Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Pax Christi!
In his masterpiece Pascendi, St. Pius X identified the worst heresy in the history of the Church and foresaw the untold damage that this heresy would inflict upon the Church and the world if it remained unchecked. The heresy was "modernism," "the synthesis of all heresies," and its "principal doctrine," wrote St. Pius X, was "evolution." Other heresies, he noted, had added, subtracted or distorted some part of the Deposit of Faith while leaving most of the Faith intact; but evolution-based modernism conceived of the whole world as in a state of continuous evolution and thus abandoned the very notion of immutable Truth. On every side, he saw Catholic intellectuals rejecting scriptural inerrancy and the sacred history of Genesis on the grounds that "natural science" had proven that the Bible contained historical errors and that advances in geology and biology had proven that man had evolved from a one-celled organism through millions of years of the same kinds of natural processes he observed in the present. Vatican One had already anathematized the proposition that "the progress of the sciences demands that the Catholic doctrine of creation be recast," but St. Pius X saw that the ranks of Catholic intelligentsia holding that error continued to swell, so he renewed the anathema in his own name.
In Pascendi, St. Pius noted that, for the modernist, liturgy and doctrine had to be adapted to the changing circumstances produced by the evolutionary process. The doctrines and liturgical traditions of the past had to give way to new expressions and practices better adapted to the current stage of evolution. Thus, in Europe, the Faith that had given birth to Christian civilization began to be subverted and replaced by a counterfeit modernist religion that affirmed the right of fallible human natural science to pass judgment on the supernatural Divine Revelation of God, as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning.
One of the greatest obstacles to the restoration of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, the foundation of our holy Faith, is the widespread belief that the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1-11 has no place in the history of Catholic theology, and that it was an invention of protestant fundamentalists. This absurd claim is repeated again and again by Catholic theistic evolutionists, in spite of the fact that all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching believed and proclaimed the literal historical truth of every word of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis from the time of the Apostles. This "diabolical disorientation" affects even Catholics who defend the liturgical and doctrinal tradition of the Church, so that it is not unusual to find the champions of theistic evolution among the most zealous promoters of the traditional Liturgy - in spite of the fact that, in keeping with the principle of "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi," all of the liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church harmoniously proclaim the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11.
Modernist Tsunami Strikes Ireland
The devastating consequences of the collapse of faith in the truth of the sacred history of Genesis can be seen everywhere today, but I remember a particularly vivid example of the horrific consequences of this “collective amnesia” in regard to Genesis when I visited Ireland in the fall of 2015, on the eve of the referendum on so-called “same-sex marriage.” In the words of Wikipedia, “The Marriage Act 2015, passed by the Oireachtas on 22 October 2015 and signed into law by the Presidential Commission on 29 October 2015, gave legislative effect to the amendment. Marriages of same-sex couples in Ireland began being recognised from 16 November 2015, and the first marriage ceremonies of same-sex couples in Ireland occurred the following day.”
My friends in Ireland who invited me to visit the country in advance of the referendum agreed that the best way to motivate Catholics to defend the true nature of Holy Marriage would be through presentations on “The Special Creation of Adam and Eve: The Foundation of the Church’s Teaching on Holy Marriage.” By showing priests and lay faithful that sound theology, sound philosophy and sound natural science confirmed the truth of the special creation of Adam and Eve in a state of genetic perfection less than ten thousand years ago, we reasoned that we could motivate them to want to defend authentic marriage—in spite of a directive from the Irish Bishops telling pastors not to tell their parishioners how to vote in the upcoming referendum!
We were not prepared for the campaign of intimidation and censorship that the promoters of unnatural marriage successfully launched in Ireland during the weeks leading up to the referendum. For example, a retreat center that had invited me to give a presentation on “The Special Creation of Adam and Eve: The Foundation of the Church’s Teaching on Holy Marriage” contacted my local host and told him that activists had threatened to report them to the government for discrimination if they allowed me to speak at their center. Since the retreat center depended heavily on income from programs they provided to children from Catholic and non-Catholic government-subsidized schools, they regretfully withdrew their invitation for me to speak on their premises.
In the end, there was only one parish in Ireland whose pastor was willing to risk hosting me to speak at his parish in Dublin; and that seminar was recorded and can be viewed on the Kolbe website at this link. I have no doubt that had the information presented in that seminar been presented in every parish in Ireland, the results of the referendum would have been totally different. As it was, the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish electorate voted to equate natural with unnatural marriage, appropriately enough on the feast of the beheading of that great defender of Holy Marriage, St. John the Baptist, August 29, 2015.
During my stay in Dublin, I enjoyed the hospitality of a wonderful Catholic family whose youngest son had Downs Syndrome. The lady of the house told me that the teachers and administrators at her son’s school were pressuring the students to vote in the referendum on unnatural marriage. Not surprisingly, the students had some difficulty understanding what the referendum was all about, so the young man’s mother had to explain to him that the Irish were going to vote to decide if a man could marry a man or a woman marry a woman. “That’s disgusting!” was the immediate and unhesitating answer of the Downs Syndrome son. Would that the pastors of the Church had felt and expressed the same horror at the referendum’s proposed violation of the natural law!
The Natural Law Cannot Survive Theistic Evolution
No matter what the advocates for theistic evolution may say, the traditional Catholic understanding of natural law cannot be reconciled with evolution. It is only within the special creation framework that the divine design of man’s and woman’s bodies determines some actions as natural, normal, and good, and others as unnatural, abnormal, and morally hideous. That is why when Cardinal Suenens wanted to persuade his brother Bishops at Vatican II to change the Church’s constant teaching on birth control, he was quick to allude to the need to “update” the Church’s teaching on the natural law. Recognizing that the divine design of man’s and woman’s bodies sufficed to expose the unnatural and perverse nature of contraception, he asked his brother Bishops to question:
whether moral theology took sufficient account of scientific progress, which can help determine, what is according to nature. I beg you, my brothers, let us avoid another Galileo affair. One is enough for the Church.
Readers of this newsletter and of our publications know very well why we agree with the verdict of Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, for many years the official historian of the Vatican, that “the most recent scientific findings vindicate the Church of 1633” in her verdict on Galileo and can find the documentary evidence to support Cardinal Brandmuller’s conclusion in the article at this link, in our DVD series “Foundations Restored,” and in many of our other publications. But what is certain is that if the Bishops to whom Cardinal Suenens addressed himself had known the true state of the scientific evidence set forth by Dr. John Sanford and others here, they would never have abandoned the traditional Catholic special creation framework and thrown open the gates to the agents of the anti-culture of death who wanted to introduce abortion on demand. Nor would the champions of “birth control” have set in motion what can only be described as the “contraceptive holocaust,” the destruction of tens of millions of unborn children every year by various forms of contraception that do not prevent conception, but which take the lives of the unborn by making it impossible for them to thrive in their mothers’ wombs.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of St. Joseph, of St. Patrick and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost grant the grace to the Pope, the Bishops, the priests and all of the lay faithful to reject the pseudo-scientific myth of evolution—in its theistic and atheistic forms—and to restore the true Catholic doctrine of special creation as the foundation of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Faith.
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. One of our advisory council members, Michael Randolph, plans to attend a conference at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. on creation and evolution on Saturday, November 13, so that he can hopefully raise his voice in defense of the true Catholic doctrine of creation. If anyone in the area would be interested in attending the conference with Michael, please let me know and I will be glad to introduce you to him by email.
