952 Kelly Rd., Mt. Jackson, VA 22842
Tel: 540-856-8453 E-Mail: director@kolbecenter.org
"For me You have created the skies scattered with stars...and all the beautiful things on earth."
St. Maximilian Kolbe
Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Christ is risen!
Evolutionary errors have so thoroughly infected the intellectual atmosphere of Catholic academia that it comes as a complete shock to most contemporary Catholics to discover how firmly the Popes and theologians of the late nineteenth century rejected the wild speculations of Darwin and his disciples. Indeed, if no anathema against evolution was handed down, it was at least in large part because the Popes who ruled the Church in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Darwin's writings did not consider them worth taking seriously.
In 1871, Blessed Pope Pius IX thanked Dr. Constantin James, an eminent French Catholic physician, for writing the book On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, in which, in the words of Blessed Pope Pius IX:
he "refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism" . . . "a system which is so repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all the peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables . . . And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God-pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, When pride cometh, then cometh shame. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should-since they borrow the mask of science-be refuted by true science." (Quoted in White, A.D., The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1895), Arco Publishers (1955), pp. 75-76.)
One of the most remarkable things about this statement by Blessed Pope Pius IX is that, in citing the bodies of knowledge which microbe-to-man evolution contradicts, natural science does not top his list. It does not even come second. Rather, "exact science" and "observed facts" come third, after "history" and "the tradition of all the peoples." This reflects the fact that, for Blessed Pope Pius IX and for most of his fellow Bishops and theologians, it was a matter of fact that the sacred history of Genesis contained accurate information about the history of the world from creation down to the time of Abraham and his descendants when written historical records began to be kept and preserved by various ancient civilizations. His statement also reflects his conviction-shared by the overwhelming majority of his fellow Bishops and theologians-that the "traditions of all the peoples" contain reliable testimony to the major events in the early history of the world, especially the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Fall, the Flood and the Tower of Babel.
That this was indeed the mind of the Pope and of most of the Bishops can be confirmed by a careful reading of the acts and decrees of First Vatican Council in 1869-70. A study of the acts reveals that the Council Fathers had a serious discussion of a thesis known as "traditionalism" which held that man's knowledge of God depended on the original knowledge of God that Adam possessed at the beginning of creation and which he handed down to his descendants. The Council Fathers ultimately rejected this thesis and defined that man has the capacity to know the existence of God by the use of his natural reason without receiving any human tradition concerning the nature or the existence of God. However, in their decree on man's ability to know the existence of God by the use of natural reason, the Council Fathers quoted St. Paul's Letter to the Romans:
From the beginning of the world the invisible things of God have been clearly revealed in the things He has made (Romans 1:20).
This statement was made in the context of the Council's teaching on man's ability to know the existence of God through natural knowledge and thus teaches implicitly but unequivocally that man had this ability to know the existence and the nature of God with his natural intellectual power from the very beginning of Creation-not only after a long process of millions of years of human evolution. This is extremely significant because it shows that the Council Fathers understood the creation of "all things" "at once" in the dogmatic decrees on creation of the Firmiter of Lateran IV and Vatican I to mean that God created all of the different kinds of spiritual and corporeal creatures by fiat at the beginning of time, and not spread out over hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of years. Indeed, the only creation period for the entire material universe that has any patristic warrant is six 24-hour days (the overwhelming majority view) or an instant (the minority view of St. Augustine). (For a summary of the overwhelming evidence for six-day creation, please see the article on the meaning of "yom" in Genesis 1 on the Kolbe website or the book I Have Spoken to You from Heaven.)
Please keep the Kolbe Center in your prayers.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
