Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In previous newsletters we have argued that most of the confusion and diabolical disorientation in the Catholic world has resulted from collective amnesia in regard to the sacred history of Genesis and the misunderstanding of our relationship to God and of our true position in time and space that rests upon that foundation. In the current, unprecedented crisis of faith, it is easy to become discouraged, but if we study the history of God’s dealings with His people, we will be able to have a much better understanding of the current confusion, how it can affect even good and well-intentioned leaders, and how we can protect ourselves and others within our sphere of influence from the sources of that confusion.
One of the most difficult things for faithful Catholics to understand now and in the recent past is how even good and holy leaders could fail to recognize and eradicate certain errors that flourish whenever the sacred history of Genesis is forgotten, mythologized or called into question. We will see that once collective amnesia in regard to Genesis takes hold, even good leaders can fail to remove the rot that erodes the foundations of the faith and the morality of their people. Moreover, in an atmosphere of collective amnesia, even good leaders can fail to eradicate the sources of evil in their midst for long periods of time, because they have literally lost their living connection with “the beginning.” In this First Saturday newsletter, we will see how the timing of Our Lady of Fatima’s request for the Consecration of Russia underscores the importance of the restoration of God’s creation revelation and the roots of the current communistic anti-culture of death in a rejection of that revelation in favor of the materialistic myth of molecules-to-man evolution.
Lessons from the Old Testament
When we read the history of the kings of the Old Testament, we see that most of them failed miserably to fulfill their responsibilities as leaders of God’s holy people. Yet even the few who tried to honor God during their reigns mostly failed to restore the memory of the sacred history of Genesis or to remove the idolatry that resulted from that forgetfulness. The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy is the only commandment that begins with an exhortation to “remember”: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). This is because “the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27) “in the beginning,” when God had completed the supernatural work of creation. Thus, there is no way that man could deduce the nature, meaning, and purpose of the Sabbath by studying nature or by the use of his own unaided reason. Man can only know the sacred significance of the seventh day by remembering what God revealed first to Adam and then to Moses about how He created the world.
But what is so catastrophic about failing to “remember the Sabbath day”?
In a previous newsletter we saw that the Kings of the House of David forgot the Sabbath and the whole sacred history of Genesis for more than 75 years, from the reign of King Ahaz to the reign of King Josiah. By forgetting God’s revelation of how He created the world and our first parents, the civil and religious leaders of the people lost the bulwark that God had given them against pagan idolatry and sexual immorality. The historical books of the Bible record a litany of horrors that proliferated in Judah. Idolatry, homosexuality, and prostitution spread like a plague over the land, even in the sacred precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem. The practice of idolatry flourished above all in what the Bible calls “the high places,” where priests and laity who had forgotten the Mosaic account of the creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day of the Hexameron began to worship them as gods.
After several generations, these practices became so routine that they co-existed with the worship of the true God which continued to be offered in the Jerusalem Temple. Forgetfulness of Genesis led to a general failure to “keep holy the Sabbath,” so that priests and people lost the physical reminder of the six-day creation and the Creation-Providence distinction that the Sabbath had given their ancestors every single week, as they ceased their mundane activities and recalled the perfection of God’s creative work in the beginning and their total dependence upon Him. In this atmosphere of collective amnesia, even the few good kings of Judah could not restore the memory of Genesis or eradicate the “high places” where the people worshipped the sun, the moon and the stars, having forgotten—or having never been taught!—that these luminaries were all created on the fourth day of the Hexameron. In a history of Asa, one of the few good kings of Judah, we read:
King Asa instituted reform; he removed the male shrine prostitutes, cut down Asherah poles, and even deposed his grandmother from her position as queen mother because of her involvement with Asherah worship (1 Kings 15:12–13; 2 Chronicles 14:3, 16). Asa also commanded his people to follow the Lord (2 Chronicles 14:4). First Kings 15:14 says, “Although he did not remove the high places, Asa’s heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life” (see also 2 Chronicles 15:17).
Is it not remarkable that the inspired, inerrant Word of God tells us that King Asa was “fully committed to the Lord all his life,” yet “he did not remove the high places”?
Good Popes and “High Places”
We have seen that in an atmosphere of “collective amnesia” regarding Genesis even a good king who was “fully committed to the Lord all his life” could fail to “remove the high places” where his people exalted creatures above the Creator. What, then, can we say of the good Popes of the last 150 years who have likewise failed to uphold the supremacy of theology and the sacred history of Genesis over fallible human natural science? Could we not say that they “instituted reform” but “did not remove the high places”?
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, St. Padre Pio was given a private revelation that the deceased pontiff had been taken to Heaven. And there is no doubt that Pope Pius XII served the Church faithfully and strove to fulfill God’s Will throughout his life. Yet Pope Pius XII failed to “remove the high places” by welcoming the speculations of Monsignor Georges Lemaitre in cosmology and failing to uphold the traditional distinction between the complete supernatural work of creation in the beginning, and the order of providence, or natural order, which only began when the work of creation was finished. According to Monsignor Lemaitre’s Big Bang cosmology, the supernatural work of creation was reduced to the creation of a few chemical elements and some natural laws at the beginning of the universe, after which Big Bang cosmologists envisioned a natural development of life and of all living things. (Of course, many, but not all!—Catholic promoters of Big Bang cosmology allow for divine intervention at the moment when a human soul was allegedly inserted into the conception of an evolved sub-human primate, but that is a far cry from the direct creation of all of the different kinds of creatures for man at the beginning of time!)
The genuine holiness and good intentions of Pope Pius XII notwithstanding, his endorsement of a naturalistic account of the origins of the universe had disastrous consequences for the Church and helped to pave the way for the full-blown “diabolical disorientation” of today. In 1907, in Pascendi, Pope St. Pius X had warned that “modernism” was “the synthesis of all heresies” and that “evolution” was “the principal doctrine of the modernists.” By encouraging the elevation of fallible human speculation in natural science above the sacred history of Genesis as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning, Pope Pius XII effectively invited the modernists to renew their assault on the foundations of the Faith in earnest. And they were not slow to seize the opportunity.
If God’s revelation of how He created all things in the beginning—as it had been understand in His Church from the beginning—could be corrected and replaced by a fallible, now-bankrupt scientific hypothesis, then what was to stop modernist Catholic intellectuals from invoking "science" to justify sodomy, usury, contraception, transgenderism or any number of other abominations? Fr. James Martin, S.J., is typical of Catholic contemporary intellectuals who call fundamental doctrines of faith and morals into question in the name of "evolution" and "science." Yet the sad reality is that by failing to “remove the high places” where fallible human science was exalted above Divine Revelation, Pope Pius XII paved the way for Fr. Martin and his disciples to spread their diabolical disorientation.
Suppression of Sunday and the Request for the Fatima Consecration
We have often pointed out that in the absence of a revelation from God, man in his natural state would never divide time into seven-day-weeks. The day, the month, and the year are all based on obvious natural rhythms, but the seven-day rhythms that exist in nature—and there are many, as documented in the book I Have Spoken to You from Heaven—are not obvious. Thus, the very fact that the whole world continues to operate according to a seven-day rhythm serves as a continual reminder of God’s Genesis Revelation that He created all things in six days and consecrated the seventh day to Himself from the foundation of the world.
As witnessed by St. Peter’s prophetic revelation in 2 Peter 3, the devil is determined to destroy our faith in God’s Genesis Revelation by substituting a false materialistic, uniformitarian account of the origins of man and the universe for God’s Genesis Revelation. In the two principal satanic revolutions of modern times, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the demonically-inspired revolutionaries tried to replace the seven-day-week, with its silent witness to God’s work of six-day creation, with a week of a different length, to obliterate the memory of God’s creation Revelation from the memory of mankind. Many Catholics do not realize that the timing of Our Lady’s request for the Consecration of Russia came directly on the heels of Josef Stalin’s attempt to abolish the seven-day week and to desecrate the Lord’s Day. On July 13, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima had told Sister Lucia:
I will come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and for Communions of Reparation on the First Saturdays of the month. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and you will have peace.
However, the Blessed Mother did not actually make her request for the consecration until June 13, 1929, when She told Sister Lucia:
God asks of the Holy Father to make, and to order that in union with him and at the same time all the bishops of the world make, the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart.
The timing of Our Lady’s request makes perfect sense in light of events that had taken place in the Soviet Union. As lamented by Pope Pius XI, earlier in that year:
During the Christmas holidays [in January], not only were hundreds of churches closed, great numbers of icons burned, all workers and schoolchildren compelled to work and Sundays suppressed, but they even compelled factory workers, both men and women, to sign a declaration of formal apostasy and hatred against God, or else be deprived of their bread rationing cards, clothing, and lodging, without which every inhabitant of this poor country is reduced to dying of hunger, misery, and cold (emphasis added).
In 1929, the Soviets created a new calendar, known as the Soviet Eternal Calendar. Although keeping the 365-day year, the Soviets created a five-day week, with every six weeks equaling a month. Intending to keep factories running continuously, workers would take staggered days off. Each individual was assigned a color (yellow, pink, red, purple, or green), which corresponded with which of the five days of the week they would take off. Unfortunately, this did not increase productivity. In part because it ruined family life since many family members would have different days off from work. Also, the machines could not handle constant use and would often break down.
By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin also decided to curtail Ukraine’s cultural autonomy, launching the intimidation, arrest, imprisonment and execution of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, Church leaders, as well as Communist Party functionaries who had supported Ukraine’s distinctiveness. At the same time, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture which led to the systematic starvation of millions of Ukrainians in one of the most fruitful agricultural regions in the entire world.
Our Lady of Fatima’s Peace Plan Still Unfulfilled
Our Lady of Fatima’s peace plan involves specific requests for the Pope and the Bishops and other requests for every member of the Church. If everyone reading this newsletter were to consecrate himself to Our Lord Jesus Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray the Rosary from the heart every day, wear the Brown Scapular with devotion, and observe the First Saturday’s as requested by Our Lady, we would call down tremendous graces upon ourselves, our families, our communities, and upon the whole world. And when enough Catholics fulfill these requests and live their consecration to Jesus through Mary in every thought, word and action, we will see the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the consecration and conversion of Russia, and the social reign of Christ Our King throughout the world in the era of peace.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. We have received a permit to gather in front of the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, June 18, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. to evangelize the passersby with evidence for Special Creation and the Glorious Resurrection of Christ Our King. If you would be willing and able to join us, please contact me at howen@shentel.net as soon as possible.
P.P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.
