Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
As we enter the holy season of Christmas, I would like to highlight two of our new publications. In a previous newsletter I announced the publication of Our World Created and Redeemed: A Family Treasury of Poems, which uses poetry and holy icons to show the parallels between the work of Creation and the work of Redemption. To give you a better idea of the format of the book, which begins on the “first day of the week” and ends on “the eighth day,” I am reproducing “Day Four” of the Hexameron and “Wednesday” from the work of Redemption.
Day Four
Now the roof of the world He makes
Bright on the fourth day.
Billions and trillions of stars
Shine forth at His word –
Red, blue, and white,
Faint and bright –
Spangling the dome
Of the soon-
To-be-
Loved-
Man’s
New
Home.
Wednesday
Word-made-flesh said to His friends:
Some of you shall not see death’s hour
Until you see the Kingdom of God
Coming with power.
To Tabor’s peak, He took three –
Peter, James, and John –
Showed them God’s light in His flesh, making
Night of the light of the sun.
He who numbered and named the stars
Blinded their bright stares.
With Moses and Elijah the Tishbite,
Jesus stood in that Tabor light,
Wrapped in a cloud.
“Always Be Prepared to Give an Answer”
Many of you have read the first volume in our series “Always be Prepared to Give an Answer: Replies to Common Objections to the Traditional Doctrine of Creation.” I am happy to announce the publication of the second volume in the series, in which the Kolbe leadership team answers fifteen additional objections. As an example of the kind of questions and answers the book contains, here is Objection #5 and the team’s response:
“Through the Incarnation, man is revealed as the pinnacle of Creation. In the light of the evolutionary hypothesis, one can see that everything has an obediential potentiality to become a human being, and this is much more wonderful than the idea of the separate direct creation of all of the different kinds of creatures.”
Reply:
The idea that theistic evolution is more wonderful than special creation because everything in nature is seen as tending toward the evolution of man appears to be quite attractive to some Catholic intellectuals. But this vision of all things tending towards man through evolution is actually a perversion of the true Catholic vision of man as the specially created microcosm of the entire cosmos. The theistic evolutionist notion that all things animate and inanimate have an “obediential potential” to become a human body can easily be misunderstood. To say that a material thing has the obediential potential to become a human body makes it sound as if the material thing contains that power within itself. But that is false. Rightly understood, the “obediential potential” to become a human body is a purely “passive” potential. It can only be actualized by God’s creative power. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, only:
Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, q. 92, a. 2, ad 2).
In other words, the “obediential potential” of the “slime of the earth” to become a human body is entirely “passive.” It can only be actualized by God’s creative action. Thus, the grandiose notion of various kinds of animate and inanimate creatures “tending” toward the actualization of a human body through a natural process of evolution has no roots in the Tradition of the Church.
An Introduction to Latin Based on Genesis
My wife Maria has completed the first volume in a series of textbooks that teach Latin using the text of Genesis. If any of you have some knowledge of Latin and would be willing to review the first volume and give us your comments, please email me at howen@shentel.net and we will send you a pdf.
Kolbe Leadership Retreat 2024
The 2024 Kolbe Leadership Retreat will take place at the Apostolate for Family Consecration retreat center near Steubenville, Ohio, again this year, from August 25 to August 31. To register or for more information, please email me at howen@shentel.net.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
