Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In previous newsletters we have demonstrated that collective amnesia in regard to God’s creation revelation has been a problem for God’s people from the beginning. That is why God Himself wrote with “the finger of God” on tablets of stone that we must “remember” to keep the Sabbath holy because He created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain in six days and consecrated the seventh day to Himself from the foundation of the world. We must “remember” because there is no obvious rhythm in nature that will remind us of what God revealed about when and over what period of time He created the world.
We have seen that one of the worst periods of collective amnesia took place during the several centuries between the reign of King Solomon and the reign of King Josiah by which time the civil and religious leaders of the Hebrew nation had actually “forgotten” Genesis so completely that the priest Hilkiah had to “rediscover” the original scrolls of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch by stumbling upon them in the process of cleaning up the Temple in Jerusalem. In spite of Josiah’s efforts to reform his kingdom and restore the memory of the sacred history of Genesis, however, the Scriptures indicate that the collective amnesia of the religious leadership in regard to Genesis continued unabated during the Exile in Babylon.
Living in exile in Babylon with her husband after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, Susanna was a chaste wife of spotless character who was falsely accused of committing adultery by corrupt judges after she refused to sin with them. Because the judges confirmed each other’s testimony, the people believed their accusations and they were preparing to stone Susanna to death when a teenager, St. Daniel, intervened and demanded an examination. As soon as the corrupt elders were forced to present their case against Susanna, their lies were exposed, and Susanna’s immaculate purity was vindicated before all the people.
In a similar way, for the past 50 or 60 years, many of the leaders of the Church – whose job it is to preserve the Deposit of Faith in all of its purity as it was handed down from the Apostles – have allowed the wild conjectures of evolutionary pseudo-science to be used as a pretext to impugn the goodness of God’s original creation, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the infallibility of the Church’s authoritative teaching. In this crisis, it is mostly young men who have been blessed to receive a traditional Catholic formation from childhood who are now playing the part of St Daniel and examining the claims of their elders who have used the alleged “fact” of molecules to man evolution to mock and mythologize the sacred history of Genesis and to distort many doctrines derived from the first chapters of Genesis—especially those that pertain to Holy Marriage and sexual morality. These new “Daniels” do this in everyday interactions with fellow Catholics, by writing excellent articles in defense of the traditional doctrine of creation, and by producing the video series “Darwin’s Documentaries” to highlight the absurdity of the “scientific” claims of evolutionary apologists.
That collective amnesia in regard to Genesis continued for the entire period of the Exile finds confirmation in the fact that when the Persian King Cyrus gave Ezra and Nehemiah permission to return to Judah and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, their public reading of the Law—Genesis and the rest of the first five books of the Bible—was met with the same shock of unfamiliarity as the reading of the Law by King Josiah more than a hundred years before. It is also significant that the primary sin for which the people of Judah were moved to repentance by the reading of the Law was the sin of mixed marriage, a reminder that the forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis always leads to sins against marriage, sexual morality, and right religious worship as prescribed in the Third Commandment.
Two hundred years after the return of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restoration of right worship in the Temple continued under the holy High Priest Onias, but it is significant that the enemies of God’s People once again targeted the sabbath with their campaign to substitute the pagan cult of sports for the worship of God. The violation of the Sabbath led directly to the forced introduction of idolatrous worship in the Temple and throughout the Holy Land under Antiochus Epiphanes, which inspired the father of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers to rise up against the forces of Antiochus, to cleanse the Temple, and to restore the observance of the Law and the Sabbath throughout the land.
The Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs Hand on God’s Genesis Revelation
Just as the righteous Susanna received instruction in Genesis and the Law from her righteous parents, so the Hebrews who participated in the Maccabean rising against the forerunners of Antichrist handed on the sacred history of Genesis and the Law to their children. The Holy Spirit saw fit to highlight this fact by preserving the account of the holy mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs in the Second Book of Maccabees in which the sacred history of Genesis figures prominently in the mother’s preparation of her son for martyrdom. She tells him:
I know not how you were formed in my womb; for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, He will restore to you again, in His mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of His laws. . . I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them, and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also (2 Maccabees 7:22-23 and 28).
With this testimony, the mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs confirmed that she had handed on the testimony of Genesis, as confirmed in the third Commandment of the Law, that God is the Creator of all things and that He has created them all from nothing, either immediately, like the angels and the light of the First Day of Creation, or mediately, like the body of Adam from the slime of the Earth, but in every case by His own divine power and not through any kind of natural process.
By contrast, by this time, throughout the Greek-speaking world whose boundaries had been so far extended by Alexander the Great, the evolutionary ideas of Greek philosophers, like Anaximander and Epicurus, had already conditioned many Greek intellectuals to believe in the evolution of all things from primitive matter, through millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that they could observe in the natural world. In the face of such pagan beliefs, the defenders of the true Faith of Abraham and Moses stood firm on the foundation of the sacred history of Genesis.
Collective Amnesia Regarding Genesis in the Time of Jesus
Some of the most moving words in all of Holy Scripture appear in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel where he says of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that:
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, but the world knew Him not (John 1:5).
It is truly remarkable that while the Mosaic law was studied and upheld by various groups of religious leaders and teachers, who placed radically different interpretations on the Law of Moses at the time of Jesus, not a single one of their questions or statements on the Law as recorded in the Gospels contains a reference to the sacred history of Genesis. This is all the more remarkable in that Our Lord’s responses to their questions about the Law frequently refer back to the sacred history of Genesis as the foundation, especially, of the right understanding of marriage and sexual morality. For example, when asked if a man can divorce his wife for any cause—according to one school of interpretation of the Law of Moses—Our Lord refers His audience back to the sacred history of Genesis, to the Mosaic account of the divine institution of marriage “in the beginning.” It would seem that collective amnesia among the leaders of the People of God only came to an end with the establishment of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church, whose Bishops and teachers from the very beginning believed and proclaimed the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis as the foundation of the Gospel.
Some may argue that the creation of all things in six days six to eight thousand years ago was not the common teaching of Holy Mother Church from the beginning, because St. Augustine’s instantaneous creation interpretation was never condemned by the Church. As a practical matter, however, Holy Mother Church did give her children this teaching, and, with the introduction of written catechisms after the Council of Trent, She specifically taught the creation of all things in six days in her approved catechisms all over the world. Thus, the Baltimore Catechism, modeled on the catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine and mandated for use in every diocese of the United States well into the twentieth century, taught unequivocally that God willed all of the different kinds of creatures into existence for mankind, in six days, six thousand years ago.
Catholic Home Schools Hand on God’s Genesis Revelation
In our day, as in the days of St. Daniel and the Maccabees, it is mainly Catholic home-schooling families that are “remembering” and handing on God’s Creation Revelation. Our Lady of Victory School has been a courageous pioneer in the fight for the right of Catholic parents to educate their children according to the Faith at home, when that is the only way or the best way to ensure that they receive a good Catholic education. As explained on the OLVS website:
In 1973 a small group of parents and grandparents met to hear a talk encouraging the formation of traditional Roman Catholic schools. They had realized the negative influences in the public schools, the declining quality of Catholic schools, and the effects on their children and sought an alternative option. That September the school opened its doors to 30 students in rented classrooms at the Church of the Nazarene in Panorama City, Southern California.
In order to fund the school, the parents held weekly yard sales year round. They relied on donations and support from the community and other Traditional Catholic groups. This project lasted for 12 years and supported the school during that time. By 1977 the school had moved twice to find enough classrooms for the growing number of students.
It was then decided that Our Lady of Victory School would offer their attractive educational program by correspondence. Our founder, Mr. William Bowman, and his wife, Ina, traveled approximately 10,500 miles throughout the United States and Canada via a VW van and spoke to various groups who were interested in homeschooling. The reception of this idea was exceptional, and soon the school had over 1,200 students in 48 states, five Canadian Provinces, and Australia.
At that time, homeschooling was still frowned upon and difficult to implement in certain states. Mr. Bowman received letters from parents describing their legal struggles while exercising their God-given parental rights.
Thankfully Home School Legal Defense Association came onto the scene in the early 1980s, and Our Lady of Victory became a member of them, which gave parents the resources they needed in order to understand their legal rights surrounding homeschooling and to avoid government overreach. Since moving to Post Falls, Idaho in 1991, the demand for homeschooling has increased tremendously.
Thankfully Home School Legal Defense Association came onto the scene in the early 1980s, and Our Lady of Victory became a member of them, which gave parents the resources they needed in order to understand their legal rights surrounding homeschooling and to avoid government overreach. Since moving to Post Falls, Idaho in 1991, the demand for homeschooling has increased tremendously.As the valiant parents who “remembered” and handed on the Faith of their Fathers in the days of Susanna and the Maccabees paved the way for the fulfillment of that Faith through the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Church, so do all parents and grandparents who today “hand on” the apostolic Faith on the foundation of the true doctrine of creation pave the way for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Social Reign of Christ Our King throughout the world.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
