Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
One of the members of our leadership team has been trying to organize a debate for us with some Catholic theistic evolutionists. Recently, he found a professor of natural science at a Catholic university who is willing to participate, but the professor was quick to assert that the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1-11 was a protestant phenomenon and that we ought not to call it the traditional Catholic interpretation. This erroneous view is so widespread among university-educated Catholics that we are deeply indebted to our colleague Christopher De Vos and his co-workers who have worked so hard to demonstrate that Church-approved catechisms and theological manuals in use all over the world upheld the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis until very recently.
One of the videos Christopher and his colleagues have produced focuses on the work of a great Irish Catholic intellectual of the nineteenth century, Fr. Daniel Cahill, whose defense of the Catholic Faith against Protestant errors repeatedly relied on arguments derived from the traditional doctrine of creation. As Christopher explains:
According to Fr. Cahill, the changing of one substance into another, or transubstantiation, connects both the highest height of the Mass and the highest height of the historically recorded Creation period—the creation of man! In a work published in 1855, Fr. Cahill states that God:
created man by changing ‘the slime of the earth’ into the flesh and bones of Adam, in His first official act of transubstantiation—that is, by the Word of God on matter. His second official act, of changing the bony rib of Adam into the flesh and blood of Eve, was also transubstantiation, by the Word of God the Father on bone. The first official act of Christ on entering on the three years of His mission, was performed when He changed water into wine at the wedding of Cana, by the Word of Christ on water.
In this one paragraph, Fr. Cahill highlights three distinct references to transubstantiation outside of the typical Catholic reference to what occurs at the Altar during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: 1. The slime of earth into Man 2. Adam’s rib into another human—Eve 3. Water into wine. Lest we think this priest is profane in his use of these examples, here is the Baltimore Catechism’s commentary on this same topic (Question 246 of the 1891 edition), “ ‘Transubstantiation’ – that is, the changing of one substance into another substance; for example, the changing of the wood in a seat into stone.”
God’s Uniformity of Action
If the Church’s enemies would like to diminish belief in the change of bread into the Flesh and Divinity of Christ by the command of God, a cunning tactic would be to destroy the belief that dust could be changed into the flesh of Adam by the command of God. Today’s widespread Catholic unbelief in the change of bread into the Real Body of Christ, is connected to the unbelief that preceded it, in regard to the change of the slime of the earth into the real body of Adam. However, Fr. Cahill uses the doctrine of creation to defend the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. He writes:
God has supplied us, during four thousand years with this mighty, universal, constant evidence, in order to prepare us for the more mighty…principle in the New Law, by the power and the word of Christ.
Interestingly, these “four thousand years” are from the beginning of creation, and show a constancy completely opposed to that of the evolutionists. This “universal, constant” action is that of the Trinity which, from the beginning of time, has sustained life by the action of the Word. The “uniformity of action in the Trinity” that Fr. Cahill speaks of is the power to create and sustain life by the Word. What dignity is bestowed on our Catholic priests, who are given the power of the Trinity to change ordinary bread into Bread from Heaven, the Body of Christ, by the utterance of a few God-Breathed words! This principle of uniformity is not the uniformitarianism of the evolutionists that states that the laws of nature are acting now just as they have since their fabled Big Bang. Rather, the principle of uniformity (“uniformity of action in the Trinity”) related by Fr. Cahill, is the uniform action of God that created life in the beginning and sustains life to this day. With regard to substance transformation by the priest at the Consecration, Fr. Cahill exhorts his Protestant interlocutors to consider that even the Old Testament confirms that a man can change one substance into another:
when commanded to do so, by the Word of God. Moses changed a rod into a serpent…he changed the waters of the river Nile into blood…by the Word of God on his lips. And do you not think, Sir, even in your common sense, that a man in the New Law could do the same thing as a man in the Old Law, if he were commanded to do so? The Word of God will certainly have the same power in every place, in every age…
Let us correspond with the Holy Ghost to vivify our Faith today as Fr. Cahill did, by using the Sacred History of the Old Testament to strengthen our Faith in the Sacred Doctrines of the New!
God’s Solution to the Problem of Collective Amnesia
In next week’s newsletter, we will consider some parallels between the collective amnesia in regard to God’s creation revelation in Genesis during the centuries before the coming of Our Lord and the current collective amnesia that afflicts so much of the Catholic community throughout the world. We will see that in both cases, when those appointed to teach and govern the people of God fail to hand on the fundamental doctrine of creation, God preserves this doctrine within families through a kind of home-schooling. And we shall see that one of the contemporary institutions that has preserved the traditional Catholic understanding of creation and the early history of mankind is Our Lady of Victory School which from its founding in 1977 has helped to safeguard the right of Catholic parents to control the education of their children and to raise them in the Faith of our Fathers.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Our annual leadership retreat has been scheduled to take place from August 27-September 2, 2023, at the Apostolate for Family Consecration retreat center in Bloomingdale, Ohio. For more information or to register, please contact me at howen@shentel.net. If you know of any young adults who would like to attend gratis in exchange for helping out during the retreat, please let me know.
