of God

06:41
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Almighty God or Mad Scientist

05:38
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Which is More Scientific?

18:51
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Kolbe Center Interviews

08:07

  • Keith Scott

    Dear. Mr. Owen, Thank you for your website. I stumbled across it at just the right time in my life. You see, I have been an ordained youth pastor in two mainline Protestant denominations for the past decade. When I was encouraged by my local church to pursue a Master of Divinity degree, I began my studies and fell in love with the Church Fathers. While I began to see the truth of the Catholic Faith through my study of Patristics, and then by reading modern Catholic apologists, I knew that the only right course for me was to enter the Catholic Church in full fellowship. As you can imagine, it has been a hard and painful road for someone with a young family, walking away from a career with a family to support. My wife and I met our real test of faith when we began our RCIA class this past fall. We found what we perceived to be a low view of Scripture and Tradition. Scripture was interpreted with what I would call a "hyper-allegorical" hermeneutical approach. The teachings of the Fathers were also reduced to a subjective experience for their time not ours. Within this framework, the …

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