Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In this newsletter I would like to highlight an article just posted on the Kolbe website by Professor Ralph Lentz, who teaches History at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. The essay was written during the recent Coronamania and offered to the Kolbe Center for publication quite a long time ago. I hesitated to publish it on the Kolbe website because, while it definitely illustrates the conflict between creation-based natural law and natural science and evolution-based scientism which destroys the foundations of natural law, we have a duty to remain focused on the traditional doctrine of creation and the traditional Catholic interpretation of the sacred history of Genesis, to avoid distraction and dilution of the fundamental message that Our Lord and Our Blessed Mother have charged us to proclaim.
I have decided to publish Professor Lentz’s article for three primary reasons. First, to reaffirm the importance of the traditional doctrine of creation as a safeguard against the denigration and instrumentalization of the human body. Second, to counter the trend away from Christian burial to cremation that has gone hand in hand with the denial of the special creation of St. Adam and St. Eve and the acceptance of theistic evolution; third, to demonstrate that the acceptance of the bankrupt and disproven hypothesis of human evolution destroys the foundations of natural law, since it is impossible in an evolutionary framework to determine what is “according to nature” since the human body, within that framework, evolved from a one-celled organism over hundreds of millions of years of continual adaptation and variation, accumulating defects along the way, rendering it impossible for anyone to determine what is normal. Moreover, as Professor Lentz demonstrates through the mouth of Antigone, even pre-Christian pagans knew that an unchanging natural law flowed from an original, unchanging human nature, and that no power on earth had the right to violate that law.
Fr. Ryan and the Response to the Scopes Trial
We have recently witnessed the sorry spectacle of the secular mass media celebrating the centenary of the infamous Scopes Trial which pitted the forces of enlightened “science” against the ignorant Bible-thumpers whose representatives had enacted the Butler Act in the Tennessee legislature to protect their children from indoctrination into molecules-to-man evolution and evolution-based eugenics. The evolutionists’ legal response to the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of human evolution was handled by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When a teacher was found willing to violate the law, and William Jennings Bryan offered to prosecute the case, the ACLU received an offer from superstar attorney Clarence Darrow to handle the defense. Moral theologian Fr. John Augustine Ryan was the only Catholic member of the ACLU board at the time, and he told the ACLU president Roger Baldwin, “I can’t object to your going into a case like this. I don’t care where the body comes from, as long as the soul is recognized as the creation of God.”
It is worth taking a few moments to reflect on this statement from a “rising star” among Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. a hundred years ago—a statement that finds an echo in the writings of the overwhelming majority of Catholic intellectuals today. On the one hand, Fr. Ryan’s opinion has become so commonplace among Catholic thinkers that it is hard to grasp the potential for harm that his statement contains. On the other hand, a serious reflection on the negative implications of his statement should lead any informed Catholic to some deeply disturbing considerations. Indeed, Fr. Ryan’s statement ought to have raised the specter of a kind of rising neo-gnosticism within Catholic intellectual circles, of the very sort that the Magisterium had sought to eradicate once and for all with the Firmiter decree of the Fourth Lateran Council against the heresy of the Albigensian-Catharist heretics.
The Albigensian heretics had denied the special creation of the various kinds of plants, animals, and even of the human body, thus rationalizing sexual immorality on the ground that it mattered little what men did with their bodies, since the soul was the only part of man that was directly created by God. Like many of today’s theistic evolutionists, Fr. Ryan and other rising stars in the intellectual firmament of the early twentieth century focused on social justice while withdrawing their support for the foundations of social justice in the traditional understanding of natural law. The creation of man as man and woman as woman with a stable human nature established the norms of human sexual morality for all times and places. The widespread acceptance of human evolution by Catholic intellectuals like Fr. Ryan destroyed this foundation and eventually led to the acceptance of homosexuality, contraception, transgenderism, and other perversions, since the human body of man and woman in its original form was no longer seen as the specially-created “form of the body”—as defined at the Ecumenical Council of Vienne in 1312—but as a transient physical habitation formed through material processes over long ages of time.
Evolving human nature is defined as much by its evolutionary ancestors and close relatives—like the chimpanzees and bonobos—as by the state of its physical organization at any particular point in its evolutionary history. Worse still, to the extent that Catholic intellectuals retained any respect for the natural law, Fr. Ryan’s perspective led to the practice of regarding fallen human nature as the norm, rather than the original human nature specially created by God in the beginning. Kinsey capitalized on this point to obtain funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for his new science of perversion by pointing out that our cousins among the apes practiced behavior that traditional Christianity had (rightly) judged abnormal, unnatural, and evil and that this proved that these behaviors were actually natural, normal and good.
Pseudo-Science-Tsunami and the Curse of Galileo
Catholic intellectuals were not only afraid to be associated with protestant fundamentalists. They were also intimidated by secular intellectuals like Edwin Conklin at Princeton University who reminded the readers of the New York Times shortly before the Scopes Trial of the Catholic Church’s role in retarding scientific progress in the Galileo Affair. To this day the myth of the Catholic Church’s role in the alleged obstruction of scientific progress through her persecution of Galileo is so widely-believed that a mere mention of Galileo suffices to silence most Catholics who dare to question the consensus view on any topic related to the origins of man and the universe. That this was already the case one hundred years ago is apparent from the ease with which pseudo-scientific claims were passed off as hard evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis during the Scopes Trial with scarcely a word of protest from Catholic intellectuals.
At Vatican II, Cardinal Suenens urged his brother bishops to overturn the Church’s teaching on contraception, arguing that moral theologians had not taken “sufficient account of scientific progress, which can help determine, what is according to nature” and warned them to avoid “another Galileo Affair”! With this disastrous intervention, Cardinal Suenens implicitly acknowledged that contraception was and always had rightly been regarded as a sin against the natural law because the special creation of St. Adam and St. Eve demonstrated that man’s and woman’s bodies had been specially designed for procreation. His reference to Galileo showed that he had been equally deceived into thinking that modern “science” had falsified the special creation of the first human beings as well as the divinely-revealed geocentric-geostatic cosmology of the Church.
Following in Cardinal Suenens’ fatal footsteps, as head of the United States Bishops’ Conference Family Life Bureau, Bishop James McHugh spearheaded the introduction of sex education into the Catholic schools of the United States and used the “fact” of evolution to argue for a tolerant view of new practices that separated conception from the marriage act. He argued that:
…The important point to grasp at the onset is that such speculations are not an insult to God nor a denial of His creative plan. There is no reason why God’s power to summon man into existence must be limited to the reproductive process as we know it now. Indeed, there is no reason to presume that the Divine plan does not go far beyond our present scientific speculation and encompass evolutionary breakthroughs that are even beyond our imagination.
Rev. André Guindon was dean of the faculty of theology at St. Paul’s University in Canada from 1978-1984 and taught moral theology there until his death in 1993. According to Guindon, “recent studies tend to disprove that lasting harm results from the pedophiliac contact itself” (emphasis added) But perhaps no single action better exemplified the new evolutionary attitude than the publication by the Catholic Theological Society of America of Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, by seminary professor Rev. Anthony Kosnick, who wrote:
At this time the behavioral sciences have not identified any sexual expression that can be empirically demonstrated to be of itself, in a culture-free way, detrimental to a full human existence.
With this document the theological society of the most vigorous Catholic community in the western world cast aside the Word of God as it had been understood in the Church for nineteen hundred years pending scientific confirmation of God’s Word through “empirical demonstration.” It was the old lie of the serpent all over again, this time directed at the Bride of Christ. God’s Word, as understood in the Church from the beginning, taught that the nature of man, human maleness and femaleness, were divine creations; that the union between man and woman in marriage was holy, a reflection of the mystery of the inner life of God and of the union between Christ and His Church; consequently, it taught that any abuse of sexuality within marriage, such as contraception, or any use of sexuality outside of marriage was not only a sin but a sacrilege. All of this was annulled by the new evolutionary theology. All forms of sexual expression had arisen through the evolutionary process, including the sexual expression of the “chimpanzee” in whose womb the first human beings had been conceived. In light of cultural prejudices, certain forms of sexual expression might be constrained, but none of them could be considered “detrimental to a full human existence.”
Bishops and theologians who taught or tolerated these ideas could not be outraged when they were put into practice. And put into practice they were. As Leon Podles documents in his exhaustive study of the clergy sex scandals, sexual abuse of children is not a new phenomenon in the Church. But what was new in the last three quarters of a century was the acceptance by many bishops and theologians of an evolutionary theology that could be used to rationalize sexual perversion. When the true Catholic doctrine of creation is reaffirmed and proclaimed by all Catholic bishops, parents and teachers, every attempt to rationalize sexual perversion and other violations of the natural law will be destroyed. Indeed, we can be confident that this fundamental doctrine will be restored during the era of peace promised by Our Lady of Fatima, because then, and only then, will it be possible to lay the foundations of a genuine culture of life.
Special Creation, Cremation, and the Importance of Christian Burial
One of the most neglected arguments in favor of the special creation, body and soul, of our first parents—and an argument to which the advocates for theistic evolution have never given a reasonable response—appears in the Roman Catechism. Treating of the Resurrection of the Body as an Article of the Creed, St. Charles Borromeo and his co-authors wrote:
The resurrection, like the creation, is clearly to be numbered amongst the principal works of God. As, therefore, at the creation, all things came perfect from the hand of God; so, at the resurrection shall all things be perfectly restored by the same omnipotent hand.
Indeed, in a world without sin at the beginning of time, how could we attribute to God, our all-wise, all-loving Creator, the creation of our first parents in body and soul, in less than a state of perfection, without committing a sin of blasphemy? Moreover, the perfection of our first parents and of all of the various kinds of creatures created for them at the beginning of time has been fully confirmed by cutting-edge genetics, as documented by Dr. John Sanford in his masterpiece, Genetic Entropy. Only this doctrine upholds the perfect goodness of God in all His works, both at the beginning and at the end of time. And only this doctrine upholds the sacredness of the body and protects it from harm at every stage along the continuum of life, from conception to natural death.
In an article on “Cremation,” The Old Catholic Encyclopedia documents the constant tradition of the Church in regard to Christian burial, as a way of upholding and reinforcing her constant teaching on the Resurrection of the Body.
The Christians never burned their dead, but followed from earliest days the practice of the Semitic race and the personal example of their Divine Founder. It is recorded that in times of persecution many risked their lives to recover the bodies of martyrs for the holy rites of Christian burial. The pagans, to destroy faith in the resurrection of the body, often cast the corpses of martyred Christians into the flames, fondly believing thus to render impossible the resurrection of the body. What Christian faith has ever held in this regard is clearly put by the third-century writer Minucius Felix, in his dialogue “Octavius”, refuting the assertion that cremation made this resurrection an impossibility: “Nor do we fear, as you suppose, any harm from the [mode of] sepulture, but we adhere to the old, and better, custom” (“Nec, ut creditis, ullum damnum sepulturae timemus sed veterem et meliorem consuetudinem humandi frequentamus” — P.L., III, 362).
Church Legislation
In all the legislation of the Church the placing of the body in the earth or tomb was a part of Christian burial. In the acts of the Council of Braga (Hardouin III, 352), in the year 563, while we read that bodies of the dead are by no means to be buried within the basilicas where rest the remains of Apostles and martyrs, we are told that they may be buried without the wall; and that if cities have long forbidden the interment of the dead within their walls, with much greater right should the reverence due the holy martyrs claim this privilege. The same may be seen in the canons of other councils — e.g. of Nantes, between the seventh and ninth centuries; of Mainz, in the ninth century; of Tribur, in the ninth century. This legislation evidently supposes the long-standing custom of burial such as the Church practices today, and shows that in the sixth century, in other places than Rome, where even today the old law of the Twelve Tables exerts a moral influence, the Church had so far conquered the prejudice of the past as to have gained the privilege of burying her dead within the city walls and within the enclosure of the churchyard . . .
Decrees of Roman Congregations
This rigid adherence to the principles of the early teaching of the Church may be seen in the later decrees of the Roman Congregations. The Vicar Apostolic of Viznagapatam, in the year 1884, proposed the following difficulty to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda: The bodies of two neophytes had been cremated, the parents testifying that there had been no idolatrous ceremonies. Should the missioners in such cases protest against what is considered a privilege of caste, or may the following present practice be tolerated? — If a pagan seeks baptism at the hour of death, the missioner grants it, without questioning what mode of sepulture is to be given the body after death, persuaded that the pagan parents will make no account of his desire to be buried, not cremated. The answer was: “You must not approve of cremation, but remain passive in the matter and confer baptism; be careful also to instruct your people according to the principles which you set forth”. . . This was given on 27 September, 1884. In 1886 another decree forbade membership in cremation societies and declared the unlawfulness of demanding cremation for one’s own body or that of another.
Motives of this Legislation
The legislation of the Church in forbidding cremation rests on strong motives; for cremation in the majority of cases today is knit up with circumstances that make of it a public profession of irreligion and materialism. It was the Freemasons who first obtained official recognition of this practice from various governments. The campaign opened in Italy, the first attempts being made by Brunetti, at Padua, in 1873. Numerous societies were founded after this, at Dresden, Zurich, London, Paris. In the last city a crematory was established at Pere Lachaise, on the passing of the law of 1889 dealing with freedom of funeral rites.
The Church has opposed from the beginning a practice which has been used chiefly by the enemies of the Christian Faith. Reasons based on the spirit of Christian charity and the plain interests of humanity have but strengthened her in her opposition. She holds it unseemly that the human body, once the living temple of God, the instrument of heavenly virtue, sanctified so often by the sacraments, should finally be subjected to a treatment that filial piety, conjugal and fraternal love, or even mere friendship seems to revolt against as inhuman. Another argument against cremation, and drawn from medico-legal sources, lies in this: That cremation destroys all signs of violence or traces of poison, and makes examination impossible, whereas a judicial autopsy is always possible after inhumation, even of some months.
Perhaps reading “the signs of the times” and observing the trend, already apparent in 1908, towards an increasingly freemasonic political philosophy among the leaders of the powerful nations of the once-Christian West, the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia end their article on cremation with these words:
In conclusion, it must be remembered that there is nothing directly opposed to any dogma of the Church in the practice of cremation, and that, if ever the leaders of this sinister movement so far control the governments of the world as to make this custom universal, it would not be a lapse in the faith confided to her were she obliged to conform.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of Good St. Joseph and of all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error, and guide us into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Now is the time to begin planning our spring seminar schedule. Please prayerfully consider trying to organize a seminar in a parish or school in your area. We do not charge any fees for our seminars. We only ask that our travel expenses be covered, if possible, and that a collection be taken up for our apostolate, but that is not requirement. Our seminars generally set forth the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, then describe the challenge that was brought against that doctrine from natural scientists outside of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century; then show how twenty-first century natural science has refuted the challenge mounted against the traditional doctrine of creation, and, finally, why it is imperative that Catholics restore and defend the traditional doctrine of creation in order to transform the culture of death into a culture of life. If you write to me at howen@shentel.net I will be happy to send you a collection of recommendations we have received from bishops, priests and lay leaders all over the world who have hosted our seminars.
P.P.S. If you have not donated to our Give, Send, Go campaign, please donate and encourage like-minded family and friends to do so as well.
