Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Pax Christi!
The three greatest revolutions against Christian order have been the rise of Islam, the protestant revolution, and evolution-based modernism. In this newsletter I would like to point out what all three of them have in common: They deny the history of God's Church and impugn God's character, making Him into an unreliable monster.
When Our Lord gave the Great Commission, He promised to be with His Church always until the end of the world (Mt 28:16-20). Islam, protestantism, and modernism all make God a liar, by asserting that He allowed the teaching and liturgical practice of the whole Church to be corrupted by error for many centuries. I once sat next to an Egyptian engineer after a seminar in Assiut, Egypt, and spoke with him about the work of the Kolbe Center. He agreed that God created one man (Adam) for one woman (Eve) in the beginning, allowed polygamy to the patriarchs and divorce under Moses, but restored marriage back to the original pattern of one man for one woman through Jesus. To my astonishment, however, he went on to assert that Allah, for his own reasons, restored to men the right to have up to four wives, "under certain conditions." This inconsistency did not bother him, he said, because "God can do whatever He wants." It is no wonder that a recent book by a courageous convert from Islam attributes her conversion to the Catholic Faith to the beauty of Catholic teaching and practice regarding Holy Marriage and to the absurdity of the Muslim claim that God established the ideal form of Holy Marriage in the beginning and restored it through Jesus, only to re-authorize polygamy under Mohammed.
Each of these successive heresies makes God into an even greater monster, because it claims that He allowed the Church to wallow in error for even more centuries than the previous one. According to the principal protestant revolutionaries, God allowed His Church all over the world to practice idolatrous worship--adoring bread and wine as if they were God and a man-made sacrifice as if it were the one Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross made present on the altar-for fifteen hundred years. He allowed His Church to include man-made, error-filled books in the Canon of Holy Scripture; imposed celibacy on priests in violation of His Will, allowed His houses of worship to be filled with idolatrous icons, statues, and representations of angels and saints, and, among other abominations, permitted His Church throughout the world to pray for--and even to request the prayers of--the dead. Needless to say, any god that would allow his faithful to wallow in errors of this kind--if, indeed, they were errors!--for fifteen centuries would not be a loving Father but a perverted monster.
As tragic as it is that any Christian should ever have abandoned the Catholic Faith to follow protestantism, it pales in comparison to the folly of abandoning orthodox Christianity for evolution-based modernism. While professing to believe in a God of Truth, Love, and absolute faithfulness, the evolution-believing modernist must believe that the same God allowed His Church to teach a serious error--i.e., a completely false account of the origin of man and the universe--not just for five hundred years (as did Mohammed) or for fifteen hundred years (as did Calvin and company) but for almost two thousand years! The evolution-believing modernist must believe this while knowing that the "truth" of man's evolution through hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity, extinctions and disease, was not discovered by saints and scholars within the bosom of God's Church but by godless men like Charles Darwin and T.H. Huxley who hated the Church and wanted to destroy Her.
If God is an all-wise, almighty, all-loving Father-and He is!-then He will never allow His Church in her authoritative teaching or in her traditional liturgical practice to go astray. To do so would be to fail in truthfulness, charity and faithfulness. That is really all that you need to know to refute revolutionary Islam, protestantism, or evolution-based modernism.
Please keep the Kolbe Center in your prayers.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh
