Pax Christi!
I am writing to you from Krakow, Poland, where Dr. Thomas Seiler and I have come to participate in World Youth Day. On Tuesday, we attended the catechesis of Bishop Athanasius Schneider in the Church of the Conversion of St. Paul as well as the Pontifical Mass that he offered after the catechesis. Yesterday, we were able to give a twenty-minute presentation to the young people gathered in the same church, after the Primate of Ireland gave a catechesis in which he providentially quoted Pope Benedict XVI's statement that man is not "a meaningless product of evolution." You can view the presentation that we gave on Youtube here.
After the Pontifical Mass in the same church, with the pastor's permission we set up one of the Witnesses for Christ banners on embryology on the church steps and asked groups of young people as they passed by whether they had been taught Haeckel's embryonic recapitulation in school, with his faked drawings or similar ones, or accurate information based on actual photographs, like the Michael Richardson photographs published in Scientific American more than 20 years ago. We discovered some interesting patterns.
It seems that Polish students are taught accurately about human embryonic development but are not taught the bogus doctrine of embryonic recapitulation. Young people from Singapore also seem to be spared this indoctrination into evolutionary pseudoscience.
On the other hand, students from Western Europe and North America generally recalled being taught embryonic recapitulation in some form. Most of the students from these regions recognized the Haeckel images from their natural science textbooks, but none of them had seen the Michael Richardson photographs which clearly demonstrate the distinct growth patterns of humans and other kinds of creatures from the beginning of their embryonic development. Thus, they are denied knowledge of striking scientific evidence that supports the traditional Catholic doctrine that God created all of the different kinds of creatures by fiat in the beginning, each with its own pattern of growth and embryonic development. This ignorance of the truth about embryology even extended to two Belgian midwives who had been taught embryonic recapitulation in the course of their professional training.
On the other hand, students from Western Europe and North America generally recalled being taught embryonic recapitulation in some form. Most of the students from these regions recognized the Haeckel images from their natural science textbooks, but none of them had seen the Michael Richardson photographs which clearly demonstrate the distinct growth patterns of humans and other kinds of creatures from the beginning of their embryonic development. Thus, they are denied knowledge of striking scientific evidence that supports the traditional Catholic doctrine that God created all of the different kinds of creatures by fiat in the beginning, each with its own pattern of growth and embryonic development. This ignorance of the truth about embryology even extended to two Belgian midwives who had been taught embryonic recapitulation in the course of their professional training.
If one studies the arguments used to defend the myth of human evolution since the time of Darwin, it is apparent that embryology has been one of the principal arguments used by Darwin, Haeckel, Fr. John Augustine Zahm, Julian Huxley, Carl Sagan and their disciples down to the present day. One hundred years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species Sir Julian Huxley, the foremost apologist for evolution in the world at the time, went so far as to say that embryology offered "the most striking proof" for evolution. Yet this "most striking proof" was exposed as a complete fraud by the publication of Michael Richardson's photographs in the journal Scientific American.
It is truly remarkable that a prominent member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has co-authored a textbook that still teaches Catholic students in the twenty-first century through words and images that the human embryo recapitulates her evolutionary history in the womb, passing through a fish stage when she has "gill-slits" and a reptile stage when she has a tail. Meanwhile, it would seem that of the hundreds of thousands of young Catholic pilgrims from all over the world only a handful at best have actually been taught the scientific fact that all of the different kinds of creatures, including man, have a distinct pattern of growth from the beginning of their embryonic development. Thus, we are allowing another generation of Catholic young people to grow up in ignorance of the scientific truth that would set them free from an evolutionary mythology that erodes their respect for the sacred humanity of the unborn child from the moment of conception.
In the afternoon after our presentation we met with one of the principal Catholic priest-scientists in Poland who had strongly objected to our presentation but who graciously agreed to have a discussion with us. This discussion offered us insight into the heart-breaking loss of the traditional Catholic sense of piety on the part of many of our most highly educated clergy. The principal points of our interlocutor's critique of our position were that theology has no special competence in the realm of natural science; that it is legitimate for natural scientists to extrapolate from the present natural order all the way back to the beginning of the universe to seek a natural explanation for the origin of everything it contains; and that the Church's traditional teaching on creation has to be "corrected" in light of the great advances mankind has achieved in every area of natural science. As proof that modern science is worthy of this kind of credence, our partner in dialogue offered the remarkable technological developments of the last century, and the fact that many phenomena that were once attributed to some kind of supernatural cause have been fully explained in terms of natural causes. He repeatedly argued that any attempt to hold on to and defend the traditional teaching of the Church on creation would destroy whatever credibility She has left in the eyes of the scientific community and render Her incapable of effective evangelization.
It was truly shocking to discover that our partner in dialogue could acknowledge that God loves us, and that He had allowed His Church to teach the fiat creation of all things in the beginning up until modern times, yet hold that this in no way represented a contradiction. He argued that for us to insist that God, as a loving Heavenly Father, could not allow His Church to mislead His flock in this way was a form of pride on our part--an imposition of our subjective, small-minded views upon God--when we ought in humility to acknowledge that the Magisterium of the Church has erred in its traditional teaching on origins and that natural science had given us a deeper understanding of the true nature of God and of His work of Creation. Not surprisingly, our interlocutor also insisted that the Magisterium had no right to designate a particular form of philosophy as the official philosophy of the Church, and he argued that scholastic philosophy was completely inadequate to describe the universe that modern natural science has exposed to our view.
When we argued and partially demonstrated that the abandonment of the traditional boundary between the work of creation and the order of nature which excluded extrapolation from the study of nature to explain the origins of nature had been a disaster for scientific and medical research, as it had led researchers to assign evolutionary explanations for unexplained phenomena in nature instead of examining them, thus retarding scientific and medical research, our partner in dialogue simply argued that evolutionary theory was constantly being refined and that it was to be expected that many of its subsidiary hypotheses would have to be abandoned and replaced with others.
By the end of our lengthy discussion, it became apparent that our friend's faith in the consensus view in modern natural science far surpassed his faith in the traditional doctrine of the Church as understood and defined by the successors of St. Peter and the Apostles. It is not difficult to see how the elevation of the consensus view in natural science to the level of a new magisterium goes hand in hand with the idea that the worst enemies of mankind are those "fundamentalists" who hold fast to some traditional understanding of a holy text without a willingness to modify their views to accommodate the conclusions of the modern consensus in natural science. In this way, Catholics who hold fast to the defined dogmas of the Faith can easily be demonized and consigned to the same category as Muslim terrorists who act on Koranic exhortations to violent Jihad.
Let us pray that the Good Lord will have mercy upon us and pour out His grace upon His shepherds and upon all His faithful so that we will regain a living faith in His Word as understood in the Church from the beginning. Let us pray that by this outpouring of His grace we will come to know, love and exalt Him in His true character, for the glory of His Name and for the extension of His reign over all the Earth.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
