Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Pax Christi!
Greetings from Aberdeen, Scotland, en route to Papa Stronsay Monastery, to give some conferences on "Creation, Evolution and the Crisis of Faith" to the Trans-Alpine Redemptorists!
One of the reasons why so many practicing Catholics cannot imagine that the sacred history of Genesis should be taken literally as all of the Fathers and Doctors did is that it has been so long since most of those appointed to teach the Faith have upheld the traditional interpretation. This leads most people to think that the "new" teaching must be correct because it has been around for so long and has become so firmly established as "the norm." But this is yet another example of how faith in evolution leads the believer to denigrate the lessons of the past because of his unverified assumption that evolution has occurred and that we have progressed beyond the "primitive" understanding of our ancestors in regard to theological and philosophical matters.
In reality, the eclipse of God's revelation in regard to Creation has occurred before in the history of salvation, most notably during the first millennium before Christ when the sacred history of Genesis, together with the rest of the Law of Moses, was almost completely forgotten, even in the holy city of Jerusalem, the very capital of God's Chosen People, for 75 years - from around the time of the death of King Ahaz in 715 B.C. to the beginning of the reign of King Josiah in 640 B.C. In this newsletter, I would like to draw some parallels between this previous crisis of forgetfulness and our current crisis of faith and morals.
Darkness in Judah
The interval between the death of King Ahaz and the advent of King Josiah witnessed some of the worst abominations in the history of the Kingdom of Judah. Not surprisingly, forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis and of the first Table of the Law, led to widespread idolatry, as the people of Judah took to worshipping the creature instead of the Creator and began offering sacrifices to the gods of the pagans. These included human sacrifices, as many offered their children as burnt offerings to Moloch. Witches and mediums did a thriving business. Prostitution and homosexual vice also proliferated around the very Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. According to Calmet:
[The Sodomites who dwelt near to the Temple] exposed their bodies to be abused contrary to nature, in honour of those filthy deities whom they worshipped. Their houses were near the temple, and the persons themselves were dedicated to impurity, and, that they might commit their abominations with the greater licentiousness, they had women appointed to make them tents, wherein they were wont to retire upon these detestable occasions.[1]
Dollinger adds, in his work 'Jew and Gentile,' vol. 1. pp. 430, 431 that the Galli or male prostitutes:
[danced] to the exciting din of drums, flutes, and inspired songs [and] cut themselves on the arms; and the effect of this act, and of the music accompanying it, was so strong upon mere spectators, that all their bodily and mental powers were thrown into a tumult of excitement, and they too, seized by the desire to lacerate themselves, deprived themselves of their manhood by means of potsherds lying ready for the purpose. Thereupon they ran with the mutilated part through the city, and received from the houses which they threw them into, a woman's gear.
Jeremiah and other prophets had denounced these abominations, but almost all of the priests and scribes, whose job it was to uphold the Law of Moses, rejected him. King Johoiakim had even burned the Word of God that had come to Jeremiah, and which he had written on a scroll, before his eyes, prompting him to ask the king's priests and scribes, rhetorically:
How do ye say, "We are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us"? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely (Jeremiah 8:8).
King Josiah and the Reformation of Judah
This was the abominable state of the Kingdom of Judah when the young King Josiah resolved at the age of eighteen to begin a reformation. According to 2 Kings:
[King Josiah] ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem - those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord, the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.(2 Kings 4:7) . . . [Then] he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech (2 Kings 23:10)
These acts of righteousness set the stage for the rediscovery of the original copy of the Law of Moses which Moses himself had ordered to be kept next to the Ark of the Covenant, as it was written in the Book of Deuteronomy:
And the LORD commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, "Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land that I swore to give them. I will be with you." When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, "Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against you" (Deut 31:23-26).
After supervising the renovation of the Temple, the priest Hilkiah either stumbled upon or retrieved the Book of the Law of Moses. According to 2 Chronicles:
Now when they carried out the money that had been brought into the temple of the Lord, [Hilkiah] the priest found the book of the law of the Lord, by the hand of Moses. DR, 2 Chronicles, 34:14)
The Douai Rheims Bible gives a faithful translation of St Jerome's Vulgate which, in turn, faithfully translates the Septuagint's rendering of this verse. Both make clear that this version of the Law was not a copy but the very "law of the Lord by the hand of Moses."[2]
King Josiah proceeded to call an assembly and read the Law out loud to the people. In this way, they were reminded that God alone had created the heavens, the Earth, the seas and all they contain, and they heard again the commandment to observe the Sabbath rest as a physical reminder of the fact that God had ceased creating new kinds of creatures after He had created Adam and Eve on the sixth day of creation:
Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day. Six days shalt thou labour, and shalt do all thy works. But on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: thou shalt do no work on it, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy beast, nor the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it (Exodus 20:8-11).
This law which had been written by the "finger of God" - and long ignored - demanded a literal interpretation, since it was understood by everyone, both high and low, that God had made a one to one correspondence between the six days of creation and the six work days of the week - between the literal seventh day of rest when God stopped creating new kinds of creatures, and the literal rest from servile labor on a literal (seventh) sabbath day, so that God's people could acknowledge and worship their Creator in what became the central ritual of the Jewish people. In the Church age, the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent would reaffirm the literal interpretation of the six days of creation as the foundation for the Church's teaching on the Third Commandment and the Sabbath rest of the Lord.[4]
Unfortunately, King Josiah's reformation was "too little, too late." The Prophet Jeremiah had already warned the people of Judah that they would make up for their neglect of the Sabbath by spending seventy years in captivity away from the land:
at the destruction of the first temple the law concerning the sabbath, or rest, of the land had been neglected four hundred and thirty years, in which space were sixty nine sabbatical years; and, according to Maimonides . . . it was at the end of a sabbatic year that the city and temple were destroyed, and so just seventy years had been neglected, and the land was tilled in them as in other years, and now it had rest that exact number of years.[5]
When King Josiah asked the prophetess Huldah for her counsel, she told him that God would not relent in his punishment of Judah but that He had seen Josiah's tears of repentance and would allow him to die before the chastisement.
The Current Crisis of Faith and Morals
The many parallels between Josiah's time and our own ought to bring us to our knees in humble repentance. Like the apostate men of Judah, we have abandoned the God of Genesis for the god of evolution, endowing finite creatures with the god-like power to produce other creatures greater and more advanced than themselves. Like them, we have made our peace with homosexual vice and child sacrifice, as the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Europe and North America favor the practice of contraception, in spite of its frequent abortifacient effects, and most support abortion in some cases, while smaller majorities even approve of so-called same sex marriage. Millions of Catholics, including many Bishops, priests, and consecrated religious, promote the New Age evolution-based theology of Teilhard de Chardin, while huge numbers of practicing Catholics see no harm in allowing their children to read or watch material like the Harry Potter series with its insidious false distinction between "black" and "white" magic.[6] For most of us, the Lord's Day is a day like any other, when the overwhelming majority of baptized Catholics forsake Holy Mass and use the Lord's Day for work, sports, shopping, and entertainment, as on any other day.
From the beginning of this ominous slide towards the abyss of godlessness and neo-paganism, Our Blessed Mother has appeared on Earth to call us to repentance. In one of the first approved apparitions of the modern Marian era, Our Lady of La Salette told the children Melanie and Maximin through her tears that God was most greatly offended by sins against the second and third commandments. The spread of Lyellian geology had already led many of the intellectual elite of once-Christian Europe to abandon the literal interpretation of the days of Genesis One in favor of the geological eras of Hutton and Lyell, and with that loss of faith in the literal historical truth of Genesis One as the basis for the Third Commandment, the slide into unbelief and the desecration of the Lord's Day spread and accelerated.[7]
On October 13, 1917, at Fatima, Portugal, Our Lady worked the greatest public miracle since the Resurrection, the Miracle of the Sun, to prove that her Fatima message was urgent and true. In that message She warned that, if her requests were not heeded, Russia would spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church, and that several entire nations would be annihilated. The principal error that took hold in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution, a few weeks after the Miracle of the Sun, was not communism, but evolutionism - since it was the "scientific fact" of molecules-to-man evolution that made confident atheists and communists of Lenin, Stalin, Mao-Tse-Tung, and their numerous disciples and stooges.
On the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun, October 13, 1973, the year of Roe vs. Wade, through her approved apparition in Akita, Japan, from a statute that had wept human tears 101 times, Our Lady warned that the Miracle of the Sun was a foretaste of a fiery divine judgment that would be unleashed upon the world, killing most of the earth's population, unless mankind repented and turned back to God. Given that we have only grown worse since Our Lady of Akita's warning, we may well have reached the point where a divine chastisement and the annihilation of nations are inevitable. But we have our Blessed Mother's solemn promise that her Immaculate Heart willtriumph, that the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Her, that Russia will be converted, and that a period of peace will be granted to the world. So, let us hasten her Triumph, by living our consecration to Jesus through Mary in every thought, word and action - in every moment of our lives!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
P.S. We have begun to show our DVD series "Foundations Restored" to clergy and lay leaders all over the world, and the rave reviews we are receiving are confirming our hope that this DVD series can help to save the faith of millions of Catholics and lead to the conversion of millions more. Please continue to pray that many Church leaders will be willing to take the time to review the DVD series and recommend it to others.
References:
[1] https://biblehub.com/commentaries/2_kings/23-7.htm [2] The modernist consensus that Moses did not write or redact the first five books of the Bible flies in the face of the whole Tradition of the Church but also of recent scholarship: https://kolbecenter.org/if-you-believed-moses-you-would-believe-me/ [3] https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/septuagint/chapter.asp?book=14&page=34 [4] "We now come to the meaning of the word sabbath. Sabbath is a Hebrew word which signifies cessation. To keep the Sabbath, therefore, means to cease from labor and to rest. In this sense the seventh day was called the Sabbath, because God, having finished the creation of the world, rested on that day from all the work which He had done. Thus it is called by the Lord in Exodus (emphasis added)(Catechism of the Council of Trent). [5] https://biblehub.com/commentaries/gill/2_chronicles/36.htm [6] Cardinal Archbishop George Pell praised the Harry Potter series for displaying values that are "deeply compatible with Christianity" (George Pell(23 September 2007). "Harry Potter and The Christians". The Sunday Telegraph). On the other hand, Fr. Gabriel Amorth, chief exorcist of Rome warned that, "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil." He also further told the Daily Mail that the books make a false distinction between black and white magic, while, in reality, the distinction "does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil." Amorth warned that the books can be a bad influence on children by getting them interested in the occult (Morris, Linda (2006-01-09). "Devil in the detail: Vatican exorcises Harry Potter". The Sydney Morning Herald.) [7] For an account of the Lyellian geological revolution that set the stage for Darwin, as well as an introduction to the empirical research in sedimentology that has falsified the Lyellian geological time scale, see the articles "Ariadne's Thread" and "A Question of Time" on the Kolbe website.
