One week ago, on November 18, 2017, Capuchin Fr. Solanus Casey was beatified. Fr. Solanus was one of the two greatest wonder-workers in the history of the North American continent, another being Venerable Antonio Margil, "the Apostle of Texas," who converted tens of thousands of indigenous people to the Catholic Faith from the isthmus of Panama to what is now the border between Texas and Louisiana, while working every kind of miracle that Our Lord Jesus Christ worked when He walked the earth two thousand years ago. While much has been written about the thousands of miracles obtained through the prayers of Blessed Father Solanus, little mention has been made of a common thread in the lives of these two great wonder-workers--their devotion (after the Word of God) to The Mystical City of God by Venerable Maria of Agreda who in the seventeenth century bi-located hundreds of times to what is now the south-western United States to catechize the indigenous people of the area and prepare them for Holy Baptism.
As explained in our publication Genesis through the Eyes of the Saints, Our Lord told Venerable Maria that the so-called Enlightenment period in which she lived was a time of unprecedented darkness, as man exalted his fallible conjectures above the Word of God as understood in His Church from the beginning. As Descartes, Kant and their disciples sought to provide a totally naturalistic explanation for the origin of everything in the universe, Our Lord told Venerable Maria that He had shown the Blessed Virgin Mary the six days of creation, exactly as He had shown them to Moses, as recorded in the "sacred history of Genesis."
The rise of theistic evolution and naturalism in the Church has coincided with a precipitous decline in the number of miracles, as fewer and fewer Catholics believe that God created all things through His Word and consequently no longer believe that He can and will exercise the same divine creative power in answer to their prayers. It is no coincidence that in a world increasingly dominated by naturalism and Enlightenment philosophy, Venerable Antonio and Blessed Solanus retained a fervent faith in the truth of the sacred history of Genesis and that their prayers obtained so many astonishing miracles in an unbelieving world.
It is a striking fact that the three major revolutions against the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church--Islam, the protestant revolution, and modernism--all denied the divine teaching authority of the Catholic Church but utterly failed to obtain any divine seal of approval upon their rebellions in the form of miracles. St. John of Damascus cites this as a striking proof that God could not have inspired the Koran. Similarly, while Luther and Calvin claimed to restore the purity of the Gospel, they failed to work a single recorded miracle in confirmation of their claims. On the other hand, the true reformers of the Catholic Church, like St. Philip Neri and St. Francis Xavier, raised the dead, gave sight to the blind, and worked every kind of miracle that Our Lord Jesus Christ worked when He walked the earth. In modern times, Venerable Maria of Agreda, Venerable Antonio Margil, and Blessed Solanus offer the same rebuke to the false prophets of evolution-based modernism who, to this day, have failed to produce from within their ranks a single miraculous confirmation of their erroneous doctrines.
Are we to believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ who confirmed the truth of His teaching by so many amazing miracles and who promised to do the same for His true disciples would fail to confirm the doctrines of Mohammed, Luther, or Teilhard de Chardin with miracles if any of them had truly come in His Name? Let us confidently expect the Lord of Creation to work new miracles in answer to our prayers when what we ask is for our spiritual good and for the spiritual good of those for whom we pray. And let us pray for the conversion of all of those who have been led astray or kept from full communion with the Catholic Church, because of false religions or false philosophies.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
