Pax Christi!
Today is the Feast of St. Bridget of Sweden (October 8 on the traditional Latin calendar). St. Bridget is one of the great mystical saints of the Church who received private revelations from Our Lord about Creation and the Fall. Many of the highlights of the approved private revelations of the saints regarding creation can be found in the book Genesis through the Eyes of the Saints published by the Kolbe Center last year and available on the Kolbe website as an e-book or in printed form. The book shows that for almost two thousand years Our Lord has confirmed and illuminated the "sacred history of Genesis" through men and women who had the gift of prophecy and who bore witness to the literal historical truth of God's revelation to Moses.
In spite of the abandonment of the traditional doctrine of creation by so many Church leaders and theologians in favor of theistic evolution, it is remarkable that no private revelation approved by the Church has ever testified to the alleged evolution of the bodies of the first human beings over billions of years. Thus, theistic evolutionists must hold that for two thousand years an all-good, all-wise, all-loving God raised up men and women outstanding in holiness, gave them a gift of prophecy recognized by the Church, and allowed them to bear witness to an account of the creation and early history of the world that, according to most theologians today, is only "an exalted myth." The same God, according to these theologians, has never managed to raise up a single saint to bear mystical witness (in writings approved by the Church) to the truth of their novel doctrine of theistic evolution.
It is anomalies of this kind that have devastated the faith of millions of Catholic young people who recognize that God would not be God if He allowed His Church to believe and teach a false account of creation for almost two thousand years and then allowed her to be corrected--not by saints and scholars from within her midst--but by godless scientists like Charles Lyell and T.H. Huxley who hated the Church and wanted to destroy her. That is why Dr. Thomas Seiler and I are going to Poland to defend the true Catholic doctrine of creation and to show the young Catholics of the world that sound theology, sound philosophy, and sound natural science confirm that beautiful doctrine and refute theistic evolution.
For countless numbers of young Catholics whose faith has been weakened, distorted, or destroyed by faith in molecules-to-man evolution, it is a "scientific fact" that the Earth is a speck of dust floating in a remote corner of a vast universe and that human life has only flickered onto the cosmic stage in the last few moments of cosmic time, evolved from sub-human life-forms on an Earth that the god of evolution had filled with death, deformity, and disease for hundreds of millions of years before the Original Sin. Yet when St. Bridget asked Our Lord why animals suffer and why they are born in pain, Jesus replied to her:
You ask why animals suffer infirmities. This is because there exists a disorder in them as in the rest of creation. I am the maker of every nature and have given to each its own temperament and order in which each one moves and lives. However, after man, for whose sake all things were made, set himself against his Lover, that is, against Me his God, then disorder entered all the rest of creation, and all the things that should have been afraid of man began to set themselves against him and oppose him. Because of this defective disorder many troubles and difficulties befall mankind as well as animals.
Besides, sometimes animals also suffer because of their own natural immoderation or as a curb to their ferocity, or as a cleansing of nature itself, or sometimes because of human sins in order that human beings, who have a greater use of reason, might consider how much punishment they deserve, when the creatures they love are plagued and taken away. But if human sins did not demand it, animals, which are under human charge, would not suffer in so singular a manner.
But not even they suffer without great justice. Their suffering occurs either to put a quicker end to their lives and lessen their wretched toils that consume their strength or on account of a change in seasons or out of human carelessness during the process of work. People should therefore fear me, their God, above all things, and treat my creatures and animals more mildly, having mercy on them for the sake of me, their Creator. I, God, accordingly decreed the Sabbath rest, because I care for all my creation . . .
As to why everything is born in pain, I answer: When mankind rejected the fairest pleasure, they immediately incurred a life of toil. And because the disorder began in and through mankind, my justice causes there to be some bitterness even for other creatures, which exist for the sake of humans, so as to temper their pleasure and foster their means of nourishment. For this reason, people are born with pain and make toilsome progress in order to render them eager to hurry to their true rest. They die naked and poor in order to make them restrain their disorderly behavior and fear the coming judgment.
Likewise animals, too, give birth in pain in order for bitterness to temper their excesses, and so that they may be participants in human toil and sorrow. For this reason, insofar as mankind is so much nobler than are animals, people should love me, the Lord God, their Creator, all that much more fervently.
How tragic that so few of our young people have even heard the traditional Catholic teaching that Our Lord confirmed to St. Bridget about the perfection of the first-created world and the centrality of man in God's plan of creation!
If you know of anyone who is going to World Youth Day who would be willing to help us to distribute our materials, please ask them to contact me directly at howen@shentel.net If you would like to help to defray the cost of our pilgrimage to World Youth Day on behalf of our young people, please go to the Kolbe website and make a donation
Most of all, please pray that we will be able to convince many of the World Youth Day pilgrims and observers of the truth of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, which is the foundation of the Holy Gospel.
