Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In previous newsletters we have argued that most of the confusion and diabolical disorientation in the Catholic world has resulted from collective amnesia in regard to the sacred history of Genesis and the misunderstanding of our relationship to God and of our true position in time and space that rests upon that foundation. In the current, unprecedented crisis of faith, it is easy to become discouraged, but if we study the history of God’s dealings with His people, we will be able to have a much better understanding of the current confusion, how it can affect even good and well-intentioned leaders, and how we can protect ourselves and others within our sphere of influence from the sources of that confusion.
One of the most difficult things for faithful Catholics to understand now and in the recent past is how even good and holy leaders could fail to recognize and eradicate certain errors that flourish whenever the sacred history of Genesis is forgotten, mythologized or called into question. We will see that once collective amnesia in regard to Genesis takes hold, even good leaders can fail to remove the rot that erodes the foundations of the faith and the morality of their people. Moreover, in an atmosphere of collective amnesia, even good leaders can fail to eradicate the sources of evil in their midst for long periods of time, because they have literally lost their living connection with “the beginning.”
Lessons from the Old Testament
When we read the history of the kings of the Old Testament, we see that most of them failed miserably to fulfill their responsibilities as leaders of God’s holy people. Yet even the few who tried to honor God during their reigns mostly failed to restore the memory of the sacred history of Genesis or to remove the idolatry that resulted from that forgetfulness. The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy is the only commandment that begins with an exhortation to “remember”: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). This is because “the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27) “in the beginning,” when God had completed the supernatural work of creation. Thus, there is no way that man could deduce the nature, meaning, and purpose of the Sabbath by studying nature or by the use of his own unaided reason. Man can only know the sacred significance of the seventh day by remembering what God revealed first to Adam and then to Moses about how He created the world.
But what is so catastrophic about failing to “remember the Sabbath day”?
In a previous newsletter we saw that the Kings of the House of David forgot the Sabbath and the whole sacred history of Genesis for more than 75 years, from the reign of King Ahaz to the reign of King Josiah. By forgetting God’s revelation of how He created the world and our first parents, the civil and religious leaders of the people lost the bulwark that God had given them against pagan idolatry and sexual immorality. The historical books of the Bible record a litany of horrors that proliferated in Judah. Idolatry, homosexuality, and prostitution spread like a plague over the land, even in the sacred precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem. The practice of idolatry flourished above all in what the Bible calls “the high places,” where priests and laity who had forgotten the Mosaic account of the creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day of the Hexameron began to worship them as gods.
After several generations, these practices became so routine that they co-existed with the worship of the true God which continued to be offered in the Jerusalem Temple. Forgetfulness of Genesis led to a general failure to “keep holy the Sabbath,” so that priests and people lost the physical reminder of the six-day creation and the Creation-Providence distinction that the Sabbath had given their ancestors every single week, as they ceased their mundane activities and recalled the perfection of God’s creative work in the beginning and their total dependence upon Him. In this atmosphere of collective amnesia, even the few good kings of Judah could not restore the memory of Genesis or eradicate the “high places” where the people worshipped the sun, the moon and the stars, having forgotten—or having never been taught!—that these luminaries were all created on the fourth day of the Hexameron. In a history of Asa, one of the few good kings of Judah, we read:
King Asa instituted reform; he removed the male shrine prostitutes, cut down Asherah poles, and even deposed his grandmother from her position as queen mother because of her involvement with Asherah worship (1 Kings 15:12–13; 2 Chronicles 14:3, 16). Asa also commanded his people to follow the Lord (2 Chronicles 14:4). First Kings 15:14 says, “Although he did not remove the high places, Asa’s heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life” (see also 2 Chronicles 15:17).
Is it not remarkable that the inspired, inerrant Word of God tells us that King Asa was “fully committed to the Lord all his life,” yet “he did not remove the high places”?
Collective Amnesia Continues for Centuries
Roughly 250 years after the reign of King Asa, the greatest of the reformer kings of Judah, King Josiah, earnestly attempted to “remove the high places” and to restore the foundations of the Faith. However, in spite of Josiah’s efforts to reform his kingdom and to restore the memory of the sacred history of Genesis, the Scriptures indicate that the collective amnesia of the religious leadership in regard to Genesis continued unabated during the Exile in Babylon. One indication of this can be found in the account of the righteous married woman Susanna in the Book of Daniel which describes how two of the corrupt “elders” or leaders of the people attempted unsuccessfully to force Susanna to commit adultery with them and then used their authority to condemn her to death for the very crime that she had refused to commit. Daniel comments that Susanna had learned the Law of God from her parents (Daniel 13:3). However, the elders whose role it was to teach and uphold the Law seem to have forgotten it entirely.
That this collective amnesia in regard to Genesis continued for the entire period of the Exile finds confirmation in the fact that when the Persian King Cyrus gave Ezra and Nehemiah permission to return to Judah and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, their public reading of the Law—Genesis and the rest of the first five books of the Bible—was met with the same shock of unfamiliarity as the reading of the Law by King Josiah more than a hundred years before (2 Esdras-Nehemiah 8). It is also significant that the primary sin for which the people of Judah were moved to repentance by the reading of the Law was the sin of mixed marriage, a reminder that the forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis always leads to sins against marriage, sexual morality, and right religious worship as prescribed in the Third Commandment.
More than two hundred years after the return of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restoration of right worship in the Temple continued under the holy High Priest Onias (cf. 2 Maccabees 3:1), but it is significant that the enemies of God’s People once again targeted the Sabbath with their campaign to substitute the pagan cult of sports for the worship of God. The violation of the Sabbath led directly to the forced introduction of idolatrous worship in the Temple and throughout the Holy Land under Antiochus Epiphanes, which inspired Judas Maccabeus and his brothers to rise up against the forces of Antiochus, to cleanse the Temple, and to restore the observance of the Law and the Sabbath through the land.
The Maccabees and Genesis
Just as the righteous Susanna received instruction in Genesis and the Law from her righteous parents and not, apparently, from the elders of her people, so the Hebrews who participated in the Maccabean rising against the forerunners of Antichrist handed on the sacred history of Genesis and the Law to their children. The Holy Spirit saw fit to highlight this fact by preserving the account of the holy mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs in the Second Book of Maccabees in which the sacred history of Genesis figures prominently in the mother’s preparation of her son for martyrdom. She tells him:
I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, he will restore to you again in his mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of his laws (2 Mac 7:22-23) . . . I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also. So thou shalt not fear this tormentor, but being made a worthy partner with thy brethren, receive death, that in that mercy I may receive thee again with thy brethren (2 Mac 7:28-29).
With this testimony, the mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs confirmed that she had handed on the testimony of Genesis, as confirmed in the Third Commandment of the Law, that God is the Creator of all things and that He has created them all from nothing, either immediately, like the angels and the light of the First Day of Creation, or mediately, like the body of Adam from the slime of the Earth, but in every case by His own divine power and not through any kind of natural process.
By contrast, at this time, throughout the Greek-speaking world whose boundaries had been so far extended by Alexander the Great, the evolutionary ideas of Greek philosophers, like Anaximander and Epicurus, had already conditioned many Greek intellectuals to believe in the evolution of all things from primitive matter, through millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that they could observe in the natural world. Yet the defenders of the true Faith of Abraham and Moses stood firm on the foundation of the sacred history of Genesis.
Collective Amnesia Regarding Genesis in the Time of Jesus
Some of the most moving words in all of Holy Scripture appear in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel where he says of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that:
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, but the world knew Him not (John 1:5).
It is truly remarkable that while the Mosaic law was studied and upheld by various groups of religious leaders and teachers who placed radically different interpretations on the Law of Moses at the time of Jesus, not a single one of their questions or statements on the Law as recorded in the Gospels contains a reference to Genesis. This is all the more remarkable in that Our Lord’s responses to their questions about the Law frequently refer back to the sacred history of Genesis as the foundation, especially, of the right understanding of marriage and sexual morality. For example, when asked if a man can divorce his wife for any cause—according to one school of interpretation of the Law of Moses—Our Lord refers His audience back to the Mosaic account of the divine institution of marriage “ in the beginning” (Matthew 19:3-6). This shocking contrast between the Genesis-based teaching of Our Lord and the collective amnesia of the religious leaders of his day in regard to Genesis underscores the fact that this motif recurs as a central element of every major crisis of faith, both under the Old Law and under the New.
Good Popes and “High Places”
We have seen that in an atmosphere of “collective amnesia” regarding Genesis even a good king who was “fully committed to the Lord all his life” could fail to “remove the high places” where his people exalted creatures above the Creator. What, then, can we say of the good Popes of the last 150 years who have likewise failed to uphold the supremacy of theology and the sacred history of Genesis over fallible human natural science? Could we not say that they “instituted reform” but “did not remove the high places”?
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, St. Padre Pio was given a private revelation that the deceased pontiff had been taken to Heaven. And there is no doubt that Pope Pius XII served the Church faithfully and strove to fulfill God’s Will throughout his life. Yet Pope Pius XII failed to “remove the high places” by welcoming the speculations of Monsignor Georges Lemaitre in cosmology and failing to uphold the traditional distinction between the complete supernatural work of creation in the beginning, and the order of providence, or natural order, which only began when the work of creation was finished [link to video on “Creation and Providence”]. According to Monsignor Lemaitre’s Big Bang cosmology, the supernatural work of creation was reduced to the creation of a few chemical elements and some natural laws at the beginning of the universe, after which Big Bang cosmologists envisioned a natural development of life and of all living things. (Of course, many, but not all!—Catholic promoters of Big Bang cosmology allow for divine intervention at the moment when a human soul was allegedly inserted into the conception of an evolved sub-human primate, but that is a far cry from the direct creation of all of the different kinds of creatures for man at the beginning of time!)
The genuine holiness and good intentions of Pope Pius XII notwithstanding, his endorsement of a naturalistic account of the origins of the universe had disastrous consequences for the Church and helped to pave the way for the full-blown “diabolical disorientation” of today. In 1907, in Pascendi, Pope St. Pius X had warned that “modernism” was “the synthesis of all heresies” and that “evolution” was “the principal doctrine of the modernists.” By encouraging the elevation of fallible human speculation in natural science above the sacred history of Genesis as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning, Pope Pius XII effectively invited the modernists to renew their assault on the foundations of the Faith in earnest. And they were not slow to seize the opportunity.
If God’s revelation of how He created all things in the beginning—as it had been understand in His Church from the beginning—could be corrected and replaced by a fallible now-bankrupt scientific hypothesis, then what was to stop modernist Catholic intellectuals from invoking "science" to justify sodomy, usury, contraception, transgenderism or any number of other abominations? Fr. James Martin, S.J., is typical of Catholic contemporary intellectuals who call fundamental doctrines of faith and morals into question in the name of "evolution" and "science." Yet the sad reality is that by failing to “remove the high places” where fallible human science was exalted above Divine Revelation, Pope Pius XII paved the way for Fr. Martin and his disciples to spread their diabolical disorientation.
In a future newsletter we will dig even deeper into the past to discover that the first failures to "remove the high places" actually took place in the eighteenth century. For the time being, let us hold fast to the faith "once delivered to the saints," firmly founded on the literal historical truth of Genesis. Then, like the Maccabees of old, and Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, we will be able to stand firm and immovable, until the promised Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary ushers in an era of peace and the reign of Christ the King throughout the world.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. As the diabolical disorientation of our times intensifies, the grace of God is being poured out superabundantly on those who open their hearts and minds to Him. We continue to receive testimonies from all over the world from priests and lay people who are using the Foundations Restored DVD series to solidify or restore the foundations of the Faith, as did the parents of Susanna and the Maccabean Martyrs, mentioned above. From A.M. B. in Sweden we received the following testimony:
My name is A.M.B. and I’m from Sweden. I am a housewife with four small boys that I would have loved to homeschool but since it is strictly forbidden in Sweden we are forced to send them to school. We are doing our best to take care of their education anyway and I was so happy to come in contact with your work so that I have been able to give them the creationist explanation of origins.
Reading and listening to your works has completely changed my life. I used to have a very vague understanding of creation before with many question marks concerning for example humans, apes and dinosaurs in relation to the Bible’s account of creation. The joy I have been experiencing when I realized that Genesis is completely true is one of the greatest in my life. What a loving Father God really is! Now my husband and I are so happy to be able to give these truths to our boys as well so that they don’t have to grow up with the lies of evolution.
But I would also like to spread these truths to the rest of our parish. I have bought your wonderful series “Foundation Restored” and would love to form a small study group in our home.
If you have not viewed or obtained the DVD series, please go to the Foundations Restored website www.foundationsrestored.com as soon as possible and order the physical DVDs or the on-line streaming version so that your family, friends and neighbors can say with A.M.B. and her family in Sweden, “What a loving Father God really is!”
