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,
Pax Christi!
I am writing to you from Washington Dulles International Airport where I am waiting to fly to Rome to participate in the first general assembly of the new John Paul II Academy for Life and the Human Family before flying on to Dubai and then to Uganda. In Uganda, Dr. Thomas Seiler and I will give a two-day seminar to a large number of lay leaders from all over the country under the auspices of the Uganda Episcopal Conference before giving another two-day seminar to 300 seminarians. I will then stay on to participate in the celebration of the Feast of the Ugandan Martyrs on June 3 before returning to the United States for our sixth annual leadership retreat at Conception Abbey in Conception, Missouri.
In his masterpiece Pascendi, St. Pius X identified the worst heresy in the history of the Church and foresaw the untold damage that this heresy would inflict upon the Church and the world if it remained unchecked. The heresy was "modernism," "the synthesis of all heresies," and its "principal doctrine," wrote St. Pius X, was "evolution." Other heresies, he noted, had added, subtracted or distorted some part of the Deposit of Faith; but evolution-based modernism conceived of the whole world as in a state of continuous evolution and thus abandoned the very notion of immutable Truth. On every side, he saw Catholic intellectuals rejecting scriptural inerrancy and the sacred history of Genesis on the grounds that "natural science" had proven that the Bible contained historical errors and that advances in geology and biology had proven that man had evolved from a one-celled organism through millions of years of the same kinds of natural processes he observed in the present. Vatican One had already anathematized the proposition that "the progress of the sciences demands that the Catholic doctrine of creation be recast," but St. Pius X saw that the ranks of Catholic intelligentsia holding that error continued to swell, so he renewed the anathema in his own name.
In Pascendi, St. Pius noted that, for the modernist, liturgy and doctrine had to be adapted to the changing circumstances produced by the evolutionary process. The doctrines and liturgical traditions of the past had to give way to new expressions and practices better adapted to the current stage of evolution. Thus, in Europe, the Faith that had given birth to Christian civilization began to be subverted and replaced by a counterfeit modernist religion that affirmed the right of fallible human natural science to pass judgment on the supernatural divine Revelation of God, as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning.
One of the greatest obstacles to the restoration of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, the foundation of our holy Faith, is the widespread belief that the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1-11 has no place in the history of Catholic theology, and that it was an invention of protestant fundamentalists. This absurd claim is repeated again and again by Catholic theistic evolutionists, in spite of the fact that all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching believed and proclaimed the literal historical truth of every word of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis from the time of the Apostles. This "diabolical disorientation" affects even Catholics who defend the liturgical and doctrinal tradition of the Church, so that it is not unusual to find the champions of theistic evolution among the most zealous promoters of the traditional Liturgy - in spite of the fact that, in keeping with the principle of "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi," all of the liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church harmoniously proclaim the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11.
The translation and publication of the great scholar Cornelius a Lapide's commentary on the first 22 verses of the Book of Genesis is the latest in a series of ongoing efforts by the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation to demonstrate that the literal historical interpretation of Genesis enjoys the support, not only of all of the Apostles, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, but of the greatest Catholic exegetes of the last 500 years. As the biographical sketch of Lapide below demonstrates, he was an exegete in the tradition of the Fathers of the Church who combined exceptional learning with great sanctity. His interpretation of the first 22 verses of the first chapter of Genesis draws upon three thousand years of Hebrew and Catholic exegesis, revealing an intimate knowledge of all of the major commentaries on the Bible of the Latin and Greek Fathers and Doctors. This magnificent work ought to destroy once and for all the absurd claim that protestant fundamentalist innovators invented the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Saints, may He who created all things by His Word use this work to renew in the members of His Mystical Body the Faith of our Fathers in the sacred history of Genesis and in the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which is the foundation of our Holy Faith.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Please remember to offer prayers and sacrifices in the coming week for the people of Ireland that they will vote to retain the 8th Amendment to their constitution which guarantees the right to life of pre-born children. The referendum on the 8th Amendment will take place on Friday, May 25.
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