Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Christ is baptized! In the Jordan!
A blessed Christmas, Epiphany and New Year to all of you!
It is a constant source of amazement to realize that virtually every problem in the world and in the Catholic community today flows from the abandonment or misunderstanding of the sacred history of Genesis. As we have shown in a previous newsletter, the on-going genocide in Gaza is a direct result of the abandonment of the traditional reading of Genesis in favor of the false theology of so-called Christian Zionism. In this newsletter, I would like to draw attention to the work of an exemplary Catholic layman, Colonel Gary Taphorn, who served for many years in the Middle East and who is one of the leading American Catholic experts on the current political situation in the region. In his Substack—to which I encourage all of our readers to subscribe—Colonel Taphorn recently cited the work of a Biblical scholar who has shown how God’s plan for the establishment of the Kingdom of God throughout the Earth began in Eden, was realized in a limited way within the boundaries of the Promised Land, but was extended to the entire Earth with the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the Promise to Abraham and invited all peoples, including the Jewish people, into the New Israel, the Catholic Church, where all the promises to Abraham are to be fulfilled.
From the beginning of the sacred history of Genesis, God distinguished between the consecrated land in the Garden of Eden and the Earth beyond which needed to be cultivated and brought to its final perfection by St. Adam and his descendants. As Cornelius a Lapide explains in his Commentary on Genesis 2:15, this distinction is reflected in the fact that God created Adam outside of Paradise and transferred him to Eden:
Verse 15. The Lord God took man, and put him into the paradise. — TO DRESS IT
From this verse and from iii, 23, it is clear that Adam was not created in paradise but outside it . . . From there he was transferred to paradise on the same day by God through the agency of an angel in order that he might know he was not a native son of paradise but a settler placed there by God of His own volition, and in order that he might ascribe the place of paradise not to his own nature, as if it were owed to him, but to the grace of God; and owing to that, he was expelled from it on account of sin.
When St. Adam sinned and was expelled from Paradise, God began the excruciating process of preparing a people for Himself so that they could occupy and consecrate a new Promised Land, as a step on the way to transforming the whole Earth into the Garden of God. When God called Abraham to be “the father of many nations,” He promised that through Abraham all the nations of the Earth would be blessed. By His dealings with Abraham, God showed that it was by faith, not by physical descent, that the promises to Abraham would ultimately be fulfilled. However, God chose the physical descendants of Abraham to cleanse and sanctify the Promised Land and through the House of David to establish His Holy Temple in the midst of the Promised Land to prepare for the coming of the Redeemer.
During the period from Abraham to the Birth of Christ, the Holy Prophets gave many inspired prophecies about the future Redeemer, some of which applied to His coming as Suffering Servant, Savior and Redeemer, others to His Second Coming as Judge of the quick and the dead. Other prophecies pertained to the Land. Some defined the boundaries of the Land of Canaan; others spoke of boundaries that reached from “sea to sea” and pertained to a much greater area. In a book recommended by Colonel Taphorn, Biblical scholar Munther Isaac shows that the prophecies that speak of the land as reaching “from sea to sea” were not intended to be taken literally as predicting some kind of Davidic Empire that would extend over the whole Ancient Near East, but rather as predicting the universal expansion of the Kingdom of God over the whole Earth after the coming of the Messiah.
Munther shows how the Apostles themselves had to be weaned from an expectation that the Messiah had come to restore and expand a specifically Jewish Kingdom so that they could embrace the Truth—that Our Lord Jesus Christ had come to fulfill all of His promises to Abraham in a universal Kingdom, the Catholic Church, which would extend to every nation on Earth. In the first chapter of the Book of Acts, before the Feast of Pentecost, the Apostles ask Our Risen Lord if He will “now restore the Kingdom to Israel,” revealing that they expect Him to restore and expand a specifically Jewish Kingdom on Earth. But Our Lord corrects and enlightens them, saying, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons . . . for the restoration of all things.” By substituting “restoration of all things” for “the Kingdom of Israel,” Our Lord calls the Apostles and Disciples to recognize that they have been called to proclaim the Gospel to all the nations so that the Kingdom of God will become a Kingdom for “all peoples,” the Catholic Church, which will extend from sea to sea and restore the entire Earth as the Garden of God.
When the House of Rothschild commissioned the convicted conman Cyrus Scofield to produce the Scofield Bible, the Scofield commentary cleverly introduced specious arguments for three egregious errors that would undermine the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis and lay a new, false foundation for a “new anti-Gospel of Christian Zionism.” First, the Scofield Bible introduced the concept of a “gap” between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 which allowed Bible scholars to reconcile Genesis with the billions of years of “uniformitarian scientism.” Secondly, the Scofield Bible commentary argued that the Old Testament prophecies that spoke of the boundaries of the Kingdom of Israel extending from “sea to sea,” predicted a future secular state of Israel that would achieve those boundaries, a secular state that would become, in the words of David Ben-Gurion in 1962, the capital of a Godless New World Order with its capital in Jerusalem. Finally, the Scofield Bible Commentary denied the correct identification of the Catholic Church as the Kingdom of God on earth, whose unique destiny was to “make disciples of all nations” and “restore all things in Christ, things in Heaven and things on Earth.” The acceptance of these three errors is directly responsible for the scandal of U.S. government subservience to the Israeli government’s systematic violation of the fundamental human rights of the inhabitants of Gaza, Palestine, and neighboring countries in the Middle East.
Our Lady of Mt. Carmel: Restoring the “Garden of God”
The last time that Our Blessed Mother appeared to the three children of Fatima, She appeared as Our Lady of Mt. “Carmel,” a word which in the original Hebrew means “garden of God” or “vineyard of God.” In this way, she turned the attention of her children to the restoration of the Earth during the promised Era of Peace when, according to many private revelations approved by the Church, even the productions of nature will be restored back to something like what existed in “the garden of God” before the Original Sin. Among the holy men and women who prophesied in this vein was the French priest Pere Lamy (1855-1931). Pere Lamy said that Our Lady had told him that God would intervene drastically to halt modern man’s slide into total degeneration and that after this intervention conditions on earth would be very different. He said:
When peace is given back to the world, big business will shrink to smaller proportions and will stay there. Everything will grow less . . . When peace is given back to the world, plots of land will rise to more value than they have now. Even if the old workmen insist on dying in towns, that will come to pass . . . The world will have to be reevangelized over again and that will be a work for a whole generation . . . The spiritual state of the first Christians will come back moreover, there will be so few men on earth . . . The monasteries will flourish again, the convents will fill up again. After these calamities, souls in great numbers will come to dwell in them again.
Commenting on God’s stated purpose in placing St. Adam in the Garden of Eden, Cornelius a Lapide comments:
St. Augustine worthily says, “Agriculture is the most innocent of all the arts” . . . Morally, God taught us in this verse that the whole business of our life has been placed, you might say, in agriculture. For just as in the case of created nature, single fruit-bearing trees and seeds need the effort and industry of man, so man needs the care and cultivation of himself. God made this known to man when “He put him into paradise to dress it and to keep it.” He made the lights in the firmament of heaven “so that they would be for signs and for seasons,” in other words, to remind us about the advantageous time for sowing, reaping, etc. Therefore, the land we must continually work by God’s command is the soul. The fruit-bearing plants are sobriety, chastity, charity and the other virtues. The cockles and tares that each one must eradicate are gluttony, extravagance, anger and the other vices. The farmer is man, and the rain shower is the grace of God which supplies and instills on the mind the good sowing, i.e., holy inspiration, enlightenment, and motivation, so that the soul, pregnant as it were from the seeds, may sprout and bring forth the works of the virtues. The winds are the temptations by which the trees, i.e., the virtues, are purified and strengthened. The harvest will be the reward of eternal life. The heat of the sun is zeal, which the Holy Ghost furnishes. Therefore, just as a farmer toils in sowing but rejoices in reaping, so even the just, “they that sow in tears,” by their effort of penance, patience, and exertion, “shall reap in joy.”
One of the glories of Catholic civilization has been the altar-and-hearth-centered agricultural life of her little ones who have worked the land as free men and women down through the centuries. France, the eldest daughter of the Church, deserves a special place of honor in the annals of human history, as it was the King of France who first banned slavery from his dominions in the fourteenth century, after the French Benedictine monasteries had removed the stigma from manual labor and sanctified the cultivation of the soil for many centuries. For more than a thousand years, the agrarian life of the Catholic peasantry revolved around the Altar of the monastery or the parish church and the hearth of the home where the family gathered to pray. Within this matrix, beautiful crafts, music, and poetry sprang forth, forming a tapestry of Catholic culture to the glory of God and the edification of souls, generation after generation.
As the Kolbe Center’s Epiphany gift to you, our beloved readers, we offer you this link to a magnificent recording of the Catholic monarchist composer Joseph-Marie Canteloube’s setting of a traditional folk song from the Auvergne region of France, accompanied by beautiful images of sheep and shepherds. May your contemplation of this beautiful music draw you closer to the Good Shepherd and move you to pray unceasingly for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the social reign of Christ Our King throughout the world, in the Era of Peace when there will be “one flock, and one Shepherd.”
Through the prayers of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Chaste Heart of St. Joseph, may the Holy Ghost descend upon all of our families and make them sacred sanctuaries where the Most Holy Trinity will always love to dwell!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Michael Warner has done a wonderful job of recording the book Loved, Lost and Found, chapter by chapter, for Sensus Fidelium. You can listen to the first eight chapters gratis at this link. The rest of the chapters will be posted one week at a time over the next several months.
P.P.S. The 2026 Kolbe leadership retreat will take place July 3-July 9, at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina, an hour’s drive north of Charlotte, North Carolina. For information and to register, please write to Hugh Owen at [email protected].
