{"id":6784,"date":"2020-05-29T21:24:36","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T01:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/?p=6784"},"modified":"2022-07-07T17:48:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T21:48:52","slug":"is-the-catholic-rejection-of-theistic-evolution-a-conspiracy-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/is-the-catholic-rejection-of-theistic-evolution-a-conspiracy-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Catholic Rejection of Theistic Evolution a \u201cConspiracy Theory?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is the Catholic Rejection of Theistic Evolution a \u201cConspiracy Theory?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a recent article in the University of Notre Dame Church Life Journal<\/em>, Dr. Brett Salkeld, the theologian for the Archdiocese of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, argues that Catholics who reject theistic evolution\u2014the idea that God used billions of years of the same kinds of material processes going on now to produce all of the different kinds of living organisms, up to and including the human body\u2014are \u201cconspiracy theorists.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 In this article we will elaborate on our previous response to Dr. Salkeld\u2019s articles in defense of theistic evolution and answer his charge.\u00a0 In the process, we will show that the real \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d is the one that holds that molecules-to-man evolution is compatible with the Church\u2019s Sacred Tradition and authoritative Magisterial teaching.<\/p>\n

What is a \u201cConspiracy Theory\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cConspiracy theory\u201d is defined by brittanica.com as:<\/p>\n

an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small, powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy<\/strong>.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before responding to Dr. Salkeld\u2019s specific allegation, it is worth noting that many hypotheses that were long dismissed as \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d because they challenged the \u201caccepted narrative\u201d were eventually proved \u201ccorrect.\u201d\u00a0 No doubt the rumor that the Emperor Galerius set fire to Diocletian\u2019s palace in Nicomedia and blamed the Christians was dismissed as \u201ca conspiracy theory\u201d by many in positions of authority, as was the \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d that the NAZI\u2019s themselves set fire to the Reichstag in 1933.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 But let us take a more relevant example of a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d that questioned the \u201caccepted narrative\u201d on one of the most influential fossil finds in modern history\u2014Piltdown Man.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt about the \u201caccepted narrative\u201d in regard to the Piltdown Man from the day in 1912 when its discoverers announced that they had found a definite missing link between apes and humans.\u00a0 The New York Times <\/em>launched the \u201caccepted narrative\u201d on Piltdown Man with the modest headline, \u201c\"Darwin Theory is Proved True\u201d\u2014not \u201csupported,\u201d \u201csubstantiated,\u201d or even \u201cconfirmed\u201d\u2014but \u201cproved true\u201d!\u00a0 No wonder Clarence Darrow\u2019s defense team brought a plaster cast of the \u201cproof\u201d of man\u2019s descent from the apes to the infamous Scopes Trial in 1925.\u00a0 In 1931, The New York Times <\/em>underscored the all but universal acceptance of this \u201cproof\u201d of Darwin\u2019s theory with an article on one of the most famous paleontologists of his age, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), who pontificated from his positions at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History that humans had evolved in Europe, and, specifically, in England! From 1934 until 1952, two-thirds of all biology textbooks in the United States hailed \u201cPiltdown Man\u201d as fossil proof of man\u2019s evolution from a one-celled organism through hundreds of millions of years of \u201cstruggle for existence.\u201d\u00a0 It was only in 1953 that a careful examination of the Piltdown man skull revealed that it was a fraud.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

We might do well to ponder the response of Pope St. Pius X to the news of Piltdown Man, if it reached him\u2014as it probably did\u2014in Rome in 1912.\u00a0 Since he had mandated the teaching of the Roman Catechism <\/em>as the gold standard for teaching the Faith, we have no doubt that he rejected the bogus claim that Darwin\u2019s theory had been \u201cproven true\u201d\u2014not because he had examined the claim in detail, but because he knew from Divine Revelation that the first human beings had been created supernaturally, body and soul, as Pope Leo XIII, his predecessor, had taught so beautifully in his encyclical Arcanum <\/em>on Holy Marriage a generation before.<\/p>\n

We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. [5]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Pope St. Pius X and Pope Leo XIII\u2014as for all of their predecessors back to St. Peter\u2014and for all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church\u2014the question of man\u2019s origin was not a proper subject for natural science but for historical theology.\u00a0 Thus, no forensic evidence, no matter how impressive it might appear to someone operating within a uniformitarian naturalistic framework, could ever prompt them to doubt the truth of man\u2019s supernatural origin by special creation.\u00a0 Yet, to the intellectual elite of the early twentieth century\u2014those who already controlled the secular universities and were gradually taking control of Catholic universities and seminaries\u2014to question Piltdown Man and other fossil evidence for human evolution was most definitely to indulge in \u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d\u00a0 That is why as early as 1922 the American Association for the Advancement of Science passed a resolution that \u201cthe evidences in favor of the evolution of man are sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the world.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

In our previous article in response to some of Dr. Salkeld\u2019s writings in defense of theistic evolution we clearly explained the fundamental difference between the way that he and most modern theologians draw the boundary between theology and natural science and the way that we\u2014following in the footsteps of St. Pius X and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church\u2014draw that boundary.\u00a0 After reading his most recent article accusing us of \u201cconspiracy theorizing,\u201d we have to wonder whether Dr. Salkeld bothered to read the previous article (which we sent him more than a month ago) because he does not even acknowledge that there is any other legitimate framework within which to discuss the origins of man and the universe than the Cartesian-Darwinian one which assumes that the same kinds of material processes that are going now have been operating in the same way since the very beginning of the universe and that, therefore, natural scientists are justified in extrapolating from presently-observed material processes all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos to explain how everything came to be.<\/p>\n

To those of our readers (including Dr. Salkeld) who have not read our previous response to Dr. Salkeld, we would make a humble plea that you read that article at this link<\/a> so that we do not need to repeat ourselves here on the fundamental issue of the two frameworks.\u00a0 Then we can concentrate on explaining more fully from an historical perspective why our defense of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation is not \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d but rock-solid argumentation on the ground of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and authoritative Magisterial teaching.<\/p>\n

Abusing St. Augustine <\/strong><\/p>\n

To set the stage for his \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d allegation, Dr. Salkeld quotes St Augustine in a famous passage wherein the Doctor of Grace counsels Catholics to beware of expressing false opinions about natural science that are not matters of faith as if they were, thus earning the scorn of well-informed pagan intellectuals who are thus turned away from the Faith.<\/p>\n

Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something one should be on one\u2019s guard at all cost, that they [unbelievers] should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be toto caelo<\/em>, as the saying goes, wide of the mark.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We wish we could have a dollar for every time that this passage has been quoted to us as an intended rebuke, because we would have pocketed quite a few of them over the years!\u00a0 However, by examining the passage in context we realized long ago that theologians like Dr. Salkeld who use this quotation to refute our position merely show that they have not understood the most important point that needs to be understood by any Catholic who approaches the subject of Creation\u2014the preeminent point that we made in our response to his two articles in defense of theistic evolution.\u00a0 In short, what must be understood is that St. Augustine was not a Cartesian-Darwinian modernist, but a Church Father who drew the boundary between natural science and theology AFTER the entire work of creation had been finished, and not at the very first moment of creation.\u00a0\u00a0 Since St. Augustine considered the entire work of Creation to be supernatural, it was not a matter for natural science, and no Catholic who defended the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time could ever be the object of the rebuke that he offers to Catholics who invoke the Bible to support a false hypothesis in natural science.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In our previous response to Dr. Salkeld, we referred him and our other readers to an article on the Kolbe website by Mr. Joseph Gedney where he explains why it is inappropriate to cite this quotation against Catholics who defend the traditional Catholic doctrine of the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time.\u00a0 As Mr. Gedney explains:<\/p>\n

there is a huge problem with touting this [statement] as a proof that St. Augustine believed that all revelation, Holy Scripture, and the Faith itself must bow before the demands of natural science.\u00a0 For if the people who make these claims actually read St. Augustine\u2019s works instead of spouting whatever they have heard others say, they would see that exactly two paragraphs from St. Augustine\u2019s previous statement, he directly attacks the principal error of all theistic evolutionists:<\/p>\n

Some of the weaker brothers and sisters, however, are in danger of going astray more seriously when they hear these godless people holding forth expertly and fluently on the numbers of the heavenly bodies, or on any question you care to mention about the elements of this cosmos.\u00a0 They wilt and lose heart, putting these pundits before themselves, and while regarding them as great authorities, they turn back with weary distaste to the books of salutary godliness, and scarcely bring themselves to touch the volumes they should be devouring with delight \u2013 shrinking from the roughness of the husks of the wheat and eagerly eyeing the flowers of the thistles (Lit. Mean. Gen. I, 40(20)).<\/p>\n

But this is exactly what we are experiencing in the Church today!\u00a0 The mass exodus of youth out of the Church is not taking place because unbelievers are laughing at us for being \u201cunscientific\u201d\u2013although they do laugh at our pathetic attempts to reconcile Genesis 1-11 and the writings of Church Fathers, like St. Augustine, with evolution.\u00a0 No, the Catholic Faith is fading because we exalt \u201cpundits\u201d like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Lawrence Krauss above God and the Magisterium of His Church.\u00a0 So now we, and the world at large, \u201cturn back with weary distaste to the books of salutary godliness and scarcely bring\u201d ourselves \u201cto touch the volumes\u201d we \u201cshould be devouring with delight\u201d\u2014volumes such as Genesis, and the works of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching.<\/p>\n

If we had a fraction of the love and devotion that St. Augustine had for Genesis, the Church would not be undergoing her current crisis of faith.\u00a0 For as St. Augustine so beautifully put it: \u201c\u2026[T]he authority of this text of scripture, surely, overrides anything that human ingenuity is capable of thinking up\u201d (Lit. Mean. Gen<\/em>. II, 9(5)).\u00a0 Indeed, ever since we began to deny the truth of the historical narrative of Genesis, we have surely been \u201cshrinking from the roughness of the husks of the wheat and eagerly eyeing the flowers of the thistles.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here Mr. Gedney lays bare the crux of the matter.\u00a0 Theologians like Dr. Salkeld who invoke St. Augustine to support an account of the origins of man and the universe that treats the subject as a topic in natural science completely miss the point.\u00a0 St. Augustine would consider their framework false and misguided.\u00a0 In the paragraph quoted against us, St. Augustine is talking about Catholics who claim support from Sacred Scripture for erroneous opinions in the realm of natural science\u2014and in that respect the Catholic scientists who promote theistic evolution and whom Dr. Salkeld cites as authorities in his articles are the appropriate contemporary targets of St. Augustine\u2019s rebuke, not the Catholic clergy and laity who defend the traditional creation theology of the Church.<\/p>\n

Before answering Dr. Salkeld\u2019s \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d charge from an historical perspective, it will be good to show how another of Dr. Salkeld\u2019s favorite criticisms of the traditional Catholic interpretation of Genesis and its accompanying chronology flows from his (seemingly) unquestioning acceptance of the Cartesian-Darwinian framework.\u00a0 Commenting on his reasons for rejecting his father\u2019s belief in the traditional Biblical chronology as a young man, he writes:<\/p>\n

there is an obvious difficulty for young-earth creationists with the fact that we can see light from stars that are more than 10,000 light years away if creation is less than 10,000 years old. This was resolved, variously, by claiming either that<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n
  1. \n
      \n
    1. \n

      God created the light itself in transit (i.e., that he had made creation look older than it was\u2014this same logic was sometimes applied to geology and the fossil record as well), or that<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

    2. \n

      the speed of light was much greater in the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      These were not things I could disprove. But they strained credulity. Indeed, the first is not the kind of thing that could<\/em> be disproved. It is not a scientific claim at all, but a post hoc<\/em> rationalization. I did not have that language as a teenager, but I knew something was not right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      No one in his right mind would question Dr. Salkeld\u2019s reasoning here within the context of a naturalistic uniformitarian framework, but when one uses the framework of the Fathers and Doctors, a totally different picture emerges.\u00a0 In his classic work on creation theology, In the Beginning, <\/em>Fr. Peter Fehlner, FI, formerly professor of dogmatic theology at the Seraphicum, explains why the distant starlight objection against the traditional chronology of the world derived from Genesis flows from a misunderstanding of the distinction between the work of creation--which was supernatural--and the natural order of Providence which only began after<\/em> the entire work of creation (what St. Thomas calls \"the first perfection of the universe\") was finished.\u00a0 He writes:<\/p>\n

      In the work of creation, the six days of Genesis, the Church has always understood God to be the principal Agent, although each of His actions during that period may not have been creative in the strictest sense, but only in the broader sense of miraculous. He may have used instruments already created, or acted Himself on pre-existent matter as in the case of Adam's body \"from the slime of the earth.\" In any case, although individual creatures once created may have acted before the end of the sixth day when God \"rested,\" they did so directly under the creative power of God, and only after completion of the entire work did the world begin to function with a relative autonomy in the sense of secondary, principal causality.<\/p>\n

      The importance of this distinction can be illustrated with the popular objection to the creation of the heavenly bodies in a single day of 24 hours. It is claimed in the objection that the formation of these bodies would have postulated a duration of enormous length, since such is the time required for light from these bodies to reach the earth at present, and that light was observed by the first man on his appearance (according to Genesis). The objection, however, begs the question. It assumes as certain what in fact the proponents of evolutionary theory should prove, that the processes now observed in the transmission of light from the heavenly bodies to earth - and the duration needed to traverse the distance between them - are the same by which they were made to shine initially. Where the Creator is the principal Cause, there is no reason why He cannot do all this without the aid of natural processes and with or without any duration pleasing Him and appropriate to His ends (24 hours as Genesis tells us). Nor should it be said that the appearance of long \"light-years\" is a deception. Appearances are deceptive only where no key to their interpretation is provided. Thus what looks like bread and smells like wine is bread and wine except where those elements have been \"transubstantiated\" into the Body and Blood of Christ by the consecratory action of a priest. There the appearances of bread and wine, real enough, indicate not bread and wine, but the Body and Blood of the Savior. This is known because God has told us so, that such power has been given to an ordained priest. So too in this case, the Creator, being the only witness to what happened in the beginning, has told us He made the stars and made them shine within a period of 24 hours, thus providing a key to the interpretation of the appearances \"in the beginning.\"<\/p>\n

      Thus, the divine creative act is distinguished from His conservative act, both of which though identical in God with His power, have different terms outside God. The second conserving act presupposes the completion of the \"founding\" of the world, and is directed to its relatively autonomous operation. The first is a reflection of what Catholic theologians subsequently called God's absolute powers, by which He not only made the world, but can destroy it, modify it, or temporarily interrupt its ordinary rhythms, as in the case of a miracle. The full extent of this power we cannot know simply from what He has already done, for He can always do something more. The second reflects His ordered power and is known from nature and the laws of nature discerned in creation.[9]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      If Dr. Salkeld would seriously meditate on Fr. Fehlner\u2019s exposition of the traditional Creation-Providence framework and on our elaboration of its importance in our previous response to his articles in defense of theistic evolution, we are confident that he would see that it is not we who are \u201cmoving goalposts.\u201d\u00a0 It is those who follow in the footsteps of Rene\u2019 Descartes and the uniformitarian naturalist philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment who \u201cmoved the goalposts\u201d by shifting the boundary between the Supernatural work of Creation and the Natural Order of Providence from the \u201csabbath rest of the Lord\u201d at the end of the entire work of creation \u2013<\/em>where it had been drawn by all of the Apostles, Fathers and Doctors of the Church\u2014to \u201cthe very beginning of Creation,\u201d as prophesied by our first supreme Pontiff in his second Epistle:<\/p>\n

      In the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts, saying, \u201cWhere is the promise of His coming? For since the time that the fathers slept all things have continued as they are from the beginning of creation<\/strong>.\u201d For this they are willfully ignorant of, that the heavens were before, and the earth out of water, and through water, consisting by the Word of God (emphasis added) (2 Peter 3:3-5<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Collective Amnesia in the Church: An Historical Perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n

      One of the reasons why so many learned Catholics, like Dr. Salkeld, cannot imagine that the sacred history of Genesis should be taken literally as historical narrative, 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 \u201cnew\u201d teaching must be correct because it has been accepted for so long and has become so firmly established as \u201cthe norm\u201d that any dissent from the norm must be a \u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u201cprimitive\u201d understanding of our ancestors in regard to theological and philosophical matters, as well as natural science.\u00a0 It also overlooks the crucial fact that none of the recent Popes who have favored molecules-to-man evolution as an hypothesis in natural science ever taught it as a doctrine of faith or morals contained in the Deposit of Faith handed down from the Apostles\u2014or abrogated the mountain of authoritative Magisterial teaching that taught special creation as part of the Deposit of Faith.\u00a0 (Dr. Salkeld denies that this mountain of authoritative teaching exists, but we will prove that he is mistaken in the following pages.)<\/p>\n

      Moreover, the eclipse of God\u2019s 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\u2019s Chosen People, for 75 years \u2013 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.\u00a0 In light of Dr. Salkeld\u2019s claim that rejection of theistic evolution constitutes a species of \u201cconspiracy theory,\u201d it will be helpful to draw some parallels between previous crises of faith and morals that flowed from a forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis and our current crisis of faith and morals which has resulted from a similar case of \u201ccollective amnesia.\u201d<\/p>\n

      Darkness in Judah<\/strong><\/p>\n

      The interval between the death of King Ahaz in 715 B.C. and the advent of King Josiah in 640 B.C. 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:<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      ...[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.] [10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Something similar to \u201crock music\u201d seems to have thrived in this perverse atmosphere, as Dollinger adds, in his work \u2018Jew and Gentile,\u2019 vol. 1. pp. 430, 431, that the Galli or male prostitutes:<\/p>\n

      ...[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\u2019s gear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      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\u2019s priests and scribes, rhetorically:<\/p>\n

      How do ye say, \u201cWe are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us\u201d? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely (Jeremiah<\/em>\u00a08:8<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      King Josiah and the Reformation of Judah<\/strong><\/p>\n

      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.\u00a0\u00a0 According to 2 Kings<\/em>:<\/p>\n

      ...[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 \u2013 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<\/em> 4:7) . . . [Then]\u00a0he defiled Topheth, which\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0in 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<\/em> 23:10).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      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:<\/p>\n

      And the LORD commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, \u201cBe 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.\u201d \u00a0When 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, \u201cTake 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\u201d (Deut <\/em>31:23-26).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      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<\/em>:<\/p>\n

      Now when they\u00a0carried\u00a0out 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.\u00a0DR, 2 Chronicles<\/em>, 34:14)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      The Douai Rheims Bible gives a faithful translation of St Jerome\u2019s Vulgate which, in turn, faithfully translates the Septuagint\u2019s rendering of this verse. Both make clear that this version of the Law was not a copy but the very \u201claw of the Lord by the hand of Moses.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      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:<\/p>\n

      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<\/em> 20:8-11).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      This law which had been written by the \u201cfinger of God\u201d \u2013 and long ignored \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019s people could acknowledge and worship their Creator in what became the central ritual of the Jewish people.\u00a0\u00a0 In the Church age, the\u00a0Roman Catechism\u00a0<\/em>of the Council of Trent would reaffirm the literal interpretation of the six days of creation as the foundation for the Church\u2019s teaching on the Third Commandment and the Sabbath rest of the Lord.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

      Unfortunately, King Josiah\u2019s reformation was \u201ctoo little, too late.\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

      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.[13]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      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\u2019s tears of repentance and would allow him to die before the chastisement.<\/p>\n

      Collective Amnesia after the Babylonian Captivity and in the Church Age<\/strong><\/p>\n

      We have just seen that prior to the reign of King Josiah, the Jewish people largely \u201cforgot\u201d the Law of Moses, including the sacred history of Genesis, and that this period of collective amnesia lasted about 75 years and led to an epidemic of serious sin, especially in regard to Holy Marriage and sexual morality. But this was not the only time in salvation history when the Chosen People and their appointed leaders succumbed to \u201ccollective amnesia\u201d in regard to the sacred history of Genesis.\u00a0 A second period of \u201ccollective amnesia\u201d occurred during the 70 years of the Babylonian Captivity after the destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple and only came to an end with the re-proclamation of the Law by Nehemiah and Ezra after the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. It arguably began\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0the seventy years of Babylonian Captivity and thus lasted even longer than the collective amnesia that came to an end during the reign of King Josiah.<\/p>\n

      Now that we have seen that God\u2019s Chosen People through their own sinfulness can be permitted to forget God\u2019s fundamental Revelation in regard to the origins of man and the universe, let us recall an epoch in the Church age when something similar was twice permitted to happen.\u00a0 During the fourth century, when the Arian heretics denied the Divinity of Christ, one of the main arguments used to refute Arianism by St. Athanasius was that Christ was the Creator of all things and therefore completely divine.\u00a0 In this way, St. Athanasius exposed the Arian heresy itself as a denial of the complete doctrine of creation.\u00a0 Moreover, by interpreting the words of the Nicene Creed \u201cthrough Him all things were made\u201d to mean that God used a secondary cause (or causes) to complete His work of creation in the beginning,\u00a0 Arianism fell into the same error in regard to Creation that theistic evolutionists embrace.\u00a0 It denied that the entire work of creation\u2014all of the different kinds of spiritual and corporeal creatures and, finally, man\u2014was the work of the Most Holy Trinity, and not the work of productive secondary causes.<\/p>\n

      By denying that Our Lord Jesus Christ was \u201cGod from God\u201d as well as the Word \u201cthrough Whom all things were made,\u201d the Arian heretics fostered the false notion that God was too exalted to be directly involved in the creation of all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures.\u00a0 But this was never the doctrine of the Orthodox Fathers who held that Our Lord Jesus Christ was fully divine and that the Most Holy Trinity created all of the different kinds of creatures by fiat without the use of what Fr. Fehlner, quoted above, calls \u201cproductive secondary causes.\u201d\u00a0 (The use of the \u201cslime of the Earth\u201d in the creation of Adam\u2019s body in no way violates this principle, as the \u201cslime,\u201d previously created ex nihilo, <\/em>contributed nothing actively to the formation of Adam\u2019s body, remaining totally passive under God\u2019s creative action.)[14]<\/a><\/p>\n

      \u201cThe World Groaned and Found Itself Arian\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

      When the first Council of Nicea condemned the Arian heresy and affirmed the divinity of Christ \u201cthrough whom all things were made,\u201d the Arians went underground only to re-surface after the death of the Emperor Constantine.\u00a0 The leaders of the Arian party gained the support of Constantius, the Emperor of the West, and began a systematic persecution of the Orthodox Bishops.\u00a0 In the middle of the fourth century,\u00a0 one generation after the Council of Nicea had defined the divinity of Christ as \u201cof the same substance as the Father,\u201d a still larger council in Rimini approved a watered-down version of the Creed which styled Him only \u201cof like<\/em> substance with the Father.\u201d Of this dark moment in Church history, St. Jerome wrote that \u201cThe world groaned and found itself Arian.\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n

      In his work The Arians of the Fourth Century, <\/em>Blessed J. H. Newman observed that \u201cthe episcopate . . . did not, as a class or order of men, play a good part\u201d in the Arian controversy; but \u201cthe laity did.\u201d \u201cTaking a wide view of the history,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwe are obliged to say that the governing body of the Church came short, and the governed were preeminent in faith, zeal, courage and constancy.\u201d Commenting on this \u201cremarkable fact,\u201d Newman concludes:<\/p>\n

      Perhaps it was permitted, in order to impress upon the Church at that very time passing out of her state of persecution to her long temporal ascendancy, the great evangelical lesson, that, not the wise and powerful, but the obscure, the unlearned, and the weak constitute her real strength.\u00a0 It was mainly by the faithful people that Paganism was overthrown; it was by the faithful people, under the lead of Athanasius and the Egyptian bishops, and in some places supported by their Bishops or priests, that the worst of heresies was withstood and stamped out of the sacred territory.[16]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      For more than 50 years the dogma of the Divinity of Christ and its accompanying doctrine of the creation of all things by Christ at the beginning of time suffered partial eclipse, not completely emerging from obscurity until the Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D.\u00a0 In making his case that defenders of the traditional doctrine of creation are conspiracy theorists, Dr. Salkeld seems to lean heavily on the fact that the overwhelming majority of\u00a0 Catholic theologians have promoted or at least accepted \u201ctheistic evolution\u201d during the last 50 or 60 years.\u00a0 In the current crisis of faith and morals, it is worth recalling the work of the renowned patristics expert Jurgens who determined that at the height of the Arian crisis (which lasted 50 or 60 years) 97% of the Catholic Bishops were in communion with the Arian heretics![17]<\/a>\u00a0 If we are indeed experiencing an \u201cunprecedented crisis of the Church,\u201d as Bishop Athanasius Schneider has affirmed,[18]<\/a> should we be surprised if the underlying errors have been taught or tolerated for an even longer period of time?<\/p>\n

      Origen and the Special Creation of Corporeal Creatures <\/strong><\/p>\n

      Arianism was not the last of the attacks on the orthodox doctrine of creation in the patristic era.\u00a0 One of the tragic consequences of the widespread acceptance by Catholics of theistic evolution is that, having assumed what has never been proven \u2013 the evolution of a microbe into a human body through hundreds of millions of years of the same material processes that are going on now \u2013 they then presume (again, without proof) that we have \u201cprogressed\u201d far beyond our \u201cprimitive forebears,\u201d in knowledge as well as in technology, so that the study of history has little relevance for us at our advanced stage of evolution. In reality, the\u00a0historical past<\/em>\u00a0contains the lessons that we need to face reality here and now, not the\u00a0mythical past<\/em>\u00a0of a non-existent evolutionary history.<\/p>\n

      One of the crises in the history of the Church in which papal error played a part was the Origenist controversy of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. Origen was a brilliant theologian and teacher in the city of Alexandria, one of the greatest Christian centers of the patristic era. Unfortunately, Origen\u2019s fondness for Platonic philosophy led him to mix the doctrines of Christianity with the doctrines of Plato in a way that undermined some of the fundamental dogmas of the Faith. In particular, Origen held that God had originally only created spiritual beings and that the existence of material bodies was a consequence of the Fall. In his view \u2013 or, at least, in a view widely attributed to him \u2013 even inanimate creatures like the sun had once been spiritual beings, and the human body was itself the consequence of a primordial fall from grace. Many of the Church Fathers of the third and fourth centuries were strongly influenced by Origen and drew heavily from his multi-lingual edition of the Holy Scriptures and his voluminous exegesis of many parts of the Bible. However, by the end of the fourth century, St. Jerome and many other Church leaders began to speak out strongly against the errors in Origen\u2019s work, especially in relation to creation, the Incarnation, and the place of spiritual and corporeal creatures in God\u2019s plan for the universe.<\/p>\n

      At the end of the fourth century, St. Jerome\u2019s former friend Rufinus arrived in Rome with a translation of one of Origen\u2019s works and received a letter of blessing from the Pope, St. Siricius, to speak about Origen\u2019s writings. One of St. Jerome\u2019s spiritual children, the laywoman St. Marcella (whose feast day is January 31), was living a consecrated life in Rome at the time, and when she learned of the errors that were being propagated from Origen\u2019s writings, she protested to the Pope. St. Jerome, though hardly an unbiased commentator, describes what happened in this way:<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      the muddy feet of heretics fouled the clear waters of the faith of Rome. No wonder that in the streets and in the market places a soothsayer can strike fools on the back or, catching up his cudgel, shatter the teeth of such as carp at him; when such venomous and filthy teaching as this has found at Rome dupes whom it can lead astray. Next came the scandalous version of Origen\u2019s book\u00a0On First Principles,\u00a0and that \u2018fortunate\u2019 disciple [a Roman Christian named Macarius] who would have been indeed fortunate had he never fallen in with such a master. Next followed the confutation set forth by my supporters, which destroyed the case of the Pharisees [i.e., the Roman clergy who sided with Rufinus] and threw them into confusion. It was then that the holy Marcella, who had long held back lest she should be thought to act from party motives, threw herself into the breach. Conscious that the faith of Rome \u2013 once praised by an apostle \u2013 was now in danger, and that this new heresy was drawing to itself not only priests and monks but also many of the laity besides imposing on the bishop [Pope St. Siricius, the successor of Pope St. Damasus]\u00a0who fancied others as guileless as he was himself, she publicly withstood its teachers choosing to please God rather than men.[19]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      In short, a mere lay woman dared to criticize the Pope and the Roman clergy for allowing Rufinus to spread a doctrine that contradicted the sacred history of Genesis as it had been understood in the Church, generally, up to that time. According to St. Jerome, Rufinus began to get the worst of it in the debates that flared up over Origen\u2019s writings but asked and obtained letters of commendation from the Pope before leaving Rome for Aquileia. St. Siricius died in 398 A.D. without having withdrawn his permission for Rufinus to teach on the writings of Origen, but his successor, Pope St. Anastasius withdrew the permission and condemned them. St. Jerome asks rhetorically:<\/p>\n

      You will say, what has this to do with the praises of Marcella? I reply, She it was who originated the condemnation of the heretics. She it was who furnished witnesses first taught by them and then carried away by their heretical teaching. She it was who showed how large a number they had deceived and who brought up against them the impious books\u00a0On First Principles<\/em>,\u00a0books which were passing from hand to hand after being \u2018improved\u2019 by the hand of the scorpion [Rufinus]. She it was lastly who called on the heretics in letter after letter to appear in their own defense. They did not indeed venture to come, for they were so conscience-stricken that they let the case go against them by default rather than face their accusers and be convicted by them.[20]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      For a long, long time, men of great learning and virtue maintained a good opinion of Origen, focusing on what was good in his work and remaining in the dark about the serious errors in some of his writings. This, in turn, was aided and abetted by men like Rufinus who seem to have suppressed the blatantly erroneous parts of Origen\u2019s writings while extolling other parts of them. However, this could not continue forever, and, with the condemnation of Pope St. Anastasius, the tide definitely began to turn. However, it took a long time for the serious errors in Origen\u2019s work drawn from Platonic philosophy to be formally condemned and rejected by the whole Church at an Ecumenical Council. Indeed, this did not occur until the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the Third of Constantinople, in 553 A.D.<\/p>\n

      It is not hard to see many similarities between the case of Origen and that of Teilhard de Chardin. For a long time, men of learning and virtue, like Archbishop Fulton Sheen, maintained a good opinion of him, but this was largely the result of the efforts of Teilhard and his disciples to use \u201corthodox terminology\u201d with a heterodox meaning. Like Rufinus in his day, they suppressed the blatantly erroneous parts of Teilhard\u2019s evolutionary pseudo-science and spirituality, and even blasphemously promoted his false theology under the banner of the \u201cprimacy of Christ.\u201d Indeed, we should take heart from the fact that it took more than 150 years for the Church of Christ to finally and definitively condemn the errors of Origen, so that subsequent authorities, like St. John of Damascus in his\u00a0Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,\u00a0<\/em>confidently condemned the \u201cravings of Origen\u201d in regard to the origins of man and the universe.<\/p>\n

      Most of all, we should take heart from the example of St. Marcella, a mere lay-woman who organized an effective resistance against a false philosophy that threatened to corrupt the very foundations of Church teaching on the origins of man and the universe. In her day, there was no formal condemnation from a Pope to support her polemic against the errors of Origen. The Roman clergy and many of the most learned theologians of the age stood aloof or even supported the position of Rufinus. Yet St. Marcella and her allies effectively combated the errors of Origen in regard to the origins of man and the universe by appealing to the sacred history of Genesis as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning.<\/p>\n

      We who have the whole patrimony of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes, and Council Fathers, and their unanimous testimony to the literal truth of the sacred history of Genesis, have no excuse to shrink back from the fight to combat theistic evolution\u2014even if it earns us the scorn and derision of Catholic intellectuals like Dr. Salkeld.<\/p>\n

      Contemporary Collective Amnesia <\/strong><\/p>\n

      Just as our Hebrew ancestors in the Faith suffered from collective amnesia in regard to Genesis and the rest of the Law for long periods of time on at least two separate occasions in salvation history, the Catholic community has also been suffering from \u201ccollective amnesia\u201d in regard to the true Catholic doctrine of creation for quite a long time.\u00a0 Indeed, this collective amnesia in regard to the sacred history of Genesis actually began much earlier than is generally acknowledged and this has contributed to confusion within the ranks of traditional theologians with regard to views held by mainstream Catholic theologians in the 1890\u2019s and early 1900\u2019s in regard to evolution up to the human body and long ages, when Catholic society still had the appearance of being in good health. Some well-intentioned, Tradition-minded theologians wrongly conclude that these views were harmless because they were widely tolerated long before the revolution against the traditional liturgy of the Roman Rite and other traditional teachings of the Church on faith and morals.<\/p>\n

      Contrary to popular belief in the English-speaking world, Charles Darwin was not nearly as successful a propagandist for microbe-to-man evolution as his German colleague Ernst Haeckel, author of the fraudulent drawings used to \u201cprove\u201d the common descent of all of the different kinds of creatures from a \u201cprimitive\u201d one-celled common ancestor. Haeckel\u2019s bogus \u201cproof\u201d was the single most effective piece of propaganda in the campaign to convince the intellectual elite of the Western world that microbe-to-man evolution was a scientific fact rather than a wild conjecture. It convinced Catholic intellectuals from Fr. John Augustine Zahm at Notre Dame at the dawn of the twentieth century to Fr. Karl Rahner towards the end of the twentieth century that the traditional teaching of the Church on the special creation of Adam and Eve had been falsified by this \u201cscientific\u201d discovery.<\/p>\n

      Ernst Haeckel proposed his so-called \"Biogenetic Law\" according to which the embryonic development of vertebrates repeats the assumed history of their evolution from one-celled ancestors: \"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.\" The importance of this \"proof\" was formulated by Julian Huxley in the following way:<\/p>\n

      Embryology gives us the most striking proof of evolution. Many animals which are extremely different as adults are hard to tell apart as embryos. You yourself when you were a young embryo were very like the embryos of lizards, rabbits, chickens, dogfish, and other vertebrates. The only reasonable explanation is that we vertebrates are all related by common descent. \u2026 Even more extraordinary is the fact that we and all other land vertebrates show a fish-like plan of construction in early embryonic life, with a fish-like heart, gill-slits, and pattern of blood-vessels. This only makes sense if we, as well as all other mammals, birds and reptiles, have gradually evolved from some kind of fish.\"5<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      However, the \"evidence\" for this proposed law consisted in Haeckel's skillful drawings of embryos belonging to different animals and man. [21]<\/a><\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      It is remarkable that Haeckel\u2019s drawings had such a huge impact on Catholic intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth century, in spite of his being censured by his academic peers for deliberately exaggerating the similarities between different kinds of organisms in his drawings.\u00a0 Haeckel himself acknowledged how quickly the intellectual elite of the Catholic Church changed its position on evolution in his \u201cLast Words on Evolution\u201d in 1906. He commented on:<\/p>\n

      the interesting efforts that the Church has lately made to enter into a peaceful compromise with its deadly enemy, Monistic science. It has decided to accept to a certain extent, and to accommodate to its\u00a0creed (in a distorted and mutilated form) the doctrine of evolution, which it has vehemently opposed for thirty years. This remarkable change of front on the part of the Church militant seemed to me so interesting and important, and at the same time so misleading and mischievous, that I chose it as the subject of a popular lecture, and accepted the invitation to Berlin.<\/p>\n

      It was obvious that both the general theory of evolution and its extension to man in particular must\u00a0meet from the first with the most determined resistance on the part of the Churches. Both were in flagrant contradiction to the Mosaic story of creation, and other Biblical dogmas that were involved in it, and are still taught in our elementary schools. It is creditable to the shrewdness of the theologians and their associates, the metaphysicians, that they at once rejected Darwinism, and made a particularly energetic resistance in their writings to its chief consequence, the descent of man from the ape. This resistance seemed the more justified and hopeful as, for seven or eight years after Darwin\u2019s appearance, few biologists accepted his theory, and the general attitude amongst them was one of cold scepticism. I can well testify to this from my own experience. When I first openly advocated Darwin\u2019s theory at a scientific congress at Stettin in 1863, I was almost alone, and was blamed by the great majority for taking up seriously so fantastic a theory, \u201cthe dream of an after-dinner nap,\u201d as the G\u00f6ttinger zoologist, Keferstein, called it.[22]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Here Haeckel reveals a number of forgotten facts that urgently need to be recalled by Catholic intellectuals. In the first place, he acknowledges that the Church completely rejected Darwin\u2019s microbe-to-man hypothesis in the first decade after the publication of\u00a0Origin of Species.\u00a0<\/em>More importantly, Haeckel reveals one of the main reasons why the Pope and the Bishops did not see the need to explicitly anathematize biological evolution at the time of the First Vatican Council \u2013 namely, that the \u201ctheory\u201d was rightly deemed so \u201cfantastic\u201d that it did not need to be taken seriously. For example, when Blessed Pope Pius IX endorsed the work of\u00a0Dr. Constantin James, an eminent French Catholic physician, for writing the book\u00a0On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape,\u00a0<\/em>in which he refuted \u201cthe aberrations of Darwinism,\u201d the Pope added that:<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      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 \u2013 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,\u00a0When pride cometh, then cometh shame.\u00a0<\/em>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 \u2013 since they borrow the mask of science \u2013 be refuted by true science.[23]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      It should be noted that at the top of the list of bodies of knowledge that are \u201cso repugnant\u201d to Darwin\u2019s \u201ctissue of fables,\u201d Blessed Pope Pius IX cites, not natural science, but history and \u201cthe tradition of all peoples.\u201d Part of our \u201ccollective amnesia\u201d regarding our own Catholic heritage extends to our almost complete forgetfulness of the fact that our fathers in the Faith rightly considered the historical information in the Book of Genesis to be inerrant data that allowed Catholic scholars to determine the approximate age of the universe. Moreover, our fathers in the Faith recognized that \u201cthe tradition of all peoples\u201d included a living memory of key events in mankind\u2019s history, such as the creation of an original couple in a state of perfection, their Fall from grace, a global Flood, and a confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. Catholic intellectuals like Blessed Pope Pius IX and Orestes Brownson rightly took this historical memory much more seriously than the wild extrapolations of Darwin and his disciples into the unrepeatable past.[24]<\/a><\/p>\n

      In the light of these facts, it is not surprising that the Pope and the Bishops of the First Vatican Council in 1869-70 re-affirmed the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>dogmatic decree on creation of Lateran IV and anathematized the proposition that \u201cthe progress of science\u201d required that the doctrine of creation, among others, be changed; but they did not see the need to explicitly condemn molecules-to-man evolution. This was also because the gold standard for teaching and preaching the Faith at the time of Vatican Council I was the\u00a0Roman Catechism,\u00a0<\/em>the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which clearly taught that God specially created all of the different kinds of creatures, including man, in six days, just as recorded by Moses in what the\u00a0Roman Catechism\u00a0<\/em>called \u201cthe sacred history<\/strong> of Genesis.\u201d[25]<\/a><\/p>\n

      The same\u00a0Catechism\u00a0<\/em>went on to teach that God rested on a literal seventh day from the work of creating new kinds of creatures, thereby identifying the entire work of creation as a subject for historical theology and not for natural science.\u00a0 In this way, it excluded the hypothesis of molecules-to-man evolution in its theistic and atheistic forms, because of its conflation of the order of creation with the order of providence\u2014as well as progressive creation, the idea that God spread out the work of special creation over millions of years because of its different way of mixing these two orders.\u00a0 Dr. Salkeld\u2019s denial that the Church taught special creation authoritatively flies in the face of the fact that the Roman Catechism<\/em> was mandated for teaching the dogmas of the Faith throughout the entire world for more than 350 years, up to and including the pontificate of Pope St. Pius X.\u00a0 Thus, when Vatican I and Pope St. Pius X anathematized the erroneous claim that \u201cthe progress of the sciences\u201d required that the dogma of creation be \u201cchanged,\u201d the dogma of creation was defined for all Catholic Bishops, pastors and seminary professors in the words of the Roman Catechism.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

      Needless to say, the modern Popes who ceased proclaiming the doctrine of creation as defined in the Roman Catechism <\/em>never deliberately rejected it as a doctrine of the faith.\u00a0 Rather, they mistakenly believed their advisors in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences who convinced them that the Cartesian-Darwinian framework was a legitimate framework within which to study the origins of man and the universe, thus, \u201cmoving the goalposts,\u201d to use Dr. Salkeld\u2019s phrase, and making it appear (falsely) that Big Bang cosmology, Lyellian geology, and Darwinian biology offered legitimate \u201cscientific\u201d explanations for the origins of man and the universe.\u00a0 In this way, the dogma of creation could be shrunk to mean nothing more than that God created the angels, some matter, and some natural laws \u201cin the beginning,\u201d which then \u201cevolved\u201d until the body of a sub-human primate became suitable to receive a human soul.<\/p>\n

      Condemnation of Darwinism <\/strong><\/p>\n

      The opening of the Vatican archives from the period when the Magisterium of the Church first responded to attempts to reconcile microbe-to-man evolution with the Catholic Faith in the decade or so after Vatican I has confirmed Haeckel\u2019s testimony to the negative reaction of the Church leadership when he first tried to promote Darwinism.\u00a0 In an unpublished master\u2019s thesis in defense of the special creation of Adam as an infallible teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium, theologian Bradford Fellmeth recently revealed that in 1878 the Congregation of the Index condemned a collection of articles by a theologian named Caverni whose main thesis was that:<\/p>\n

      \u201cit is possible to reconcile evolution with Christian doctrine.\u201d After a 19-page report by future Cardinal Tommaso Zigliara, O.P.\u2014to whom we will return when addressing Arcanum\u2014the Index reached the unanimous decision to condemn the work, albeit quietly. Their reasoning for doing so is found in the official report read and submitted to Pope Leo XIII, who personally approved it on July 10, 1878:<\/p>\n

      If Caverni\u2019s work is condemned, as it should be, Darwinism would be indirectly condemned. Surely there would be cries against this decision: the example of Galileo would be held up; it will be said that this Holy Congregation is not competent to emit judgments on physiological and ontological doctrines or theories of change. But we should not focus on this probable clamor. With his system, Darwin destroys the bases of revelation and openly teaches pantheism and abject materialism. Thus, an indirect condemnation of Darwin is not only useful, but necessary.<\/p>\n

      Therefore, the Church, via the Congregation of the Index, has already albeit indirectly condemned Darwinism, and virtually no one knew about it until within the past twenty years. It is relevant to recall that Pius X condemned the proposition that \u201cthey are free from all blame who treat lightly the condemnations passed by the Sacred Congregation of the Index\u201d in Lamentabili<\/em>. Even though, as the authors of Negotiating Darwin<\/em> note, this indirect condemnation has been entirely \u201cineffective,\u201d it is not for that reason no longer binding.[25]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      As explained above, the reason why the Magisterium stopped enforcing these authoritative condemnations flowed from the influence of the natural scientists in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences who convinced the Popes from Pope Pius XII on to go along with their unjustified \u201cmoving of the goalposts\u201d to remove the origins of man and the universe from the realm of historical theology to the realm of natural science.[26]<\/a><\/p>\n

      Haeckel\u2019s \u201cGreatest Triumph\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Not surprisingly, in his \u201cLast Words on Evolution,\u201d Haeckel regarded his success in changing the intellectuals of the Church from his greatest enemies into active supporters as \u201chis greatest triumph.\u201d He wrote:<\/p>\n

      Today, when evolution is almost universally recognised in biology, when thousands of anatomic and physiological works are based on it every year, the new generation can hardly form an idea of the violent resistance that was offered to Darwin\u2019s theory and the impassioned struggles it provoked. In the first place, the Churches at once raised a vigorous protest; they rightly regarded their new antagonist as the deadly enemy of the legend of creation, and saw the very foundations of their creed threatened . . . Our science of evolution won its greatest triumph when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, its most powerful opponents, the Churches, became reconciled to it, and endeavoured to bring their dogmas into line with it.[27]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Haeckel went on to note the unique role played by scientists within the Society of Jesus in accomplishing this revolution against the \u201cfoundations\u201d of the Creed. He wrote:<\/p>\n

      the Jesuit Father Wasmann, and his colleagues, have \u2013 unwittingly \u2013 done a very great service to the\u00a0progress of pure science. The Catholic Church, the most powerful and widespread of the\u00a0Christian sects, sees itself compelled to capitulate to the idea of evolution. It embraces the most important application of the idea, Lamarck and Darwin\u2019s theory of descent, which it had vigorously combated until twenty years ago. It does, indeed, mutilate the great tree, cutting off its roots and its highest branch; it rejects spontaneous generation or archigony at the bottom, and the descent of man from animal ancestors above. But these exceptions will not last. Impartial biology will take no notice of them, and the religious creed will at length determine that the more complex species have been evolved from a series of simpler forms according to Darwinian principles . . . the open acknowledgment of [the truth of evolution by] the Jesuit, Father Wasmann, deserves careful attention, and we may look forward to a further development. If his force of conviction and his moral courage are strong enough, he will go on to draw the normal conclusions from his high scientific attainments and leave the Catholic Church, as the prominent Jesuits, Count Hoensbroech and the able geologist, Professor Renard of Ghent, one of the workers on the deep-sea deposits in the\u00a0Challenger<\/em>\u00a0expedition,\u00a0have lately done. But even if this does not happen, his recognition of Darwinism, in the name of Christian belief, will remain a landmark in the history of evolution. His ingenious and very Jesuitical attempt to bring together the opposite poles will have no very mischievous effect; it will rather tend to hasten the victory of the scientific conception of evolution over the mystic beliefs of the Churches.[28]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      With this statement Haeckel showed keen insight into the weakness of theistic evolutionist attempts to reconcile molecules-to-man evolution with the antithetical dogma of creation. He rightly anticipated that if Catholic theologians accepted the naturalistic accounts of Darwin and his disciples for the origin of man and other living things and abandoned the constant teaching of the Church on the fundamental doctrine of creation, thoughtful Catholics would realize the absurdity of trying to reconcile these opposites. He realized that theologians who allowed natural scientists to dictate to them in regard to the dogma of creation would end up ceding the primacy of theology as the Queen of the Sciences and allow Natural Science to usurp her place. Haeckel also noted the irony that Jesuits and other Catholic apologists for theistic evolution at the end of the nineteenth century tried to make it seem as if the Church had \u201cadmitted the theory of evolution for decades\u201d when just a decade or two before the Church had been united against evolution as a mortal threat to the very foundations of the Faith.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)<\/p>\n

      As Karl Escherich [a German entomologist and colleague of Haeckel] well says: \u201cHitherto we read in the faces of our clerical opponents only hatred, bitterness, contempt, mockery, or pity in regard to the new invader of their dogmatic structure, the idea of evolution. Now (since Wasmann\u2019s apostasy) the assurances of the Catholic journals, that the Church has\u00a0admitted the theory of evolution for decades, make us smile. Evolution has now pressed on to its final victory, and these people would have us believe that they were never unfriendly to it, never shrieked and stormed against it. How, they say, could anyone have been so foolish, when the theory of evolution puts the wisdom and power of the creator in a nobler light than ever.\u201d We find a similar diplomatic retreat in the popular work of the Jesuit, Father Martin Gander,\u00a0The Theory of Descent<\/em>\u00a0(1904): \u201cThus the modern forms of matter were not immediately created by God; they are effects of the formative forces, which were put by the creator in the primitive matter, and gradually came into view in the course of the earth\u2019s history, when the external conditions were given in the proper combination.\u201d That is a remarkable change of front on the part of the clergy.[29]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Indeed, the anti-Catholic forces have been \u201csmiling\u201d at this \u201cremarkable change of front\u201d ever since, delighted to have Catholic intellectuals like Dr. Ken Miller assure us that the literal historical interpretation of Genesis was an invention of protestant fundamentalists at the end of the nineteenth century, in flagrant contradiction to the indisputable fact that every one of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church would have died to defend the literal historical truth of every word of the \u201csacred history of Genesis.\u201d In a remarkable fulfillment of Haeckel\u2019s predictions, Dr. Miller now assures his youthful audiences that twenty-first century natural scientists will discover how life came from non-life when \u201cthe external conditions\u201d were \u201cin the proper combination,\u201d without any special creative act of God. Thus, as Haeckel predicted, mainstream Catholic theistic evolutionism has become indistinguishable from atheistic evolutionism, except in its adherence to the absurd notion that God placed a human soul into the conception of two sub-human primates!<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      \u201cHomo alaliis\u201d or speechless man presented by the artist to Prof. Ernst Haeckel, 1887<\/p>\n

      Lucifer\u2019s Secret Weapon Against the True Catholic Doctrine of Creation<\/strong><\/p>\n

      To realize how badly Catholic intellectuals allowed themselves to be duped at the end of the nineteenth (and the beginning of the twentieth) century can actually be a first step to liberating ourselves from our intellectual slavery to a host of evolution-based errors. But there is one piece of the puzzle that Haeckel cannot supply, and that has to do with the\u00a0sources\u00a0<\/em>of Catholic doctrine in regard to the creation of man and the universe. We saw earlier that ten years after the publication of\u00a0Origin of Species\u00a0<\/em>the First Vatican Council reaffirmed the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>of Lateran IV which had defined the creation of \u201call things\u201d by God \u201cat once\u201d from \u201cthe beginning of time.\u201d An objection often raised by modern scholars against the thesis that the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>of Lateran IV and Vatican I\u00a0was intended to define once and for all that God created all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures in the beginning of time asserts that the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>itself is rarely mentioned by theologians or Doctors of the Church in their writings against later errors in regard to the doctrine of creation.\u00a0 If the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>was intended to define the creation of all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures at the beginning of time, the argument goes, then later Doctors and preeminent theologians would have cited the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>as a kind of proof text against later heretics who deviated from the true doctrine of creation.<\/p>\n

      Unfortunately, this objection exemplifies the very attitude that makes it so hard for modern scholars like Dr. Salkeld to understand the thinking of the medieval doctors and the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>correctly \u2013 an attitude of irreverence for Sacred Scripture as the totally inerrant, God-breathed Word of God.\u00a0 The\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>was intended to correct heresies based on a rejection or misinterpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, but it was never intended to\u00a0replace\u00a0<\/em>Genesis as the primary source of information revealed by God about the creation of the world.\u00a0 The common notion among Catholic theologians today, that the content of Genesis 1-3 is not sufficient to prove that God created all of the different kinds of creatures by fiat at the beginning of time, would have been incomprehensible not only to Pope Innocent III and the fathers of Lateran IV but also to Blessed Pope Pius IX and Pope Leo XIII whom Dr. Salkeld quotes in defense of his evolution-friendly reading of Genesis.\u00a0 Indeed, in one of the most respected summaries of dogmatic theology published after Vatican I, the\u00a0Dogmatik\u00a0<\/em>of Mathias Scheeben, the author completely rejected microbe-to-man evolution and upheld the special creation of all of the different kinds of creatures, including man. However, even though the\u00a0Dogmatik<\/em>\u00a0was written in the immediate aftermath of Vatican I, Scheeben\u2019s defense of the doctrine of special creation does not rest on the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>of Lateran IV and Vatican I but on the testimony of the sacred history of Genesis. In the words of\u00a0A Manual of Catholic Theology Based on Scheeben\u2019s Dogmatik,\u00a0<\/em>the authors explain that:<\/p>\n

      Organic\u00a0beings, which now propagate themselves by generation, owe their existence neither to spontaneous generation nor to unconscious evolution of inorganic matter and forces;\u00a0each species has been created to represent a Divine exemplar, and has received the power to perpetuate itself by producing individuals of the same species<\/strong>.\u00a0This doctrine is most expressly contained in the narrative of creation in Genesis\u00a0<\/strong>(emphasis added).[30]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      To repeat: The\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0of Lateran IV and Vatican I\u00a0<\/em>was meant to exclude erroneous teachings about creation based on the rejection or misinterpretation of Genesis,\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>to supplant Genesis as God\u2019s inerrant account of how He created all of the different kinds of spiritual and corporeal creatures for man at the beginning of time.\u00a0 Thus, for St. Thomas and the Church Doctors who came after him until the generation of Haeckel\u2019s \u201cgreatest triumph,\u201d it was sufficient to say, \u201caccording to Moses, God said X, Y, or Z,\u201d to settle an argument.\u00a0 No reference to a Church Council or papal document was necessary.\u00a0 However, one of the signs of Haeckel\u2019s \u201cgreatest triumph\u201d was the erosion of the faith of many Catholic intellectuals in the inerrancy of Scripture beginning with Genesis. This, in turn, gave rise to the modern attitude \u2013 so common even among Tradition-friendly theologians today \u2013 to insist, as Dr. Salkeld does, on some kind of conciliar or papal decree to ratify the literal historical truth of Sacred Scripture. Lucifer\u2019s secret weapon in his war against the true doctrine of creation has been the abandonment of the traditional reverence for Sacred Scripture and for Scriptural inerrancy which characterized all of the Fathers, Doctors and theological masters of every generation that preceded Haeckel\u2019s \u201cgreatest triumph.\u201d With that out of the way, subsequent generations of Catholic scholars down to the present day appeal in vain for evidence that the\u00a0Firmiter\u00a0<\/em>of Lateran IV and Vatican I excludes theistic evolution and progressive creation, heedless of the fact that only in the impoverished atmosphere of faith after Haeckel\u2019s \u201cgreatest triumph\u201d would Catholic scholars look anywhere but to the \u201csacred history of Genesis\u201d for the source of the true Catholic doctrine of creation.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      The Current Crisis of Faith and Morals<\/strong><\/p>\n

      The many parallels between Josiah\u2019s 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 \u201cblack\u201d and \u201cwhite\u201d magic. For most of us, the Lord\u2019s Day is a day like any other, when the overwhelming majority of baptized Catholics forsake Holy Mass and use the Lord\u2019s Day for work, sports, shopping, and entertainment, as on any other day.<\/p>\n

      The spectacle of so many Church leaders tolerating or even encouraging these evils has driven many Catholics into sedevacantism from a sheer inability to believe that such evils could exist within the Church of God.\u00a0 No doubt there were Jews in the time of King Johoiakim who believed that God had deserted the House of David because of the abominations that flourished during his reign.\u00a0 But it would be as foolish to abandon canonical communion with the Pope and the Bishops of the Catholic Church today as it would have been to seek the future Messiah anywhere else than in the House of David in the days of King Johoiakim.<\/p>\n

      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\u2019s Day spread and accelerated.<\/p>\n

      Today, prominent Catholic intellectuals like Dr. Kenneth Miller at Brown University, author of\u00a0Finding Darwin\u2019s God,\u00a0<\/em>routinely dismiss the literal historical interpretation of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis as a \u201cprotestant fundamentalist\u201d phenomenon that was never taken seriously within the Catholic Church. The notes and commentary in the Douay Rheims Bibles in use throughout the English speaking world at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council continued to teach that God created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain in six days four thousand years before the Birth of Christ, but the majority of the Bishops at the Council had been taught by their seminary professors that at least some \u2013 if not all \u2013 of the historical information in Genesis 1-11 had been falsified by modern \u201cnatural science.\u201d Thus, like the collective amnesia that afflicted the Jewish people during the seventy years of the Babylonian Captivity, our collective amnesia concerning the Church\u2019s teaching on origins began long before the Second Vatican Council.<\/p>\n

      The proof that the creation of all things in six 24-hour days four thousand years before the Birth of Christ was taught by all Catholic Bishops, seminaries, and universities in the world as recently as the beginning of the First Vatican Council in 1869-70 can be found in the Catholic catechisms and theological manuals approved by the Bishops of Europe and North America at that time. Through the efforts of our colleague Chris De Vos we have been able to review a large representative sample of these works, including\u00a0A Dogmatic Catechism\u00a0<\/em>by Rev. D. W. Cahill (1855) and\u00a0The Catholic Church: An Epitome in Sacred History\u00a0<\/em>by the same author (1860);\u00a0The Full Catechism of the Catholic Religion\u00a0<\/em>by Rev. De Herbe (1863);\u00a0A Manual of the Catholic Religion for Catechists and Teachers\u00a0<\/em>by Rev. Walther Weninger (1863);\u00a0The Catechism of Perseverance\u00a0<\/em>of Rev. Jean-Joseph Gaume (1866), which was used to instruct the Little Flower, St. Therese of Lisieux; and\u00a0The Dogmatic Catechism\u00a0<\/em>of Rev. Frassinetti (1873), published in English with a foreword by the Archbishop of Westminster in London.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      These works prove that Catholic seminarians and laity alike were taught to believe and defend the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis. In his\u00a0Dogmatic Catechism\u00a0<\/em>Rev. Cahill yields no ground whatsoever to the \u201clearned men\u201d of his time who challenged the chronology of four thousand years from Creation to the Nativity of Christ. In works recommended by the Bishop in charge of Eastern Scotland for use in all of his Catholic schools, Fr. Cahill writes that these \u201clearned men\u201d:<\/p>\n

      attribute ten thousand years or more to certain ancient monuments, particularly Egyptian monuments . . . to bring into discredit the Sacred Scriptures, and so to shake the foundations of our most holy religion. Adam was the first man created by God. He is as old as heaven and earth within five days, having been created on the sixth day of creation; and all the buildings and monuments which are in the world are less ancient than Adam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Could our Fathers in the Faith have been any more emphatic that the literal historical truth of the first eleven chapters of the sacred history of Genesis pertains to the \u201cfoundations of our most holy religion\u201d?<\/p>\n

      A careful examination of the instructional materials in use throughout the world at the time of the First Vatican Council shows that they not only taught the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis from beginning to end but also anticipated many of the objections to it that have destroyed the faith of so many Catholics in recent times. How many Catholics have cited Fr. Stanley Jaki\u2019s statement that \u201cThere can\u2019t be days without the sun\u201d as a decisive argument against a literal interpretation of \u201cday\u201d in Genesis One? Yet in the\u00a0Catechism of Perseverance\u00a0<\/em>that formed the faith of the soul dubbed \u201cthe greatest saint of modern times\u201d by Pope St. Pius X \u2013 St. Therese of Lisieux \u2013 Fr. Gaume anticipated and refuted this sophistical objection with the same argument that St. John Chrysostom and the Church Fathers had used against the skeptics of their day. God created the sun and the moon on the fourth day, Fr. Gaume explains, so that men would not attribute the growth and sustenance of living things to them but to God, thus protecting mankind against the temptation to idolatry.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      The Message of Fatima and the Future of the Church <\/strong><\/p>\n

      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 \u2013 since it was the \u201cscientific fact\u201d of molecules-to-man evolution that made confident atheists and communists of Lenin, Stalin, Mao-Tse-Tung, and their numerous disciples and stooges.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      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\u2019s population, unless mankind repented and turned back to God. Given that we have only grown worse since Our Lady of Akita\u2019s 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\u2019s solemn promise that her Immaculate Heart\u00a0will <\/em>triumph, 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 \u2013 in every moment of our lives!<\/p>\n

      As we observe the multiplication of errors against faith and morals on every side, it is tempting to lose heart and to doubt that there will ever be an era of peace, a restoration of the Faith all over the world, and the social reign of Christ the King. But this would be tragic, because God who does \u201cnothing without telling His servants the prophets,\u201d has repeatedly foretold a future era of peace and a final Ecumenical Council that will put an end to all heresies. Moreover, in light of a number of authentic prophecies that speak of a future Ecumenical Council that will \u201cdefine the true sense of Holy Scripture,\u201d it seems virtually certain that the overwhelming support in Scripture and Tradition for creation in six days will lead to a solemn definition of \u201cday\u201d in Genesis 1 as a 24-hour day.<\/p>\n

      In his book\u00a0Trial, Tribulation, and Triumph,\u00a0<\/em>researcher Desmond Birch cites a number of holy men and women of recent centuries who prophesied an Ecumenical Council during the future era of peace that will define the sense of Scripture on certain important, unresolved questions. In particular, he mentions the seventeenth century founder of an institute for priests, Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser; Sr. Jeanne le Royer, a French nun and mystic of the eighteenth century; and a nineteenth century French nun known as the Ecstatic of Tours.<\/p>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      Before presenting the prophecies of a final Ecumenical Council during the Era of Peace, Birch cites the work of Scripture scholar Fr. Kramer whose analysis of the Book of Revelation argues that \u201cthe seven thunders\u201d of chapters eleven and twelve of the\u00a0Apocalypse\u00a0<\/em>refer to the declarations of an Ecumenical Council during the Era of Peace, before the appearance of the final Antichrist. According to Kramer:<\/p>\n

      The Seven Thunders may then be declarations of an ecumenical council\u00a0<\/em>clearing up all that was left unfinished by the magisterial office of the Church, before God will permit Satan to exert his supreme efforts to destroy her from without. The Seven Thunders will strengthen the faithful and loyal clergy in their belief and practices, expel all who are addicted to corrupt lives and superstitions and manifest the unwavering stand of the Church on the then prevailing maxims of the world . . . Through the Seven Thunders, God gave him (St. John) a special revelation of great importance, indicating what would immediately precede the coming of Antichrist, but it was to remain a secret to the Church.[31]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser was a holy priest of the seventeenth century, founder of an Institute for the formation of priests approved by Pope Innocent XI in 1680. Holzhauser accurately predicted the execution of Charles I of England and the persecution of the Catholic Church in England for 120 years. (Prohibition of Mass under penalty of death lasted from 1658 until 1778.) The documents for his cause of canonization attribute miracles of healing to him. In one of his works, Venerable Holzhauser divided the history of the Church into seven periods and situated the seventeenth century Church in the fifth of these periods. He wrote:<\/p>\n

      During the fifth period, we saw only calamities and devastation; oppression of Catholics by tyrants and heretics; execution of Kings, and conspiracies to set up republics[32]<\/a> . . . Are we not to fear, during this period, that the Mohammedans will come again, working out their sinister schemes against the Latin Church? . . . During this period men will abuse the freedom of conscience conceded to them . . . there will be laxity in divine and human precepts. Discipline will suffer. The holy canons will be completely disregarded, and the clergy will not respect the laws of the Church. Everyone will be carried away and led to believe and to do what he fancies, according to the manner of the flesh[33]<\/a> . . . But, by the hand of God Almighty, there occurs so wondrous a change during the sixth period that no one can humanly visualize it.[34]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n

      The sixth period of the Church will begin with the powerful Monarch and the holy Pontiff . . . and it will last until the revelation of Antichrist. In this period, God will console His Holy Church for the affliction and great tribulation she has endured during the fifth period. All nations will become Catholic. Vocations will be abundant as never before, and all men will seek only the Kingdom of God and His justice. Men will live in peace, and this will be granted because people will make their peace with God. They will live under the protection of the Great Monarch and his successors.<\/p>\n

      All nations will come to worship God in the true Catholic and Roman faith. There will be many Saints and Doctors on earth. Peace will reign over the whole earth because God will bind Satan for a number of years until the days of the Son of Perdition.\u00a0\u00a0 No one will be able to pervert the Word of God since, during the sixth period, there will be an Ecumenical Council which will be the greatest of all councils. By the grace of God, by the power of the Great Monarch, by the authority of the Holy Pontiff, and by the union of all the most devout princes, atheism and every heresy will be banished from the earth. The Council will define the true sense of Holy Scripture, and this will be believed and accepted by everyone <\/strong>(emphasis added).[35]<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      It is difficult for twenty-first century readers to imagine how unbelievable Venerable Holzhauser\u2019s predictions of the rise of republics must have seemed to seventeenth century Catholics in nations where Christian monarchies had existed for many centuries. In our proud and unwavering faith in progress, we fail to consider that the restoration of monarchies in the future is no less likely today than the prophesied rise of republics in the seventeenth century. Moreover, Venerable Bartholomew was not the only authentic Catholic prophet to predict a future Ecumenical Council in similar terms.<\/p>\n

      Why would the six days of creation be among the passages of Holy Scripture whose \u201ctrue sense\u201d will be defined once and for all during the Era of Peace?<\/p>\n

      The answer emerges where Venerable Holzhauser remarks that \u201catheism and every heresy will be banished from the Earth.\u201d Given the intimate connection between the denial of the six days of creation and the acceptance of evolution \u2013 in dogma and in morals, as well as in natural science \u2013 the definition of \u201cday\u201d in Genesis One as a 24-hour day would irrevocably seal the Church\u2019s condemnation of that error.<\/p>\n

      Like Venerable Holzhauser, Sister Jeanne le Royer foretold a great Council of pastors after a time of great trial and tribulation:<\/p>\n

      I see in God\u00a0a large assembly of pastors\u00a0<\/em>who will uphold the rights of the church and of her Head.\u00a0They will restore the former disciplines.\u00a0<\/em>I see, in particular, two servants of the Lord who will distinguish themselves in this glorious struggle and who, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, will fill with ardent zeal the hearts of\u00a0this illustrious assembly.<\/em> [36]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Similarly, the Ecstatic of Tours predicted:<\/p>\n

      The Council will meet again after the victory.\u00a0<\/em>But, this time, men will be obliged to obey;\u00a0There will be only one flock and one shepherd.\u00a0<\/em>All men will acknowledge the Pope as the Universal Father, the King of all peoples. Thus mankind will be regenerated. [37]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Since the Ecstatic of Tours had lived during the first Vatican Council, which was interrupted by strife between French and Italian forces, it was logical for her to see the future council as a continuation of the work of Vatican I. On the other hand, as a \u201cpastoral council,\u201d which did not define doctrine or condemn errors, Vatican II could not\u00a0complete<\/em>\u00a0the work of Vatican I, which was a Council in the traditional sense, defining doctrine and condemning errors in faith and morals. Thus, the Ecstatic\u2019s prophetic announcement of a council \u201cafter the victory\u201d of the Church points to a\u00a0future<\/em>\u00a0Council that will complete the unfinished work of the First Vatican Council.[38]<\/a><\/p>\n

      In light of the promises of Our Lady of Fatima, it is interesting to note that prophets of the Russian Orthodox Church have also predicted a future Ecumenical Council. St. Seraphim of Sarov who predicted the Bolshevik Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar more than one hundred years in advance also foretold a final Ecumenical Council before the rise of Antichrist and the end of the world. He prophesied that its aim would be:<\/p>\n

      to unite and reunite all the holy Churches of Christ against the growing anti-Christian tendency under a single Head, Christ the Life-Giver, and under a single Protecting Veil of His Most Pure Mother, and to deliver to a final curse against the whole of Masonry and all the parties similar to it (under whatever names they may appear), the leaders of whom have one common aim: under the pretext of complete egalitarian earthly prosperity, and with the aid of people who have been made fanatical by them, to create anarchy in all states and to destroy Christianity throughout the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      It is significant that St. Seraphim recognized that the Orthodox Churches have not been able to have an Ecumenical Council since their separation from the Church of old Rome.\u00a0\u00a0 Thus, he regards this future Council as \u201cthe eighth\u201d because it will involve the Bishops of the whole world, as did the seven Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium when the Patriarch of Constantinople remained in communion with the Bishop of Rome. This is a remarkable admission by one who is probably the most revered modern saint of the Russian Orthodox Church\u2014an admission that it is impossible to have a truly Ecumenical Council without the participation of the Bishop of Rome.\u00a0 Indeed, we know that this event will only become possible after<\/em> the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope and the Bishops in union with him,[39]<\/a> the act that will spark the conversion of Russia and her return to full communion with the Catholic Church.[40]<\/a><\/p>\n

      It is worth reflecting on the agenda that St. Seraphim identifies as the common aim of all of the enemies of Christianity: \u201cunder the pretext of complete egalitarian earthly prosperity, and with the aid of the people who have been made fanatical by them, to create anarchy in all states and to destroy Christianity throughout the world.\u201d\u00a0 Is that not the very goal that we see being pursued throughout the world by corporate globalists like Bill Gates and George Soros, in concert with the United Nations, Communist China, and secular humanist regimes?<\/p>\n

      Conclusion <\/strong><\/p>\n

      We hope and pray that Dr. Salkeld will read this response to his \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d claims\u2014as well as our response to his previous articles which ought to have disabused him of the notion that contemporary defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation are conspiracy theorists in the first place!\u00a0 However, we realize that it will not be easy for him to change his mind\u2014not because the scientific evidence for molecules-to-man evolution is so overwhelming, as he seems to believe, but because it is so hard to believe that \u201cso many brilliant scientists (and theologians) could be wrong\u201d about something as fundamental as the proper framework within which to study the origins of man and the universe.\u00a0 Dr. Salkeld accuses us of holding that anyone who embraces theistic evolution is a \u201csycophant, a \u201cpatsy,\u201d or a \u201ccrook.\u201d\u00a0 But we do no such thing.\u00a0 We have acknowledged that a Catholic can be highly intelligent, learned, sincere and devout, and still be wrong<\/em> about the origins of \u00a0man and the universe, IF\u2014and this, as we stated above, is the crux of the matter\u2014IF he accepts a false framework within which to study the relevant theological and empirical data.<\/p>\n

      To put this difficulty into a historical perspective, we might ask ourselves:<\/p>\n

      How many of the scribes of Judah believed in the sacred history of Genesis when Josiah mounted the throne?<\/p>\n

      How many scribes believed in the sacred history of Genesis in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah?<\/p>\n

      How many Bishops believed in Christ the Creator of all things at the height of the Arian crisis in the mid-fourth century?<\/p>\n

      The answer to all of these questions is the same\u2014only a few.\u00a0 The vast majority of the learned and powerful religious men in each of these crises supported an heterodox interpretation of Genesis or no interpretation at all.\u00a0 It was only a tiny remnant who upheld the true understanding of the Mosaic account of Creation.<\/p>\n

      But what about Dr. Salkeld\u2019s objection that if our position is correct, it would mean that the Church leadership had failed to uphold the complete Catholic doctrine of creation for almost 100 years?\u00a0 Is it not absurd on the face of it to hold that the leadership of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church could have failed to uphold the true doctrine of creation in its entirety for almost 100 years?<\/p>\n

      Again, the history of the Church provides an answer.<\/p>\n

      It took 56 years for an Ecumenical Council in Constantinople to complete and confirm the work of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea, to put an end to the first<\/em> dire crisis of faith in the history of the Church. Is it so surprising that it could take 150 years for a final Ecumenical Council to complete the work of the First Vatican Council and put an end to the worst <\/em>crisis of faith in the history of the Catholic Church? As the prophets quoted above prophesied, the next Ecumenical Council that completes the work of the First Vatican Council will condemn all modern heresies and so will undoubtedly pronounce a final reaffirmation of the dogma of creation and an explicit anathematization of evolution it its theistic as well as its atheistic forms.<\/p>\n

      Through the prayers of the Mother of God, may the Holy Spirit grant to the Pope and the Bishops the grace to consecrate Russia by name to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as soon as possible, and to usher in an era of peace, the restoration of the Church, and the greatest evangelization the world has ever known.<\/p>\n

      Fr. Peter Dwyer, OAM; M.Ed.; B.Th.; G.R.S.M. (Lon); L.R.A.M.; A.R.C.M.; A.Mus.A.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Eric Bermingham, M.S., Aerospace Engineering<\/span><\/p>\n

      Dr. Dean H. Kenyon, Ph.D., Biophysics<\/span><\/p>\n

      Dr. Kevin Mark, D.M.D.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Mr. Hugh Owen, M.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Mr. Michael Randolph,\u00a0B.S. Philosophy; M.S.\u00a0Information Management<\/span><\/p>\n

      Thomas H. Seiler, Ph.D., Physics\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

      John Wynne, M.S.<\/span><\/p>\n


      \nReferences<\/strong><\/p>\n

      [1]<\/a> https:\/\/churchlifejournal.nd.edu\/articles\/catholic-creationism-as-a-conspiracy-theory\/<\/a> (accessed 5-15-20)<\/p>\n

      [2]<\/a> https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/conspiracy-theory<\/a> (accessed 5-15-20)<\/p>\n

      [3]<\/a> LACTANTIUS (c. 300). \"Chapter 14,\" On the Deaths of the Persecutors.\u00a0 According to Lactantius, \"That [Galerius] might urge [Diocletian] to excess of cruelty in persecution, he employed private emissaries to set the palace on fire; and some part of it having been burnt, the blame was laid on the Christians as public enemies; and the very appellation of Christian grew odious on account of that fire.\"<\/p>\n

      [4]<\/a> The controversy surrounding Piltdown Man during the decades of its acceptance as fossil proof of human evolution concerned not its authenticity <\/em>but its viability as proof that human evolution first occurred in Europe rather than in Africa or that white Europeans were \u201cmore highly evolved,\u201d as Osborn believed, than \u201cless favored races.\u201d\u00a0 Certainly, the idea that the skull was a deliberate fabrication would have been regarded as a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d by the intellectual elite of the Western world, especially during the period from 1934 to 1952. On re-examination in 1953 it was found to be a fabrication, comprised of a human cranium and an ape jaw.<\/p>\n

      [5]<\/a> POPE LEO XIII, Arcanum divinae, <\/em>5.<\/p>\n

      [6]<\/a> Quoted in GERARD J. KEANE, Special Creation Rediscovered <\/em>(Mt. Jackson: Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, 2016), p. 4.<\/p>\n

      [7]<\/a> ST. AUGUSTINE, Lit. Mean. Gen<\/em>. I, 39(19).<\/p>\n

      [8]<\/a> JOSEPH GEDNEY, \u201cSt. Augustine Rediscovered\u201d http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/st-augustine-rediscovered-a-defense-of-the-literal-interpretation-of-st-augustines-writings-on-the-sacred-history-of-genesis\/<\/a> (accessed 5-29-20)<\/p>\n

      [9]<\/a> FR. PETER FEHLNER, In the Beginning <\/em>http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/in-the-beginning\/<\/a>\u00a0 (accessed 5-25-20).<\/p>\n

      [10]<\/a> https:\/\/biblehub.com\/commentaries\/2_kings\/23-7.htm<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [11]<\/a> https:\/\/www.ellopos.net\/elpenor\/greek-texts\/septuagint\/chapter.asp?book=14&page=34 <\/a>(accessed 5-29-20)<\/p>\n

      [12]<\/a> \u201cWe 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\u00a0the seventh day was called the Sabbath, because God,\u00a0having finished the creation of the world, rested on that day from all the work which He had done.\u00a0<\/strong>Thus it is called by the Lord in Exodus (emphasis added) (Catechism of the Council of Trent<\/em>).<\/em><\/p>\n

      [13]<\/a> https:\/\/biblehub.com\/commentaries\/gill\/2_chronicles\/36.htm<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [14]<\/a> The most important dogmatic decree on creation, the Firmiter <\/em>of Lateran IV in 1215, was specifically directed at the Albigensian-Catharist heretics, most of whom held that God created the spiritual creatures and some material elements in the beginning but did not specially create the different kinds of corporeal creatures.\u00a0 See \u201cThe Firmiter <\/em>of Lateran IV in its Historical Context Defines the Fiat Creation of All Things\u201d at http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/the-firmiter-of-lateran-iv-in-its-historical-context-defines-the-fiat-creation-of-all-things\/ <\/a>(accessed 5-29-20)<\/p>\n

      [15]<\/a> The Council of Rimini was opened early in July, 359, with over four hundred bishops. About eighty Semi-Arians, including Ursacius, Germinius, and Auxentius, withdrew from the orthodox bishops, the most eminent of whom was Restitutus of Carthage; Liberius, Eusebius, Dionysius, and others were still in exile. The two parties sent separate deputations to the emperor, the orthodox asserting clearly their firm attachment to the faith of Nicaea, while the Arian minority adhered to the imperial formula. But the inexperienced representatives of the orthodox majority allowed themselves to be deceived, and not only entered into communion with the heretical delegates, but even subscribed, at, Nice in Thrace, a formula to the effect merely that the Son is like the Father according to the Scriptures (the words \"in all things\" being omitted). On their return to Rimini, they were met with the unanimous protests of their colleagues. But the threats of the consul Taurus, the remonstrances of the Semi-Arians against hindering peace between East and West for a word not contained in Scripture, their privations and their homesickness--all combined to weaken the constancy of the orthodox bishops. And the last twenty were induced to subscribe when Ursacius had an addition made to the formula of Nice, declaring that the Son is not a creature like other creatures. Pope Liberius, having regained his liberty, rejected this formula, which was thereupon repudiated by many who had signed it. In view of the hasty manner of its adoption and the lack of approbation by the Holy See, it could have no authority. In any case, the council was a sudden defeat of orthodoxy, and St. Jerome could say: \u2018The whole world groaned in astonishment to find itself Arian\" (Benigni, Umberto. \"Council of Rimini.\" The Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em>. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 9 Oct. 2018 <http:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/cathen\/13057b.htm<\/a>>.) (accessed 5-29-20)<\/p>\n

      [16]<\/a> J. H. NEWMAN, The Arians of the Fourth Century <\/em>(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), pp. 445-446. The First Nicene Council\u2019s dogmatic definition of the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ was ultimately reaffirmed by the First Council of Constantinople in 381.\u00a0 Since the work of Vatican Council I was interrupted by Italian revolutionaries, it is to be expected that its work will be completed in the future era of peace promised by Our Lady of Fatima and that this will include a definitive reaffirmation of the traditional dogma of creation and anathemas against the principal deviations from that doctrine.<\/p>\n

      [17]<\/a> \u201cAt one point in the Church\u2019s history, only a few years before Gregory\u2019s [Nazianz] present preaching (A.D. 380), perhaps the number of Catholic bishops in possession of sees, as opposed to Arian bishops in possession of sees, no greater than something between 1% and 3% of the total\u201d (JURGENS, The Faith of the Early Fathers<\/em>, Vol. II, p. 39.)<\/p>\n

      [18]<\/a> BISHOP ATHANASIUS SCHNEIDER, \u201cThe Interpretation of Vatican II and the Current Crisis in the Church\u201d https:\/\/catholicism.org\/bishop-schneider-interpretation-vatican-ii-current-crisis-church.html<\/a> \u00a0(accessed 5-17-20).<\/p>\n

      [19]<\/a> St. JEROME, Letter to Principia, Letter CXXVII \u00a0http:\/\/www.ccel.org\/ccel\/schaff\/npnf206.v.CXXVII.html<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [20]<\/a> ST. JEROME, Letter to Principia, Letter CXXVII http:\/\/www.ccel.org\/ccel\/schaff\/npnf206.v.CXXVII.html<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [21]<\/a> As Dr. Thomas Seiler explains in his work Originality of <\/em>Species (THOMAS H.SEILER, Originality of Species<\/em>) http:\/\/www.originality-of-species.net\/<\/a> (accessed 5-25-20):<\/p>\n

      These drawings have been compared to real scientific observations and embryologist Michael Richardson summarized the significance of Haeckel's influential work:<\/p>\n

      This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It\u2019s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. \u2026 What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don\u2019t \u2026 These are fakes\" ( Michael Richardson, The Times (London) <\/em>11 Aug. 1997.)<\/p>\n

      Furthermore, the proposed embryonic recapitulation of certain organs turned out to be without substance. Human embryos never have gill slits or other animal organs during their development as has been documented by the embryologist Erich Blechschmidt who concluded: \"the so-called basic law of biogenetics is wrong. No buts or ifs can mitigate this fact.\" He adds that the gill stage myth is \"not even a tiny bit correct or correct in a different form... It is totally wrong\" (E. Blechschmidt, The Beginnings of Human Life<\/em>, Springer-Verlag, New York, p. 32, 1977).<\/p>\n

      [22]<\/a> ERNST HAECKEL, \u201cLast Words on Evolution\u201d https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/53639\/53639-h\/53639-h.htm\u00a0<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [23]<\/a> Quoted in A. D. WHITE, The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom <\/em>(1895), Arco Publishers (1955), pp. 75-76.<\/p>\n

      [24]<\/a> Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) was one of the greatest Catholic apologists in the history of the United States\u2013some would say the greatest.\u00a0 A convert to the Catholic Faith, Brownson entered the Church after having earned a stellar reputation as an original writer and thinker, a member of the intellectual circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. His\u00a0Review<\/em> offered a bold and uncompromising defense of the Catholic Faith which earned the respect and admiration of the entire episcopate.\u00a0 On May 13, 1849, Brownson received a letter from Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia, signed by the Archbishop of Baltimore and by all of the American Bishops in attendance at the Council of Baltimore in 1849, to encourage him by their \u201capprobation and influence\u201d to continue his \u201cliterary labors in defense of the faith.\u201d\u00a0 In a review of Darwin\u2019s Descent of Man <\/em>in 1873, Brownson wrote:<\/p>\n

      We are thus severe against these men [Darwin and his disciples], not because we are narrow-minded and bigoted, not because we have an overweening confidence in our own opinions or hold them to be the measure of the true and the good, nor because we dislike science that is science, or dread its light; but because they do not give us science, but their own opinions and speculations, which they can neither know nor prove to be true, and\u00a0 which we know cannot be true, unless the religion of Christ is false, God is not, and heaven and earth a lie.\u00a0 We condemn them, because the truth condemns them; because, instead of shedding light on the glorious works of the Creator, they shed darkness over them, and obscure their fair face with the thick smoke that ascends at their bidding from the bottomless pit of their ignorance and presumption.\u00a0 Their science is an illusion with which Satan mocks them, deludes and destroys souls for whom Christ has died, and it comes under the head of the endless \u201cgenealogies\u201d and \u201cvain philosophy,\u201d against which St. Paul so solemnly warns us.\u00a0 It is high time that they be stripped of their prestige, and be treated with the contempt they deserve for their impudent pretension, and be held in the horror which all men should feel\u00a0 for the enemies of truth, and whose labors tend only to the extinction of civilization, the abasement of intelligence, to fix the affections on the earth, to blunt the sense of moral obligation, and to make society what we see it every day becoming.\u00a0 They are Satan\u2019s most efficient ministers. ORESTES BROWNSON, Brownson\u2019s Quarterly Review<\/em>, July 1873 \u00a0http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/orestes-brownson-on-darwins-descent-of-man\/<\/a> (accessed 5-25-20)<\/p>\n

      [25]<\/a> Citing an article by James Akin, Dr. Salkeld holds that the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent and Vatican I lost their force when the Code of Canon Law was revised in 1983\u00a0The \u201cUnanimous Consent\u201d of the Church Fathers<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0This smacks of the exegetical style of the scribes of Our Lord\u2019s day who interpreted the Mosaic law on divorce to mean that a man could divorce his wife \u201cfor any reason,\u201d forgetting that, as Jesus reminded these errant teachers, \u201cin the beginning it was not so,\u201d and that marriage was established by God to be permanent and indissoluble from the beginning of creation.\u00a0\u00a0To hold, as Dr. Salkeld and Mr. Akin do, that the dogmatic decrees of Trent and Vatican I (the violations of which were not anathematized in the conciliar canons) were abrogated or made non-binding by the 1983 Code of Canon Law is to turn Almighty God into a kind of Koranic monster who directs His Church to teach fundamental doctrines for almost two thousand years before withdrawing His directives and allowing those doctrines to be radically altered under the influence of fallible man-made hypotheses in natural science.\u00a0\u00a0The absurdity of this claim can be readily recognized when one considers that the canon of Holy Scripture was defined at the Council of Trent without a corresponding anathema, so that, by Dr. Salkeld and Mr. Akin\u2019s criterion, the canon of Holy Scripture can no longer be considered dogmatically defined since the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law!\u00a0\u00a0Dr. Salkeld and Mr. Akin seem to think that the Pope has an unlimited power to change doctrine, but in defining papal infallibility Vatican I explicitly stated that this gift was not given to the Pope to \u201cdefine any new doctrine\u201d but only to define doctrines of faith or morals contained in the Deposit of Faith handed down from the Apostles.\u00a0\u00a0Needless to say, no recent Pope has found anything contrary to the traditional doctrine of creation in the Deposit of Faith!<\/p>\n

      [26]<\/a> BRADFORD FELLMETH, Thou Art Dust\u201d: Recovering the Revealed Doctrine of the Origin of Man\u2019s Body<\/em>, unpublished thesis for a Master\u2019s Degree in Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, 2019.\u00a0 In the same thesis, Fellmeth proves that the Profession of Faith Vas electionis <\/em>by Pope St. Pelagius I, defining the special creation of Adam, body and soul, and the creation of Eve from Adam\u2019s side, was an infallible exercise of the papal Magisterium.<\/p>\n

      [27]<\/a> In reality, the scientists of the PAS never \u201cconvinced\u201d the modern Popes that this \u201cmoving of the goalposts\u201d was justified.\u00a0 By fairly early on in the twentieth century, the Cartesian-Darwinian framework had become the accepted framework in academia for studying the origins of man and the universe, but this happened so subtly and gradually that there never was an open and honest debate about the relative merits of the Cartesian framework and the traditional Creation-Providence framework.<\/p>\n

      [28]<\/a> ERNST HAECKEL, \u00a0\u201cLast Words on Evolution\u201d https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/53639\/53639-h\/53639-h.htm<\/a> (accessed 5-27-20)<\/p>\n

      [29]<\/a> IBID.<\/p>\n

      [30]<\/a> IBID.<\/p>\n

      [31]<\/a> A Manual of Catholic Theology Based on Scheeben\u2019s Dogmatik<\/strong><\/em>, Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell, Vol I, Chap. IV, Sect. 122 (London: Kegan Paul, 1890), p. 383.<\/p>\n

      [32]<\/a> Quoted in DESMOND A. BIRCH, Trial, Tribulation and Triumph <\/em>(Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, 1996), p. 421.<\/p>\n

      [33]<\/a> DESMOND A. BIRCH, Trial, Tribulation, and Triumph <\/em>(Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, 1996), p. 40.<\/p>\n

      [34]<\/a> IBID, pp. 332-333.<\/p>\n

      [35]<\/a> YVES DUPONT, Catholic Prophecy <\/em>(Rockford: TAN, 1970), p. 40.<\/p>\n

      [36]<\/a> BIRCH, op. cit., pp. 332-333.<\/p>\n

      [37]<\/a> IBID, p. 422.<\/p>\n

      [38]<\/a> IBID, p. 423.<\/p>\n

      [39]<\/a> The Second Vatican Council was supposed to complete the work of the First Vatican Council, and the original schemas were written with that purpose in mind.\u00a0 When the modernist Bishops and theologians of northern Europe seized control of the Council, the original schemas were set aside, and the character of the Council was changed to that of a \u201cpastoral council\u201d in which, as the Pope\u2019s legate confirmed, no new doctrine would be defined.<\/p>\n

      [40]<\/a> For an explanation of why the papal consecrations of the world in 1984 and 2000 did not fulfill the request of Our Lady of Fatima for the Consecration of Russia by the Pope in union with the Bishops, see HUGH OWEN, The Light Comes from the East; Reflections on the Papal Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary <\/em>(Mt. Jackson: Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, 2015), pp. 105-109.<\/p>\n

      [41]<\/a> To those who object that St. Seraphim of Sarov ought not to be called a \u201cSaint\u201d\u2014as did Pope St. John Paul Ii\u2014because he has not been canonized by the Catholic Church, it should be pointed out that it has been the practice of the Catholic Church to accept the saints who are commemorated by Churches that have been separated for a time from the Holy See when they return to communion with Rome, even if those saints have been glorified during the period of separation. For example, St. Gregory Palamas was glorified by the Orthodox after the Schism of 1054, but after the Ukrainians returned to communion with Rome in 1596, they were allowed to commemorate St. Gregory Palamas in their liturgical calendar.\u00a0 Today, St. Gregory Palamas is commemorated by the Greek Catholic Churches both Melkite and Ukrainian.\u00a0 (For a beautiful harmonization of the theology of St. Gregory Palamas and St. Thomas Aquinas, please see The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas, <\/em>A.N. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). This masterful work demonstrates that St. Gregory and St. Thomas can be shown to agree on all essential points of theology by anyone who takes the time to understand each of them in his own idiom.)\u00a0\u00a0 Since Our Lady of Fatima assures us that Russia will be converted and return to full communion with the Catholic Church, it is quite reasonable\u2014although not certain, of course\u2014to expect that St. Seraphim of Sarov will continue to be commemorated as a saint in the era of peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Is the Catholic Rejection of Theistic Evolution a \u201cConspiracy Theory?\u201d In a recent article in the University of Notre Dame Church Life Journal, Dr. Brett Salkeld, the theologian for the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,185,154,279,370,243],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/The_Garden_of_Eden_with_the_Fall.jpg?fit=600%2C393&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15660,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6784\/revisions\/15660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}