A recent article on the Crisis Magazine website questioned whether the traditional Biblical chronology of the world and the geocentric-geostatic model of the cosmos were either scientific or even Catholic.[1] The main point of the article was that since an ancient cosmos and heliocentrism have been scientifically proven (and a recent creation and geocentrism have been disproven), not only is it unscientific to say otherwise, it is not an authentically Catholic position to defend the traditional teaching. The author, Eric Sammons, was kind enough to post a short reply to his article which argued that those viewpoints have not been disproven and that they are supported by Scripture and by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. In this expanded response to Mr. Sammons, we will show that the scientific evidence also harmonizes better with the traditional Catholic teaching on our orientation in time and space as set forth in Divine Revelation, than with the wild speculations of evolutionary cosmology, geology, and biology.
Although the Biblical chronology of the earth and the geocentric-geostatic model of the universe are certainly now minority positions within Catholic academia, neither one of them has actually been scientifically disproven. Moreover, before the time of Copernicus, belief in a central earth was practically the unanimous position of all Catholics and even of most natural scientists. Before Darwin, a relatively recent creation was the constant teaching of the Magisterium, in spite of the fact that some ancient Greek philosophers proposed an infinitely old universe, things evolving from one form into another, and a heliocentric model of the solar system. All Catholics knew that Scripture and Tradition clearly pointed to a recent creation and a central, stationary earth.
Mr. Sammons cited a recent book by Walter Cardinal Brandmüller to support his case against geocentrism – The Case of Galileo and the Church. Mr. Sammons and Cardinal Brandmüller assume that geocentrism has been scientifically disproven and that the Church must conform its views to the current scientific consensus. What they do not seem to know or accept is that Dr. Robert Sungenis and physicist Dr. Robert Bennett have done an excellent job of showing that a number of highly-educated, well-known modern cosmologists admit that the idea of a central, motionless earth cannot be disproven. Indeed, it is sad that Mr. Sammons took the time to read Cardinal Brandmuller’s book but would not read Robert Sungenis’s detailed treatment of the Galileo Affair and his and the Kolbe Center’s defense of the geocentric-geostatic model of the universe and of a recent creation before publishing his critique.[2]
The Galileo trial and his condemnation are well-known, especially in scientific circles. It is regularly used as stick with which to beat the Catholic Church. The arguments usually go something like: “See, the Catholic Church was wrong about Galileo, so they are probably also wrong about divorce, sexual relations outside of marriage, contraception, abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality, etc.” There is a saying that: “Most heresies start below the belt.” It is quite common for a person’s view on sexuality to influence his view of Catholic Church teaching. If a person feels justified in criticizing the Church over one teaching, then other teachings seem open to criticism as well.
But dogmatic teachings of the Church are not subject to change. The Scriptural basis for that dogma is Proverbs 22:28, “Pass not beyond the ancient bounds which thy fathers have set.” At the end of the Galileo trial in 1616, Church officials stated that the idea of a central, motionless sun was “formally heretical” since it contradicted Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers. Pope Leo XIII said in Providentissimus Deus (1893) that the unanimous teaching of the Fathers on a point of faith, shows that the teaching has come down from the Apostles as a matter of faith. It can be argued that the motion of the sun fits the requirement, although modern cosmologists are not heliocentrists – they just believe that everything is moving. The second ruling from the Galileo trial was that to say that the earth is not the center of the world nor motionless is at least erroneous in faith. Scripture explicitly says three times in Psalms that the earth does not move (“shall not be moved” – Psalm 92, 95, & 103 in Douay-Rheims Bible). So the saying that the Bible teaches “How to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” is not quite right. The Bible clearly states that the sun moves and the earth does not.
Mr. Sammons tries to argue in his article that the Church changed its position regarding heliocentrism through a series of imprimaturs. Although the Galileo ruling was never officially overturned, even by the commission set up by Pope John Paul II in the 1990’s, some later works favorable to heliocentrism were given imprimaturs and other works which were formerly on the Index of Forbidden Books were taken off the list. However, Robert Sungenis has shown that this was done more through subterfuge than through honest investigation. The official teaching of the Church still upholds geocentrism, even if that teaching is ignored or denied.
Only God Has a Vantage Point Outside of Space and Time
God is present everywhere, so He does not need to move. The earth is called the footstool of God (Isaiah 66:1), and God would not want a moving footstool. That might not be a scientific argument, but the idea is valid. If God is not moving on an absolute basis, and the earth does not move relative to God, then the earth is also not moving on an absolute basis. Moreover, while the centrality of the earth is not explicitly stated in Scripture, the earth is certainly the central location of the Creation, Incarnation and Redemption. Besides, if the earth is not moving, then the universe is rotating around it, which implies that the earth is in the center. If you look up in the sky and see the sun, moon, and stars moving around you without feeling a sense of motion yourself, you are not mistaken. That is how it was meant to be. Poet Johann von Goethe said: “But among all the discoveries and corrections, probably none has resulted in a deeper influence on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus.” To be displaced from the center of the world was a huge change of thought – and a destabilizing one at that. All of our scientific observations have been done on or near the earth. To know, for certain, the position and motion of the earth in the cosmos, you would have to view the cosmos from the outside. God can do that, but humans cannot. It is simply not scientifically possible to prove on an absolute basis whether or not you are moving within the cosmos, if you are sitting on the inside of it. We need to take God’s Word for it.
The “proof” for an old earth is not any stronger than the “proof” for a moving earth. The Crisis article states that the old age of the universe has been scientifically proven in the context of the “well-accepted” Big Bang hypothesis. In reality, all of the arguments put forward against the chronology derived from the Bible assume the naturalistic-uniformitarian framework of the so-called Enlightenment philosophers. And while that framework was embraced by most of the pagan intellectuals of the patristic age, it was rejected by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who embraced the much more reasonable Creation-Providence Framework derived from Divine Revelation. Within that framework, the entire work of creation was understood to have been supernatural and the natural order which we are living in—what St. Bonaventure and other Doctors call the Order of Providence—only began when the entire work of creation was finished with the creation of St. Adam and St. Eve.
For St. Thomas Aquinas and all of the Fathers and Doctors, it would have been absurd to try to explain the origin and history of the universe in terms of the natural processes that are going on now. It would have been like trying to discover the true age and origin of the miraculous wine at Cana, by examining its physical characteristics. The Fathers and Doctors recognized that the reason why Our Lord arranged to change six containers of ordinary water into wine at Cana was to remind us that the divine power by which in an instant He changed six containers of ordinary water into wine that had all the appearance of having gone through a long natural process that never actually took place was the same divine power by which in the six days of creation He created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain. It was obvious to all of the Fathers and Doctors that just as we can only know the true age and origin of the miraculous Cana wine from the Word of God in St. John’s Gospel as it was understood in the Church from the beginning, so we can only know the true age and origin of the cosmos from the Word of God in the sacred history of Genesis, as understood in God’s Church from the beginning.
That the Big Bang hypothesis was formulated by a Catholic priest and supported by a statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Pius XII hardly settles the question. It is even somewhat ironic that Fr. Lemaître criticized Pius XII for saying that the Big Bang hypothesis supported the Biblical creation account, but it is not surprising, since Mons. Lemaitre also contradicted the de fide dogmatic teaching of Vatican I on Scriptural inerrancy by asserting that the Bible was only free from error in matters of faith and morals. He blasphemously stated:
The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less — some more than others — on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors in historic and scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if the errors related to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.[3]
The Big Bang hypothesis itself rests on an unproven assumption – that the universe is expanding. If the universe is expanding in the way that the hypothesis assumes, it would require an enormous amount of energy. Since there is no sign of that energy, it has been labeled “Dark Energy.” Between that “Dark Energy” and the “Dark Matter” that supposedly holds the distant spiral galaxies together, about 95% of the assumed universe is undetectable within the framework of the Big Bang hypothesis. A hypothesis that cannot account for 95% of what it claims to explain would be laughable in any other field. But modern cosmology is mostly just bad philosophy.
The assumed expansion of the universe originally led to the term “Big Bang” since extrapolating an expanding universe back in time leads to the idea that it was initially a single point no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. For most people, that would defy common sense, but not if you are a modern cosmologist. Somehow, that initial single point exploded into everything that exists (the “Big Bang”), although where that initial point came from and why it exploded are not addressed. We are just expected to believe the experts. However, there is no scientific proof that you can extrapolate an expanding universe back to a single point, even if you assume that it is now expanding. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the strongest argument for the Big Bang hypothesis is the argument from authority—in that the overwhelming majority of natural scientists now subscribe to it. But, as the Angelic Doctor pointed out long ago, the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments—except when the authority of God is invoked. In the case of the Big Bang hypothesis, the scientific evidence not only weighs overwhelmingly against it, but actually harmonizes perfectly with the traditional Catholic geocentric-geostatic model of the universe derived from Divine Revelation.
One contemporary Catholic natural scientist who actually took the time to examine the evidence for and against the traditional, Scriptural geocentric-geostatic model of the cosmos has qualifications in biology, physics and astronomy. Dr. Dean H. Kenyon earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University before doing post-doctoral research for NASA. As a professor of evolutionary biology at San Francisco State University, Dr. Kenyon had his first intellectual conversion when he confronted the work of Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith who demonstrated that, with the discovery of DNA, life could no longer be reduced to matter and energy as Descartes and his disciples had sought to do. Wilder-Smith showed that living things could only be explained in terms of matter, energy and information, and, since information is immaterial and can only be produced by an intellect and a will, the biological information to determine the genome of a microbe, a mouse, or a man could only be produced by a supreme intellect and will, and not by any material process.
When Dr. Kenyon retired from his position at the Discovery Institute, he was inspired to make a thorough examination of the work of Dr. Robert Sungenis and physicist Dr. Robert Bennett in defense of the traditional Catholic geocentric-geostatic model of the universe, as it was shown to St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, in the twelfth century, in light of the latest discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In the days of St. Hildegard, virtually all of the learned men of Christendom adhered to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system which placed the Earth at the center of the solar system and the sun and the planets in orbit around the Earth. In her visions, however, St. Hildegard was shown the Earth motionless at the center of the universe with the sun going around the Earth and the planets going around the sun. Five hundred years later, the greatest astronomer of the age of Copernicus and Galileo was the Danish Lutheran Tycho Brahe who made more detailed telescopic observations of the cosmos than any astronomer in recorded history.
Although Tycho knew nothing of St. Hildegard’s visions and was extremely anti-Catholic, he saw that all of the telescopic observations that clashed with the Ptolemaic model of the solar system could be harmonized with the geocentric-geostatic model of the cosmos, simply by placing the Earth motionless at the center of the world, the sun in orbit around the Earth, and the planets in orbit around the sun—the exact model of the universe that Our Lord Jesus Christ had shown to St. Hildegard of Bingen, named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI and given the same feast day as St. Robert Bellarmine who defended the traditional cosmology of the Church against the heliocentric claims of Galileo and his disciples. According to Dr. Kenyon:
After four years (2008-2011) of intense study of the arguments of Sungenis and Bennett and their references in the primary scientific literature, I have concluded that a very strong case can be made for the validity of a Neo-Tychonic geocentric cosmology [in which the universe rotates around the sun and the sun rotates around the Earth]. Virtually every empirical finding (e.g., stellar parallax and aberration, retrograde motions of the planets) purportedly supporting heliocentrism can be shown to be consistent with Neo-Tychonic geocentrism. Especially persuasive are recent data on the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos, gamma-ray bursts, and the distribution of quasars, all of which strongly suggest that the earth lies at or very near the center of the cosmos. And then there are the astounding data obtained by the Wilkerson (2001) and Planck (2009) probes on patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. These data show that the CMB dipole axis is aligned with the earth’s equator and that the CMB quadrupole and octopole axes are aligned with the ecliptic! So much for the Copernican Principle!
What I found especially intriguing was Sungenis and Bennett’s discussion of Lorentz’s and Einstein’s responses to the famous (nearly) null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887). The null result implied that the earth was motionless and yet according to the heliocentric model it obviously could not be motionless. The problem for physicists was to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment in a way that would preserve Copernicanism, a very tall order indeed. Lorentz derived his famous transformations (e.g., 1904) and Einstein developed his special theory of relativity (1905). But amazingly both of these now seem to be erroneous in the light of Sungenis’ and Bennett’s arguments. (Einstein’s equation, e = mc2, can be derived in several ways non-relativistically.)[4]
In short, had Eric Sammons, like Dr. Dean Kenyon, made a serious study of the work of Dr. Robert Sungenis and Dr. Robert Bennett, he would never have been so quick to exalt the consensus view in secular academia above the Word of God as understood in God’s Church from the beginning, and as confirmed by the latest empirical findings in astronomy!
The Dating Game
Most of the work done to convince the public that the universe was old and expanding was done in the early 1900’s, not too long after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. It was thought that the long ages required by evolution fit well with the long ages demanded by the Big Bang hypothesis. The long ages required by evolution were also supported by the long ages proposed by James Hutton and Charles Lyell in their work on geology. However, recent experimental research by Guy Berthault, Alexander Lalomov and other sedimentologists on the deposition of sediment in moving water has shown that massive layers of sediment can be deposited rapidly, as would have been the case during Noah’s Flood.[5] Until recently it was thought that mudstone, which comprises almost two-thirds of the Earth’s sedimentary rocks, could only form slowly and gradually in a tranquil environment, but the work of Juergen Schieber at Indiana State University has now proven that even mudstone can form very rapidly under the conditions that existed during the Flood.[6]
Most high school and university students are taught that radiometric dating has confirmed the long ages of Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, but that, too, is false. Radiometric dating was invented after the geologic time scale had already been established within the false uniformitarian framework of the Enlightenment philosophers. Consequently, radiometric dating results were shoehorned into the false uniformitarian framework of Lyellian geology.[7] To make radiometric dating support the long ages of evolutionary mythology, three unreasonable assumptions must be made. For example, imagine that you are holding a rock that contains a certain amount of uranium and a certain amount of lead, and you know that it would take 1.4 billion years for the amount of lead in the rock to be produced by the decay of uranium into lead.
To assign an “age” to that rock of 1.4 billion years, one must first assume that the initial conditions of the rock are known—in other words, how much uranium and lead were in the material to begin with. This is completely unreasonable, as there is no way to go back in time 1.4 billion years to determine how much lead and uranium were in the original material. The standard radiometric dating procedure also assumes that the rate of radioactive decay has been constant for the entire history of the rock. But this assumption is also completely unreasonable—as we know that decay rates can be affected by factors like temperature and pressure in the laboratory. Moreover, if uranium-to-lead decay had been going for billions of years, as evolutionary mythology requires, there would be more than a hundred times more helium in the earth’s atmosphere than is actually present there. Finally, the standard radiometric dating procedure assumes that the rock has been a closed system for its entire history. This is also completely unreasonable—as uranium, for example, is water soluble and could easily be brought in or out of the environment where the rock formed. The notion that the material that constitutes the rock remained sealed off from the surrounding environment for 1.4 billion years is frankly absurd.[8]
The unreliability of long half-life dating methods is underscored by many examples of rocks of known age that have been “dated” with long half-life dating methods to ages of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. For example, rocks formed by the eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 were subsequently dated from hundreds of thousands to millions of years old by the Potassium-Argon dating method.[9] Moreover, in the last two decades more than 70 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals have confirmed the presence of substantial amounts of Carbon-14 in dinosaur bones, coal, and other organic material from every level of the geologic column. Since Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, after 50 to 100 thousand years, every atom of C-14 would have decayed to Nitrogen-14, so the presence of substantial amounts of C-14 at every level of the geologic column testifies to the fact that the entire fossil record was formed more or less at the same time thousands of years ago, during and in the immediate aftermath of Noah’s Flood.[10] Further confirmation of this truth has been provided by paleontological journal articles reporting the presence of soft tissue,[11] intact proteins,[12] flexible blood vessels,[13] and intact strands of DNA in the remains of land-dwelling dinosaurs, which are frequently found jumbled together with the remains of marine organisms that lived in oceans hundreds of miles away from their burial sites.
While recent Carbon-14 dating research has given the lie to the long ages of biological evolution, cutting-edge genetics has confirmed the Biblical chronology of the Earth in another way. In his recent book Genetic Entropy, Cornell University plant geneticist John Sanford has shown that genetic mutations are almost always harmful and never add new functional biological information to the genome. The rate at which genetic mutations have built up in humans shows that mankind cannot have lived on earth for more than a few thousand years.[14] Under the influence of evolutionary propaganda, until recently the consensus view in biology held that 98% of human DNA was “junk” left over from the millions of years of human evolution. Richard Dawkins went all over the world winning converts to atheism with this bogus claim, while most Catholic intellectuals remained silent or concurred with his propaganda. Yet when Project Encode studied the so-called “non-coding” DNA, scientists discovered that it’s not junk. It operates at a higher level of functioning than the DNA that codes for protein, often switching on and off genetic programs that enable plants and animals to adapt to changing environments.
We now know that the DNA sequences in the cells of all living things can be:
- Read in one direction to give a meaningful set of instructions
- Read in the opposite direction to give a different meaningful set of instructions
- That there is a pattern whereby every so many letters can be read to give a third set of meaningful instructions
- And the sequence can be translated into another language to give a fourth set of meaningful instructions.
No human being can create information at this level of density and complexity—and, as Dr. Sanford has demonstrated, information this dense and complex cannot be improved by mutations. It can only degenerate. Thus, we know for certain that we are not evolving into Superman. We are devolving from an original state of perfection, just as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis. Indeed, God’s Revelation tells us that He created everything in the universe for us out of love—and that when we destroyed the harmony of the first created world with our sin, God came down into the misery that we made, took it upon Himself, suffered and died for us, rose again, and founded the Catholic Church so that we could become new creations in Him and cooperate with Him in restoring everything back to the beauty that it had in the beginning and to bring it to an even more wonderful perfection at the end of time. That understanding gives meaning to every human life—a meaning that the evolutionary account of origins destroys, thus clearing the way for the global anti-culture of death.
Only a Supernatural Creator Can Explain the Origin of Nature
We have seen that the entire modern scientific edifice of cosmic, geologic, and biologic evolution over vast ages rests on unproven assumptions. Catholics know by faith that God is outside of time and space. At some point in the past, He created the world and everything in it. Since nature cannot create itself, it must have had a Creator, which can be known by pure observation (Romans 1:20). Scientific observation also tells us that the universe is not infinitely old, since we have not reached the “Heat Death” of the universe (all the stars have not yet burned out). So, God must have created the universe out of nothing at some point in the past, which means that it was a supernatural creation not subject to nature laws. This is where the Creation-Providence concept comes into play. Natural laws went into effect after the initial supernatural creation, but not before. In theory, we can extrapolate from observations of nature back to the end of creation, but not before that.
When God wrote the Ten Commandments with “the finger of God” on tablets of stone, He only commanded us to “remember” one thing. He did not command us to remember to honor our parents, for example, because it is only natural to honor those who gave us life. But there is one commandment that cannot be derived from nature, and that is the Third Commandment: Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day. We are to serve God and our neighbor for six days and consecrate the seventh day to God, because He created the world and all the different kinds of creatures in six days and consecrated the world to Himself at the beginning of time. In other words, as the Catechism of Trent explains, while God could have created the world in a trillion years, in an instant, or in any period of time that He chose, He deliberately created the world according to the rhythm that we must follow if we want to live a happy, healthy, holy life.
God commands us to “remember” His Genesis Revelation, because there is nothing in nature that can tell us when, how, or over what period of time God created the world. The only way that anyone can know when, where, how and over what period of time God created the earth is if he “remembers” what God commanded us to remember when He wrote the Ten Commandments with “the finger of God” on tablets of stone. Tragically, the Old Testament historical books record what happened when the People of God failed to obey this commandment after King Solomon allowed his numerous wives to bring idolatrous worship into the Holy Land. In a few generations, God’s People forgot what God had commanded them to remember about the creation of the world and soon ceased to consecrate the seventh day to Him in keeping with His command. Instead, throughout the Holy Land, God’s people began to worship the sun, the moon, and the stars on what the Bible calls the “high places.”
After a few generations, the “collective amnesia” in regard to God’s Genesis Creation Revelation became so widespread that even the good King Asa who, according to the Word of God, strove to do God’s Will all his life, could not “take down the high places.” According to the historical books of the Old Testament, this collective amnesia intensified after the reign of King Asa, and 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, for 75 years—from around the time of the death of King Ahaz in 715 B.C. to the beginning of the reign of King Josiah in 640 B.C.
Darkness in Judah
The interval between the death of King Ahaz and the advent of King Josiah witnessed some of the worst abominations in the history of the Kingdom of Judah. Not surprisingly, forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis and of the first Table of the Law, led to widespread idolatry, as the people of Judah took to worshipping the creature instead of the Creator and began offering sacrifices to the gods of the pagans. These included human sacrifices, as many offered their children as burnt offerings to Moloch. Witches and mediums did a thriving business. Prostitution and homosexual vice also proliferated around the very Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. According to Calmet:
[The Sodomites who dwelt near to the Temple] exposed their bodies to be abused contrary to nature, in honour of those filthy deities whom they worshipped. Their houses were near the temple, and the persons themselves were dedicated to impurity, and, that they might commit their abominations with the greater licentiousness, they had women appointed to make them tents, wherein they were wont to retire upon these detestable occasions.
Dollinger adds, in his work 'Jew and Gentile,' vol. 1. pp. 430, 431 that the Galli or male prostitutes:
[danced] to the exciting din of drums, flutes, and inspired songs [and] cut themselves on the arms; and the effect of this act, and of the music accompanying it, was so strong upon mere spectators, that all their bodily and mental powers were thrown into a tumult of excitement, and they too, seized by the desire to lacerate themselves, deprived themselves of their manhood by means of potsherds lying ready for the purpose. Thereupon they ran with the mutilated part through the city, and received from the houses which they threw them into, a woman's gear.
Jeremiah and other prophets had denounced these abominations, but almost all of the priests and scribes, whose job it was to uphold the Law of Moses, rejected him. King Johoiakim had even burned the Word of God that had come to Jeremiah, and which he had written on a scroll, before his eyes, prompting him to ask the king's priests and scribes, rhetorically:
How do ye say, "We are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us"? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely (Jeremiah 8:8).
King Josiah and the Reformation of Judah
This was the abominable state of the Kingdom of Judah when the young King Josiah resolved at the age of eighteen to begin a reformation. According to 2 Kings:
[King Josiah] ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem - those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts. He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people. He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord, the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.(2 Kings 4:7) . . . [Then] he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech (2 Kings 23:10)
These acts of righteousness set the stage for the rediscovery of the original copy of the Law of Moses which Moses himself had ordered to be kept next to the Ark of the Covenant, as it was written in the Book of Deuteronomy:
And the LORD commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, "Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land that I swore to give them. I will be with you." When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, "Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against you" (Deut 31:23-26).
After supervising the renovation of the Temple, the priest Hilkiah either stumbled upon or retrieved the Book of the Law of Moses. According to 2 Chronicles:
Now when they carried out the money that had been brought into the temple of the Lord, [Hilkiah] the priest found the book of the law of the Lord, by the hand of Moses. DR, 2 Chronicles, 34:14)
The Douai Rheims Bible gives a faithful translation of St Jerome's Vulgate which, in turn, faithfully translates the Septuagint's rendering of this verse. Both make clear that this version of the Law was not a copy but the very "law of the Lord by the hand of Moses."
King Josiah proceeded to call an assembly and read the Law out loud to the people. In this way, they were reminded that God alone had created the heavens, the Earth, the seas and all they contain, and they heard again the commandment to observe the Sabbath rest as a physical reminder of the fact that God had ceased creating new kinds of creatures after He had created Adam and Eve on the sixth day of creation:
Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day. Six days shalt thou labour, and shalt do all thy works. But on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: thou shalt do no work on it, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy beast, nor the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it (Exodus 20:8-11).
This law which had been written by the "finger of God" - and long ignored - demanded a literal interpretation, since it was understood by everyone, both high and low, that God had made a one to one correspondence between the six days of creation and the six work days of the week - between the literal seventh day of rest when God stopped creating new kinds of creatures, and the literal rest from servile labor on a literal (seventh) sabbath day, so that God's people could acknowledge and worship their Creator in what became the central ritual of the Jewish people. In the Church age, the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent would reaffirm the literal interpretation of the six days of creation as the foundation for the Church's teaching on the Third Commandment and the Sabbath rest of the Lord.
Unfortunately, King Josiah's reformation was "too little, too late." The Prophet Jeremiah had already warned the people of Judah that they would make up for their neglect of the Sabbath by spending seventy years in captivity away from the land:
at the destruction of the first temple the law concerning the sabbath, or rest, of the land had been neglected four hundred and thirty years, in which space were sixty nine sabbatical years; and, according to Maimonides . . . it was at the end of a sabbatic year that the city and temple were destroyed, and so just seventy years had been neglected, and the land was tilled in them as in other years, and now it had rest that exact number of years.
When King Josiah asked the prophetess Huldah for her counsel, she told him that God would not relent in his punishment of Judah but that He had seen Josiah's tears of repentance and would allow him to die before the chastisement.
Collective Amnesia Regarding Genesis in the Time of Jesus
Collective Amnesia Regarding Genesis in the Time of JesusSome of the most moving words in all of Holy Scripture appear in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel where he says of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that:
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, but the world knew Him not (John 1:5).
It is truly remarkable that while the Mosaic law was studied and upheld by various groups of religious leaders and teachers who placed radically different interpretations on the Law of Moses at the time of Jesus, not a single one of their questions or statements on the Law as recorded in the Gospels contains a reference to Genesis. This is all the more remarkable in that Our Lord’s responses to their questions about the Law frequently refer back to the sacred history of Genesis as the foundation, especially, of the right understanding of marriage and sexual morality. For example, when asked if a man can divorce his wife for any cause—according to one school of interpretation of the Law of Moses—Our Lord refers His audience back to the Mosaic account of the divine institution of marriage “ in the beginning” (Matthew 19:3-6). This shocking contrast between the Genesis-based teaching of Our Lord and the collective amnesia of the religious leaders of his day in regard to Genesis underscores the fact that this motif recurs as a central element of every major crisis of faith, both under the Old Law and under the New.
Good Popes and “High Places”
We have seen that in an atmosphere of “collective amnesia” regarding Genesis even a good king who was “fully committed to the Lord all his life” could fail to “remove the high places” where his people exalted creatures above the Creator. What, then, can we say of the good Popes of the last 150 years who have likewise failed to uphold the supremacy of theology and the sacred history of Genesis over fallible human natural science? Could we not say that they “instituted reform” but “did not remove the high places”?
From the beginning of this ominous slide towards the abyss of godlessness and neo-paganism, Our Blessed Mother has appeared on Earth to call us to repentance. In one of the first approved apparitions of the modern Marian era, Our Lady of La Salette told the children Melanie and Maximin through her tears that God was most greatly offended by sins against the second and third commandments. The spread of Lyellian geology had already led many of the intellectual elite of once-Christian Europe to abandon the literal interpretation of the days of Genesis One in favor of the geological eras of Hutton and Lyell, and with that loss of faith in the literal historical truth of Genesis One as the basis for the Third Commandment, the slide into unbelief and the desecration of the Lord's Day spread and accelerated.
On October 13, 1917, at Fatima, Portugal, Our Lady worked the greatest public miracle since the Resurrection, the Miracle of the Sun, to prove that her Fatima message was urgent and true. In that message She warned that, if her requests were not heeded, Russia would spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church, and that several entire nations would be annihilated. The principal error that took hold in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution, a few weeks after the Miracle of the Sun, was not communism, but evolutionism - since it was the "scientific fact" of molecules-to-man evolution that made confident atheists and communists of Lenin, Stalin, Mao-Tse-Tung, and their numerous disciples and stooges.
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, St. Padre Pio was given a private revelation that the deceased pontiff had been taken to Heaven. And there is no doubt that Pope Pius XII served the Church faithfully and strove to fulfill God’s Will throughout his life. Yet Pope Pius XII failed to “remove the high places” by welcoming the speculations of Monsignor Georges Lemaitre in cosmology and failing to uphold the traditional distinction between the complete supernatural work of creation in the beginning, and the order of providence, or natural order, which only began when the work of creation was finished. According to Monsignor Lemaitre’s Big Bang cosmology, the supernatural work of creation was reduced to the creation of a few chemical elements and some natural laws at the beginning of the universe, after which Big Bang cosmologists envisioned a natural development of life and of all living things. (Of course, many, but not all!—Catholic promoters of Big Bang cosmology allow for divine intervention at the moment when a human soul was allegedly inserted into the conception of an evolved sub-human primate, but that is a far cry from the direct creation of all of the different kinds of creatures for man at the beginning of time!)
The genuine holiness and good intentions of Pope Pius XII notwithstanding, his endorsement of a naturalistic account of the origins of the universe had disastrous consequences for the Church and helped to pave the way for the full-blown “diabolical disorientation” of today. In 1907, in Pascendi, Pope St. Pius X had warned that “modernism” was “the synthesis of all heresies” and that “evolution” was “the principal doctrine of the modernists.” By encouraging the elevation of fallible human speculation in natural science above the sacred history of Genesis as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning, Pope Pius XII effectively invited the modernists to renew their assault on the foundations of the Faith in earnest. And they were not slow to seize the opportunity.
If God’s revelation of how He created all things in the beginning—as it had been understand in His Church from the beginning—could be corrected and replaced by a fallible now-bankrupt scientific hypothesis, then what was to stop modernist Catholic intellectuals from invoking "science" to justify sodomy, usury, contraception, transgenderism or any number of other abominations? Fr. James Martin, S.J., is typical of Catholic contemporary intellectuals who call fundamental doctrines of faith and morals into question in the name of "evolution" and "science." Yet the sad reality is that by failing to “remove the high places” where fallible human science was exalted above Divine Revelation, Pope Pius XII paved the way for Fr. Martin and his disciples to spread their diabolical disorientation.
The Current Crisis of Faith and Morals
The many parallels between King Josiah's time and our own ought to bring us to our knees in humble repentance. Like the apostate men of Judah, we have abandoned the God of Genesis for the god of evolution, endowing finite creatures with the god-like power to produce other creatures greater and more advanced than themselves. Like them, we have made our peace with homosexual vice and child sacrifice, as the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Europe and North America favor the practice of contraception, in spite of its frequent abortifacient effects, and most support abortion in some cases, while smaller majorities even approve of so-called same sex marriage. Millions of Catholics, including many Bishops, priests, and consecrated religious, promote the New Age evolution-based theology of Teilhard de Chardin, while huge numbers of practicing Catholics see no harm in allowing their children to read or watch material like the Harry Potter series with its insidious false distinction between "black" and "white" magic. For most of us, the Lord's Day is a day like any other, when the overwhelming majority of baptized Catholics forsake Holy Mass and use the Lord's Day for work, sports, shopping, and entertainment, as on any other day.
On the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun, October 13, 1973, the year of Roe vs. Wade, through her approved apparition in Akita, Japan, from a statute that had wept human tears 101 times, Our Lady warned that the Miracle of the Sun was a foretaste of a fiery divine judgment that would be unleashed upon the world, killing most of the earth's population, unless mankind repented and turned back to God. Given that we have only grown worse since Our Lady of Akita's warning, we may well have reached the point where a divine chastisement and the annihilation of nations are inevitable. But we have our Blessed Mother's solemn promise that her Immaculate Heart will 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, in every moment of our lives!
Feast of St. Joseph
March 19, 2025
Eric Bermingham
Hugh Owen
Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
Footnotes:
[1] https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/a-truly-traditionalist-approach-to-science-isnt-what-youve-been-told
[2] For a good summary of the case for the Church’s traditional geocentric-geostatic cosmology, please see the last section of the article “Scoffers Will Arise” at this link on the Kolbe website.
[3] Salvation Without Belief in Jonah's Tale, Literary Digest, Vol 115, Issue 10, 1933, p. 22.
[4] Dean H. Kenyon, Translator’s Note for Helmut Posch, True Conception of the World According to Hildegard of Bingen (Mt. Jackson, VA: Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, 2016).
[5] Guy Berthault, "Experiments in Stratification Do Not Support the Theory of Evolution," (Rome: Sapienza University, 2009), pp. 15-30.
[6] "Wave-enhanced sediment-gravity flows and mud dispersal across continental shelves: Reappraising sediment transport processes operating in ancient mudstone successions - Geology", n.d., http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/38/10/947.abstract.
[7] Edmund M. Speiker, "Mountain-building and the Nature of the Geologic Time-scale," Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, (1956) 40(8):1769_.
[8] Jean Pontcharra, "Are Radioactive Dating Methods Reliable?" (Bierbronnen: Gustav Siewerth Akademie, 2010).
[9] For further information, the reader is referred to The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods (ICR, 1999), John Woodmorappe’s highly technical rebuttal of published radiometric dates.
[10] Josef Holzschuh et al, "Recent C-14 Dating of Dinosaur Fossil Bone Collagen," (Bierbronnen: Gustav Siewerth Akademie, 2010).
[11] "Mineralized soft-tissue structure and chemistry in a mummified hadrosaur from the Hell Creek Formation, North Dakota (USA) - Proceedings B", n.d., http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/06/30/rspb.2009.0812.abstract?sid=472f83d8-7f8e-46cb-9fa9-98f00826c3fc.
[12] Mary Schweitzer et al., "Analyses of soft tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex suggest the presence of protein," Science 316, no. 5822 (2007): 277-280.
[13] Mary Schweitzer et al. 2005. Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex. Science. 307 (5717): 1952.
[14] Dr. John Sanford, Jim Pamplin & Christopher Rupe, “Genetic Entropy Recorded in the Bible?” https://kolbecenter.org/genetic-entropy/
