Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
I would like to thank everyone who is praying our Novena to St. Joseph which will end tomorrow September 7 on which evening we will begin our next Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows which will end on September 15. One of our readers reminded me that tomorrow, September 7, is a Sunday, not a Monday as I had originally said. My apologies for that!
Our Give, Send, Go fund raiser has been launched and the website can be accessed through this link. Please be as generous as possible, as we cannot succeed in our mission without your financial support.
Another one of our readers reminded me that August 12 was the anniversary of the publication of the encyclical Humani generis, so the primary focus of this newsletter will be on the way that the Kolbe Center is combating one of the most pernicious errors that Pope Pius XII warned against in Humani generis.
“Fictitious Opinions” Regarding the Interpretation of Genesis 1-11
Catholic theistic evolutionist Dr. Kenneth Miller reflected the views of the overwhelming majority of Catholic intellectuals today in an interview when he commented on the “genre” of Genesis and said:
Great theologians of the early centuries of the Christian era, like Saint Augustine, did not read Genesis as history. It’s only in the last hundred years, mostly in the United States, that you have people coming up with a radically different view.
In reality, as we have demonstrated again and again, St. Augustine, like all of the Fathers of the Church, would have shed his last drop of blood to defend the literal historical truth of every word in the sacred history of Genesis. He wrote:
The narrative [in Genesis] is not written in a literary style proper to allegory, as in the Canticle of Canticles, but from beginning to end in a style proper to history, as in the Books of Kings (St. Augustine, The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Vol 2., p. 32, 33.)
In his excellent guide to the faithful interpretation of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis, Fr. Victor Warkulwiz pointed out that the encyclical actually warns against and condemns Dr. Miller’s view regarding the “genre” of Genesis. In PARAGRAPH 23, Pope Pius XII identifies certain “fictitious opinions” of modernist commentators on Genesis:
Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.
In his commentary on Paragraph 23, Fr. Victor writes:
This paragraph is directed against those who think that science and Scripture can be reconciled only by repudiating the literal historical truth of Genesis 1–11, which was upheld by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. This repudiation has led to serious lacunae in Catholic theology, teaching and preaching.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) in an address to the presidents of the European doctrinal commissions in Vienna, Austria in May 1989 lamented the “almost total disappearance of the theology of the doctrine of creation.” Also, in the preface to his collection of homilies on Creation and the Fall entitled ‘In the Beginning …’ Cardinal Ratzinger states:
Paradoxically, however, the creation account is noticeably and completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology. The creation narratives go unmentioned; it is asking too much to expect anyone to speak of them.
Even Vatican Council II’s document on Sacred Scripture (Dei verbum) neglects to refer to Genesis 1–11 in it summary of the history of salvation.
Today the Catholic Church has well developed theologies of redemption and sanctification but no well-developed theology of creation. That is because so many of her influential thinkers have abandoned the sound creation theology of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and have embraced instead the false principles of evolutionism.
Great confusion has been introduced into the thinking of Catholics by the theory of evolution and its associated doctrines, which are rooted in some false claims of natural scientists. Genuine natural science seeks truth about the natural world. But sometimes what scientists present as truth is simply opinion based on a false philosophy. This is the case with the theory of evolution, which seeks to explain the origin of all things by natural causes.
Rejection of the Traditional Reading of Genesis Leads to Blasphemy
Now a few words about the literary form of Genesis: The literary form of a writing is often suggested by the text itself and sometimes made known by the author. There is no evidence whatsoever in Genesis 1–11 that it is anything other than what Moses presented it as, a literal-historical document. That is what the Fathers of the Church unanimously understood it to be. They received that understanding from the Apostles, who received it from Christ. That this is genuine Catholic Tradition is confirmed in the liturgy of the Church and in the overwhelming consensus of the faithful over the centuries, as reflected in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and in other Catholic literature.
This brings us to the notion of literal historical truth. The expression of “literal historical truth” does not exclude the use of metaphorical and other figurative language, which is often used to clearly and unambiguously express truth. The Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), in a 1909 decision, made allowances for the flexibility of language, saying that Genesis 1–3 need not be “interpreted in a proper literal sense” “when expressions are manifestly used figuratively, that is, metaphorically or anthropomorphically, and when reason forbids us to hold, or necessity impels us to depart from, the proper literal sense.” Not all expressions of truth are mechanically literal. Modern English is full of metaphors and other figures of speech that greatly enrich the language. Figurative language stretches the meaning of words to give them a wider range of application. Figures of speech colorfully, succinctly and forcefully convey shades of meaning that would be clumsy to do with strict literalism. But they reveal and clarify; they do not conceal. Literal-historical truth is truth that is expressed plainly, in either strictly literal or contextually-clear figurative language, without the use of cryptic symbolism that can be deciphered only by highly trained scholars.
Pius XII in this paragraph is castigating the elitist notion that our ancestors for 6000 years did not really understand Genesis 1–11 and that it is only we in the modern world who have came to understand it properly, that is, as only “symbolic or spiritual,” without any basis in reality. The logical conclusion is the blasphemous one that God, the author of Sacred Scripture, deceived our ancestors all those years, and it was modern Scripture scholars (who have been strongly influenced by false science and phony exegesis) have set things straight.
If you have not read Fr. Victor’s entire commentary on Humani generis, I highly recommend that you obtain it from the Kolbe web store in print form or as an PDF e-book. It is one of many tools that Our Lord and the Blessed Mother have given us with which to awaken our Catholic brothers and sisters to the blasphemous nature of the modernist interpretation of Genesis 1-11.
Spiritual Warfare
One of the ways that we can tell that the true doctrine of creation poses a threat to the foundations of the anti-culture of death is by the fury of the demonic attacks that we constantly face in this apostolate. One of our members, Michael Warner, is a gifted reader who has a professional studio in his home where he records audio books. By the grace of God, he offered to record our recent publication Loved, Lost and Found, and our friend Steve Cunningham at Sensus Fidelium has agreed to post the audio files, one chapter at a time, on the Sensus Fidelium Youtube channel. In the meantime, Michael has experienced all kinds of demonic harassment while working on this project. He wrote recently:
I have had multiple experiences with demonic attack . . . For example, as I was praying before a livestream of the Blessed Sacrament, the light bulb on my desk lamp, which was inches from my face, exploded, but not one shred touched me. Another time I had a candle lit before a livestream image of the Blessed Sacrament and the candle was knocked onto my keyboard, hot wax ruining it. These kinds of experiences have helped me to identify what was really happening in this case pretty quickly. Just the fact that I am attacked like that makes me want to dig my heels in.
The first part of Mike’s recording of Loved, Lost and Found will appear in this playlist, tomorrow, Sunday, September 7th at 12 PM PST/3PM EST. Please pray for God’s blessing and protection upon him and his work. Tomorrow will also mark the end of our Novena to St. Joseph and the beginning of our Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows, which we invite you to begin in the evening, when the September 7 Vespers prayers will usher in the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady on Monday, September 8. We will pray a Memorare and “Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!” for nine days that Our Lady will inspire our friends and supporters to provide the spiritual and financial support that we need to carry out our mission in 2026.
As we have noted many times, the establishment of the beginning of the liturgical day with Vespers took place at the foundation of the world, when Our Heavenly Father established the liturgical rhythms of the liturgical day and the liturgical week, by the very way that He created all things in six days consisting of “an evening and a morning.” That is why Byzantine Daily Worship, the official prayer book of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church to which I belong, states right at the beginning:
“Ecclesiastical day begins at sunset in accord with Genesis: ‘. . . and there was an evening and morning, the first day.’ Therefore Vespers, or the Order of the Evening, is the first hour of the Holy Office.”
And that, of course, is why the Angelic Doctor, summarizing the consensus of the Church Fathers, writes in Part I, Question 74, Answer 3, in the Summa Theologica:
“The words ‘one day’ are used when day is first instituted, to denote that one day is made up of twenty-four hours. Hence, by mentioning ‘one,’ the measure of a natural day is fixed.”
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of St. Joseph, and all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.
