Is the God of the Old Testament the God of the New?

Introduction

One of the most destructive heresies of the early Church was the heresy of Marcion who denied the divine origin of the Old Testament and set up an opposition between the alleged evil god of the Old Testament and the good God of the New Testament.  Although Marcion’s errors were rejected and condemned in his lifetime, Marcion predicted that his heresy would divide the Church until the end of time, a prediction that history has unfortunately borne out to a great extent. Indeed, the interpretations of Genesis 1-3 commonly offered by contemporary Catholic theologians can only be described as neo-Marcion in their failure to recognize or affirm a consistent, continuous doctrine of creation in Genesis, in the writings of the Apostles, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and in the conciliar teaching of Lateran IV and Vatican I and other authoritative Magisterial teachings on creation from the time of the Apostles.  Moreover, many contemporary Christian leaders, mostly evangelicals but even some Catholics, now justify the subservience of United States foreign policy to the dictates of the Israeli government by making a perverse analogy between the Netanyahu regime’s genocidal approach to dealing with real or perceived enemies in the Middle East and Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan.  Rightly interpreted, the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan provides no support whatsoever for the Israeli regime’s brutal treatment of its Middle Eastern neighbors.[1]  That account ought to be viewed by our generation not as an occasion to assert our moral superiority over St. Joshua, but as a call to repentance, not only for our own failure to protect the physical, moral and spiritual wellbeing of our own children but also because of the cruel way that the once-Christian nations of the world have waged war in modern times without regard to the basic rights of innocent civilians.  Thankfully, those who continue to trust in the Word of God as believed in the Church from the beginning can find good reason to hope for the preservation, salvation and sanctification of innocent children throughout the world in the very chronological data that most of the “wise and prudent” of the world today hold in contempt because of their scientistic belief in naturalism and uniformitarianism.

“The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom”

The Word of God teaches that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” so I would like to begin this article by asking the Holy Theotokos to obtain for all of us an abundant outpouring of this gift of the Holy Ghost.  In one of his conferences, the Desert Father St. John Cassian reflects on “the inscrutable Providence of God”:

Finally, the blessed Apostle when revolving in his mind this manifold bounty of God’s providence, as he sees that he has fallen into some vast and boundless ocean of God’s goodness, exclaims: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are the judgments of God and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord?”  Whoever then imagines that he can by human reason fathom the depths of that inconceivable abyss, will be trying to explain away the astonishment at that knowledge, at which that great and mighty teacher of the gentiles was awed. For if a man thinks that he can either conceive in his mind or discuss exhaustively the dispensation of God whereby He works salvation in men, he certainly impugns the truth of the Apostle’s words and asserts with profane audacity that His judgments can be scrutinized, and His ways searched out. This providence and love of God therefore, which the Lord in His unwearied goodness vouchsafes to show us, He compares to the tenderest heart of a kind mother, as He wishes to express it by a figure of human affection, and finds in His creatures no such feeling of love, to which he could better compare it. And He uses this example, because nothing dearer can be found in human nature, saying: “Can a mother forget her child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” But not content with this comparison He at once goes beyond it, and subjoins these words: “And though she may forget, yet will not I forget thee.”  

In his homily on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter Nine, St. John Chrysostom recalls Our Lord’s humbling response to St. Job as he struggled to understand and accept the trials and tribulations that he had endured at the hands of Divine Providence:

This He does to take down the objector’s unseasonable inquisitiveness, and excessive curiosity, and to put a check upon it, and teach him to know what God is, and what man, and how incomprehensible His foreknowledge is, and how far above our reason, and how obedience to Him in all points is binding. So when he has made this preparatory step in his hearer, and has hushed and softened down his spirit, then with great felicity he introduces the answer, having made what he says easy of admittance with him. And he does not say, it is impossible to answer questions of this kind, but that . . . it is presumptuous to raise them. For our business is to obey what God does, not to be curious even if we do not know the reason of them. Wherefore he said, “Who art thou that repliest against God?” You see how very light he makes of him, how he bears down his swelling spirit! “Who art thou?” art thou a sharer of His power? (compare Job xxxviii.) nay, art thou sitting in judgment upon God? Why in comparison with Him thou canst not have a being even! nor this or that sort of being, but absolutely none! For the expression, “who art thou?” doth much more set him at naught than “thou art nothing.” And he takes other ways of showing further his indignation in the question, and does not say, “Who art thou that” answerest “God?” but, “that repliest against,” that is, that gainsayest, and that opposest. For the saying things ought to be so, and ought not to be so, is what a man does that “replieth against.” See how he scares them, how he terrifies them, how he makes them tremble rather than be questioning and curious. This is what an excellent teacher does; he does not follow his disciples’ fancy everywhere, but leads them to his own mind, and pulls up the thorns, and then puts the seed in, and does not answer at once in all cases to the questions put to him.[2]

St. John’s words remind us that we ought to approach any examination of God’s Word with the greatest humility and with a profound awareness of our inability to comprehend more than a tiny fragment of the whole of reality which God has present to Himself at all times.

Numbers 21 and the Conquest of Canaan

Although I do not agree with Paul Copan’s negative evaluation of the Crusades and with a few tenets of his Protestant theology, his treatment of the conquest of Canaan by the Hebrew armies in his book Is God a Moral Monster? demonstrates that the God of the Old Testament is indeed the God of the New, who could not respect the free will of his creatures without allowing them to suffer the excruciating consequences of their persistent disobedience.[3]  Copan rightly emphasizes the fact that the true character of God is clearly revealed at the beginning of Genesis where He reveals His perfect wisdom and goodness by creating, for us, a perfectly beautiful, complete and harmonious universe, a universe that was free not only from human death but from deformity, disease, and any disorder of that kind.

In the beginning of Genesis God reveals that sin is the cause of all death, deformity, disease and distress.  Thus, one of the most important sayings of Jesus in identifying Himself with the God of the Old Testament is His reply to the Pharisees’ question about divorce, when He says, “Because of the hardness of your heart, God allowed you to write a bill of divorce, but in the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8).  With this statement, Our Lord plainly reveals that the Mosaic law and God’s military directives to Moses and Joshua were adapted to a people who suffered from “hardness of heart,” unlike the Ten Commandments which were written by the finger of God on tablets of stone as the unchangeable foundation of morality for all times and places.  Our Lord’s revelation that the Mosaic Law had to be adapted to the low level of virtue to which the Hebrews had reduced themselves by their own free choices over a long period of time helps to explain why the eradication of the pagan inhabitants of the land by military action was as much a consequence of the Hebrews’ hardness of heart as it was of the obstinate rejection of the natural law and of God’s mercy by the Canaanite inhabitants of the land for 430 years.

Daniel J. Castellano offers additional valuable insights into the criteria that ought to be used when attempting, “with fear and trembling,” to understand God’s directives in relation to the conquest of Canaan.

Catholics who have been properly catechized know that capital punishment has always been sanctioned by the Church for serious crimes, so long as it is fairly administered.  In light of that fact, no one in his right mind would condemn a state-appointed executioner for electrocuting a person convicted of a capital crime, even if it later came to light that the executed person had been innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Similarly, no one in his right mind would condemn a conscripted soldier defending his country against a foreign power who killed a soldier in the opposing army, even if the soldier he killed was a man of great virtue who had done nothing deserving of punishment.  Moreover, the executioner who takes the life of a convicted criminal and the solder who takes the life of a virtuous man in an enemy army both experience the horror of death in a way that drives home to them the consequences of sin and that ought to motivate them to avoid sin so as to minimize the likelihood of serious crime or warfare in the future.  Indeed, this was the reason for St. Basil the Great’s canonical legislation that a soldier who had taken the life of an enemy in a just war in defense of his homeland must abstain from Holy Communion for three years.

The Conquest of Canaan: Deliverance from Demons

In Paul Copan’s book cited above he explains why it is unlikely that children were ever actually executed by the Hebrew forces in their conquest of Canaan.   Moreover, before claiming moral superiority for ourselves and condemning God as a “moral monster” for ordering the removal of the Canaanite peoples which led to the deaths of children, we would do well to ponder the spiritual and moral depravity of the Canaanite society.  As Copan observes, the pagans of Canaan practiced sexual perversion, bestiality, and child sacrifice in the context of demon worship. After 430 years, children born into Canaanite society were effectively consecrated to demons from the womb and had little if any chance to escape from being raised to follow the depraved way of life of their parents.  The death of a Canaanite child could protect him from being raised in spiritual and moral depravity and, as argued below from the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, would make it possible for him to be saved and sanctified for eternal life through the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ on his behalf.

Kolbe advisor Dr. Kevin Mark has explained why it is reasonable to surmise that the Canaanites who resisted Joshua’s army to the end were not only hardened in depravity but most likely also demonically possessed, as were most of the earth’s people prior to the Flood, except for the members of Noah’s family:

Noah’s flood happened largely because of the influence of the sons of God, the fallen angels, upon all people on earth except Noah’s family.  While it is commonly argued that the “sons of God” are either the children of Seth or angels, the argument against their identification as angels has often been won by pointing out that mankind and angels cannot copulate.  What if angels were not copulating with but simply possessing mankind?  I first heard of this idea through the writing of Henry Morris.  Genesis 6:4 is then an explanation of how the giants came to be, not through copulation per se, but through demonic possession of their mothers:

Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went into the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.

Renown here simply denotes fame; perhaps infamy would be a better word.  Virtually ubiquitous demonic possession allowed sin to be so grave and so pervasive that the earth had to be totally cleansed of its inhabitants.  I suggest a similar situation was going on in the land of Canaan.  The fact that giants were evident before the flood and giants were evident in the land of Canaan (in many passages of Scripture), even though there was no genetic link since all the pre-flood giants were wiped out, suggests that biblical giantism was a result of demonic possession.  The race of giants is always viewed as evil in Scripture.  When we look at the demoniac that Jesus encountered at the Gadarenes we see that he was so strong that he would break his chains.  This supports the concept that demonic possession can convey superhuman strength to a person.  In addition, when Jesus cast out the demons from the man, he cast them into a herd of swine which were subsequently all drowned after running over a cliff, showing that animals can also be possessed, and showing that a just end for such animals is death. Thus, perhaps it was not only the people of Canaan who were possessed by demons but also even their animals, thus providing a coherent explanation for why the Israelites were called to act as the hand of God in wiping out not only the people but also the animals of Canaan.  Thus it would seem the Israelites were acting as God’s hand of judgement to cleanse the land of unimaginable sin made possible by mass demonic possession of both humans and animals.[5]

The Holy Innocents and Unbaptized Infants

The greatest weakness in Neo-Marcionite critiques of God’s dealings with the Canaanite tribes during the conquest of Canaan lies in their failure to acknowledge Our Lord’s individual love for every single human being, past, present and future, and the way in which Our Lord—as God and Man—was present to each and every human being from Adam to the last man.  A second weakness lies in the way that these critiques deny the possibility that the execution of Canaanite children not only delivered them from a demonic pagan upbringing but also delivered them into the arms of a loving God, as were the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem after their murder at the decree of Herod the Great.

Before moving on to a more profound consideration of the possibility of salvation for unbaptized children in light of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, it may be helpful to reflect more deeply on the way that parents can abuse their God-given authority over their children to inflict spiritual harm.  This author recently had the opportunity to speak with a psychiatric social worker who counsels the criminally insane in the California prison system.  This counselor converted to the Catholic Faith because he encountered so many patients whose parents had been involved in satanism, including not a few whose parents had consecrated them to satan from the womb. After fruitlessly seeking for guidance everywhere else, the counselor finally found helpful knowledge, wisdom, and guidance in the Catholic Church.   He learned that the effects of a satanic consecration of a child by his parents were unimaginably severe. Yet the criminally insane patients that he counseled in the California prison system were only second-generation victims of demonic consecration—as compared with Canaanite children whose ancestors had practiced demonic consecration for more than 400 years!

Is it unreasonable to hope that God in His infinite Divine Mercy would supply the countless hosts of souls of children who die through miscarriage, abortion, infant illness or infanticide—including the Canaanite children executed by the Hebrews in the conquest of Canaan—with what these little victims require for their salvation and sanctification?   The Holy Innocents are recognized as martyrs because they died in place of the Infant Jesus, but they were only able to do this because God gave them the gift of reason, infused into them the knowledge of the Incarnation and of Herod’s intention to murder the Incarnate Word and Savior of the world, and offered them the grace—which they all accepted—to unite their sufferings with the sufferings of Christ.

It has been argued that children who die before the normal age of reason, by miscarriage, abortion, infant disease or infanticide cannot be considered martyrs like the Holy Innocents, because they do not die in the place of Jesus.  However, Jesus teaches that the devil was a “murderer” from the beginning, and that every death is the result, directly or indirectly, of his envious malice.  Thus, the children who die from miscarriage, abortion, infant disease or infanticide are in every instance the victims of the devil’s murderous malice—every bit as much as the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem.

Theistic evolutionists regard physical death as a “normal” part of the world prior to the Original Sin, denying God’s own Word where He states clearly that “God made not death” (Wisdom 1:13).  Those who hold to this view easily become desensitized to abortion and abortifacient contraception through their acceptance of death as a “normal” part of God’s original plan. For example, theistic evolutionist Sister Joan Acker in a letter published in America magazine wrote that “death and disease were always part of God’s plan” for us!  When we adopt the perspective of all of the Fathers of the Church and acknowledge that God “made not death and takes no pleasure in the destruction of the living” (Wisdom 1:13), we can better understand that the taking of human life is always the consequence of man’s sin, but that God never wills or permits the death of any human being except in accordance with His perfect wisdom and Divine Mercy.

Can the Possibility of God’s Mercy upon Innocent Victims be Excluded?

Like the Holy Innocents, the souls of the victims of miscarriage, abortion, infant disease, and infanticide came directly and immediately from God.  And, like the Holy Innocents, these little victims committed no actual sin in thought, word or deed.  Thus, they would present no obstacle to the grace of God.  Commenting on the examples of saints who were sanctified by God in the womb, Fr. Aidan Nichols writes:

‘Children in their mothers’ wombs cannot be subjected to the actions of humans in such a way that through their ministry they may receive the sacraments of salvation. But they can be subject to the work of God, in whose presence they live, that by a privilege of grace they may obtain sanctification, as is evident from those who have been sanctified in the womb’. [63] According to St Thomas, ‘Sanctification in the womb is Baptism of the Spirit (Baptismus flaminis).’ (Aquinas, In IV Sent., dist. 6, q. 1, art. ic, sed contra 2). St. Thomas mentions the Blessed Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and the prophet Jeremiah as prime examples of persons who have been sanctified ‘outside of the common law as though miraculously in their mothers’ wombs’ (Aquinas, In IV Sent., dist. 6, q. 1, art. ib, corp). An act of the mind can extend equally to the born or to the preborn. If, therefore, faith ever were sufficient for wiping out original sin, why cannot those in the womb be cleansed from original sin through the faith of another? St Thomas replies:

A child living in the womb of his mother does not, as far as human knowledge can tell (quantum ad humanam cognitionem pertinet), have being that is separate (distinctum) from his mother, and, therefore, cannot be reached by an act of man, whether in these times to be cleansed from original sin through Baptism, or in those [ancient] times to be cleansed through the faith of his parents, but he can be divinely cleansed, as appears in the case of those who have been sanctified in the womb (Aquinas, In IV Sent., dist. 1, q. 2, art. 6b, ad 2).[6]

In the lives of certain saints, like St. Joan of Arc, we read of occasions when they raised unbaptized infants from the dead so that the children could be baptized.  However, these incidents do not invalidate the thesis of this article.  For example, God may have preserved certain young boys living in the vicinity of Bethlehem from being murdered through providential circumstances which prevented their mothers from taking them to the gathering place where the Holy Innocents were executed on Herod’s orders.   Those same boys could then have grown up, embraced the Gospel, been baptized, and gone to Heaven, arriving at the same destination as the Holy Innocents by different pathways according to God’s Providential design.  The fact that the Holy Innocents were sanctified in an extraordinary way would not change the Church’s norm for sanctification through Holy Baptism.  Similarly, the raising of babies from the dead who died without Holy Baptism by certain saints like St. Joan of Arc so that the children could be baptized does not exclude the possibility that other children who die without Holy Baptism before the age of reason could be “divinely cleansed,” as explained by the Angelic Doctor in the passage quoted above.

It makes perfect sense that the Holy Ghost would not have inspired the Magisterium to teach the salvation of all children who die before the age of reason before now, since such a teaching could easily be abused and used as an excuse for human beings to be even more cavalier about the abuse and murder of children than we already are.  Nevertheless, in light of the Angelic Doctor’s teaching on “divine cleansing” in the womb and the fact that Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered His Passion and Death on behalf of every soul, past, present and future, is it inconceivable that any Canaanite children executed by the Hebrew forces were redeemed and sanctified by Our Lord and welcomed into eternal life?

The Contraceptive Holocaust, Vacant Thrones, and the Malice of Demons

It has been argued that one of the reasons why the demonic forces do all that they can to promote abortion is that by means of the global abortion holocaust they deprive the slaughtered innocents of the Beatific Vision.  Converted Satanists testify to the fact that abortion is a sacrifice to satan.

Zachary King, a former high wizard in a satanic church who converted through the miraculous intervention of the Blessed Mother, says abortion is a spiritual battle that must be fought with spiritual weapons.

“I know abortion is a satanic sacrifice,” King said at a conference on spiritual warfare organized by Toronto-based Serviam Ministries. “Why is the devil intent on killing the unborn?” he said. “Satan does fear certain things. Innocence is one. You can’t get more innocent than the baby in the womb.”

King, who is blind as a result of diabetes, told 800 people at the October 28 conference of his remarkable journey to the Catholic Church.

Raised in a Baptist home, King was addicted to magic at age 10, sexually assaulted by a woman teacher at age 11, and formally joined a satanic coven and sold his soul to the devil at age 13.

Three months before he turned 15, he assisted in his first ritual abortion, where the objective was to get blood on his hands.

At age 21, he was in a satanic church as high wizard, one of only a few in the world, and who are rumoured to be hand-picked by Satan. (Read his story here).

By the time he converted, King had assisted in 146 abortions.

“Every hex, we used an abortion,” he told the conference.

“The bigger thing you request from the devil, the more you have to do for the devil to get it. … A hex requires an aborted baby.”[7]

While it might seem unreasonable to argue that satan and the demons would promote a practice on a global scale that hastens their ultimate defeat, the perverse psychology of the demons resolves this apparent contradiction.  To understand why this is so, it will be helpful to recall the Fall of the Angels as it was shown to Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich:

I saw spreading out before me a boundless, resplen­dent space, above which floated a globe of light shin­ing like a sun. I felt that It was the Unity of the Trinity. In my own mind, I named It the ONE VOICE, and I watched It producing Its effects. Below the globe of light arose concentric circles of radiant choirs of spirits, wondrously bright and strong and beauti­ful. This second world of light floated like a sun under that higher Sun.

These choirs came forth from the higher Sun, as if born of love. Suddenly I saw some of them pause, rapt in the contemplation of their own beauty. They took complacency in self, they sought the highest beauty in self, they thought but of self, they existed but in self.

At first all were lost in contemplation out of self, but soon some of them rested in self. At that instant, I saw this part of the glittering choirs hurled down, their beauty sunk in darkness, while the others, thronging quickly together, filled up their vacant places. And now the good angels occupied a smaller space. I did not see them leaving their places to pur­sue and combat the fallen choirs. The bad angels rested in self and fell away, while those that did not follow their example thronged into their vacant places. All this was instantaneous.

Then rising from below, I saw a dark disc, the future abode of the fallen spirits. I saw that they took possession of it against their will. It was much smaller than the sphere from which they had fallen, and they appeared to me to be closely crowded together.

I saw the Fall of the angels in my childhood and ever after, day and night, I dreaded their influence. I thought they must do great harm to the earth, for they are always around it. It is well they have no bodies, else they would obscure the light of the sun. We should see them floating around us like shadows.

Immediately after the Fall, I saw the spirits in the shining circles humbling themselves before God. They did homage to Him and implored pardon for the fallen angels.

At that moment I saw a movement in the lumi­nous sphere in which God dwelt. Until then it had been motionless and, as I felt, awaiting that prayer.

After that action on the part of the angelic choirs, I felt assured that they would remain steadfast, that they would never fall away. It was made known to me that God in His judgment, in His eternal sen­tence against the rebel angels, decreed the reign of strife until their vacant thrones are filled. But to fill those thrones seemed to me almost impossible, for it would take so long. The strife will, however, be upon the earth. There will be no strife above, for God has so ordained.[8]

It is worth pondering those words of Blessed Anne Catherine:

It was made known to me that God in His judgment, in His eternal sen­tence against the rebel angels, decreed the reign of strife until their vacant thrones are filled. But to fill those thrones seemed to me almost impossible, for it would take so long.

According to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, the number of angels exceeds the comprehension of the human mind:

Imagine how great in number is the Roman people, imagine how great in number are the other barbarian peoples that now exist, and how many must have died even! In a century, imagine how many have been buried in a thousand years, imagine all mankind, from Adam to the present day. Great is their multitude, but it is small in comparison with the angels, whose numbers are greater. They are the ninety-nine sheep, whereas the human race is the one lost sheep. By the greatness of a place one can judge the numbers of those who dwell in it. The earth we inhabit is a mere dot in the heavens, thus the heaven that surrounds it must have a much greater number of inhabitants. As it has greater space, the heavens of heavens hold their innumerable number. If it is written that ‘a thousand thousands ministered unto Him, and ten thousands of myriads attended upon Him’ this is only because the prophet could express no greater number.[9]

In light of this testimony from a great Father and Doctor of the Church, it would seem as if the sanctified souls of children who die before the age of reason would be necessary to fill up the innumerable thrones of the fallen angels within the divinely-ordained chronological framework that God has revealed through Sacred Scripture and Tradition.  According to Infant Homicides through Contraceptives, written and published by the Ad Hoc Commission to Study Abortion Deaths 1994, revised 1998 and 2003:

In the U.S., between 1973 and 1996, the total number of abortions caused each year by the use of OCs, Depo-Provera, Norplant (Implanon), and IUDs ranges between 6,555,000 and 11,625,000. This figure is significantly higher than the total number of surgical, prostaglandin, and saline abortions committed each year during the same time period (1,350,000–1,400,000, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute).[10]

Thus, it is reasonable to estimate the total number of surgical and non-surgical abortions, including those caused by abortifacient contraceptives all over the world during the last 50 years, at 40 to 50 billion!

From one point of view, the demons should want to stop killing babies in such huge numbers through abortion and contraception because in their vast multitudes these innocent children are rapidly filling up the unimaginably great number of thrones vacated by the fallen angels and so hastening the Day of Judgment.  But the malice of the demons drives them to inflict the maximum harm, and especially to commit the maximum sacrilege here and now, even when doing so hastens their final defeat.  Satan, their master, encourages this, because each abortion is a sacrifice to him, appealing to his pride, and granting to him the closest thing to worship that he can receive as a creature.

Thus, for all his intelligence, one can see why satan would fan the flames of the abortion holocaust, even if he knows that it is one of the principal ways—if not the principal way—that God fills up the thrones that he and his minions abandoned when they fell.  Moreover, God’s mandate to Joshua to drive the Canaanite peoples out of the land cannot be understood apart from the malice of satan and his minions and the depths of spiritual and moral depravity to which the Canaanite peoples had sunk under their influence over many generations.  An article on the “Knowing the Bible” website documents this depravity in detail:

An honest look at the global practice of abortion and contraception, the spread of sex trafficking and child prostitution, the explosion of internet pornography and the exposure of hundreds of millions of children to pornographic material, with little or no serious effort by most governments to protect children from corruption and exploitation, shows that mankind is in no position to pass judgment on the God of the Old Testament for ordering Joshua to put an end to the abominations of Canaan. Moreover, through Church-approved apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other private revelations approved by the Church, Our Lord has warned us plainly that if we do not put an end to the physical and moral destruction of innocent children, He will send a chastisement “worse than the Flood” that will kill most of the earth’s population and cleanse the earth.  On October 13, 1973, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun in Fatima and the year when the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion on demand in the United States, Our Lady of Akita told Sister Agnes Sasagawa:

If mankind does not repent, the Heavenly Father will inflict a punishment worse than the Deluge, such as one will never have seen before.  Fire will fall from the sky, wiping out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priest nor faithful.

Indeed, an honest look at the spiritual and moral degradation of the modern world reveals that we have much in common with the corrupt Canaanite peoples on the eve of their destruction.  Thankfully, those who continue to trust in the Word of God as believed in the Church from the beginning can find good reason to hope for the preservation, salvation and sanctification of innocent children throughout the world in the very chronological data that most of the “wise and prudent” of the world today hold in contempt because of their scientistic belief in naturalism and uniformitarianism.

Filling the Vacant Thrones and the Traditional Biblical Chronology

If the age of the universe derived from the Holy Scriptures had not been an important part of Divine Revelation for the Church Fathers, they would not have risked the ridicule of the pagan intellectual elite by affirming and defending the Biblical chronology so firmly. The Fathers were very familiar with evolutionary accounts of the origins of man and the universe, such as the systems proposed in the writings of Anaximander, Epicurus and Lucretius. All of these systems involved long ages of time and denied the rapid, supernatural character of the creation of all things as revealed to Moses. Thus, all of the Fathers, including St. Augustine, upheld the fiat nature of the whole work of creation which necessarily entailed that it was completed at the beginning of time—whether that was in six 24-hour days of creation—as the overwhelming majority of the Fathers believed—or in an instant, as St. Augustine was inclined to believe in the light of Sirach 18:1.

When the extraordinary Belgian Jesuit exegete Cornelius à Lapide wrote his great commentary on Scripture, he did not hesitate to endorse the interpretation of St. Irenaeus et al. that there would be six thousand years of human history before the rise of the final Antichrist. As demonstrated in the articles “Cosmology, Thermodynamics, and the Christian Doctrine of Creation,” “Ariadne’s Thread” and “A Question of Time” on the Kolbe Center website, the scientific evidence actually fits well into the traditional Creation-Fall-and-Flood framework.  But there are several weightier reasons why no Catholic should be scandalized or dismayed by this interpretation, apparently so naïve and counter to the alleged “scientific” chronology of millions and billions of years. In the first place, the numbers in the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse, are symbolic numbers, because the Apocalypse is not an historical but a prophetic book. Thus, the “seven” Churches of which St. John writes not only represent the variety of Churches in the world at the time of St. John’s revelation, but rather all of the Churches that will ever be, the number “seven” being the number of fullness or perfection. Similarly, the number “one thousand” in this context does not mean a literal thousand years, but a period that represents a certain “fullness” of time—as when the psalmist records God’s declaration that “the cattle on a thousand hills are Mine”—not as if the cattle on the thousand and first hill belonged to someone else, but as a poetic way of saying that the full number—the totality—of all of the creatures belong to Him.

This use of numbers stands in marked contrast to the way that Moses uses numbers in the sacred history of Genesis, so it is not surprising that there was a tendency to see the six literal 24-hour days of Genesis One as a foreshadowing of a literal six thousand years of human history before the rise of the final Antichrist. On the other hand, St. Bede the Venerable was one of the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church who learned Hebrew, compared the genres of Genesis and Revelation, and divided the history of the world into six ages rather than into six literal thousand-year periods. When the seventeenth century prophet Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser wrote his remarkable predictions concerning the future of the Church and of the world—so many of which have already been fulfilled—he was also inspired to divide human history into six periods, but not into a literal six millennia, thus showing his correct understanding of the “thousand years” of Revelation 20 as a “period of a fullness of time” rather than as a literal thousand years. In light of the way that St. John uses numbers symbolically in the Book of Revelation, the tendency of later Fathers, Doctors and holy authors to interpret the fulfillment of the six days of creation as six periods of history rather than a literal six thousand years suggests that, while Our Lord definitely wants us to accept a literal six-day creation and the Biblical chronology of the world, He does not want us to know the exact “day or the hour” when His plans will be fulfilled.

“The World Is Passing Away” (1 John 2:17)

Our Lord tells us that no man knows “the day or the hour” of His Second Coming, but there are many reasons why it makes sense to believe that the Lord’s Second Advent, the Final Judgment and the end of the world will take place in the not-too-distant future. In the first place, it is highly unlikely that St. Irenaeus would have been completely wrong in his interpretation of Revelation 20, when his spiritual Father St. Polycarp, was a direct disciple of St. John the Evangelist who wrote the Book of Revelation—especially since that interpretation was confirmed by St. Justin Martyr, St. Hippolytus, St. Jerome, and St. Isidore of Seville. In view of the fact that all of the numbers of days or years in the sacred history of Genesis are intended to be taken literally, it is reasonable to hold, as St. Irenaeus did, that they could foreshadow future proportionate periods of time. However, as we have just seen, since all of the numbers in the Book of Revelation are symbolic, it follows that St. Venerable Bede, St. Augustine, and Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser were correct to hold that the days of Genesis One foreshadowed six periods of roughly but not exactly a thousand years, and that the “thousand-year reign” in Revelation 20 refers to a “fullness of time” and a great flowering of holiness all over the Earth, rather than to a literal thousand-year period. This would entail that part of the seventh millennium of human history could take place prior to the Era of Peace and the world-wide flowering of holiness predicted by Our Lady of Fatima and many other saints, followed by the rise of the Final Antichrist, the return of Enoch and Elijah, the Final Judgment and the end of the world.

Another reason why it makes sense to believe that the final end times events will take place in the not-too-distant future is that genetic entropy is taking place at such a fast rate that it is unlikely that the human race can remain viable for very much longer. As plant geneticist Dr. John Sanford noted in his masterpiece Genetic Entropy:

Our Heavenly Father could, of course, heal the genetic defects of the whole human race in an instant, miraculously, but it does not appear to be His Will to do this, since the effects of Original Sin serve as constant reminders that we have on Earth “no lasting city,” and that our true citizenship is, or ought to be, with our heavenly Abba and the angels and saints in Heaven.   Moreover, this chronological testimony from genetics to the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis points to an additional reason why the ongoing contemporary holocaust of innocent children—through abortion, abortifacient contraception, and IVF—could be satan’s way of filling up Heaven’s “empty thrones” with the souls of these child-victims within the time-frame that God has established from the beginning to the end of the world.  Indeed, in light of the clear testimony of Divine Revelation in regard to the six days of creation less than ten thousand years ago and their fulfillment in six periods of time no more than a few thousand years in length, it is hard to imagine any other way that those vacant thrones can be filled within God’s divinely-ordained time-frame.

The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor

The champions of perversity love to attack the defenders of childhood innocence by accusing Our Lord of genocide and of directly commanding Joshua to murder men, women and children.  The Fathers and Doctors understood that this was a singular circumstance, in which God used Joshua and his men as the instruments of His justice, by putting an end to a tribe that had become so depraved that children born into that society no longer had any chance of escaping corruption.  But that is only part of the truth that we are called to defend and explain to our children and to unbelievers.  The greatest weakness of atheist criticisms of the goodness of God in Christ is that it is blind to God’s identification with all human beings, including all victims of violence and injustice, past, present and future, through Our Lord’s Incarnation, Passion and Death for each one’s salvation and sanctification.  In the words of the Council of Quiercy (853), quoted in paragraph 605 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer.

The famous atheist novelist Albert Camus criticized Our Lord Jesus Christ for fleeing to Egypt while He allowed the Holy Innocents to be massacred on His account.  We can expose the blind folly of this criticism with the help of Venerable Maria of Agreda, the incorrupt Conceptionist nun, who bilocated to the Red River region of what is now the United States hundreds of times in the seventeenth century, to evangelize the indigenous people.  This phenomenon was confirmed by impeccable witnesses who testified that Venerable Maria had knowledge of the Indians and the areas she visited that it was impossible to have obtained without having visited the region by bi-location as she testified to have done under obedience.  It was also confirmed by the Indians who received her visitations and who called her the “Lady in Blue” because of the blue habit in which she appeared to them.  They testified that she prepared them to go to the nearest Franciscan mission station to ask for Holy Baptism by instructing them in the rudiments of the Catholic Faith, to the utter astonishment of the missionaries who had never seen them before!

As if to anticipate and refute the scoffing of atheists like Albert Camus, Venerable Maria of Agreda was shown how Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother made Themselves present to the Holy Innocents and obtained for them the grace to unite their sufferings to the sufferings of Jesus so that they were sanctified to share one life with God for all eternity.  She was shown that the command of Herod to murder the children of Bethlehem two years old or younger was issued six months after the birth of Jesus.  According to Venerable Maria:

When it began to be executed the great Queen happened to hold her divine Son in her arms, lost in contemplation of His most holy Soul. Looking into it as into a clear mirror, She saw all that passed in Bethlehem more clearly than if She herself had been present to hear the wailing of the children and the parents. She saw also how her Son prayed to His eternal Father for the parents of these innocents; that He offered up the murdered children as the first fruits of his own Death; asking Him also that they receive the use of reason, in order that they might be a willing sacrifice for their Redeemer and accept their death for his glory. Thus, He would be able to reward them with the crowns of martyrdom for what they suffered. All this the eternal Father granted, and as it was made known to the Queen in her Only-begotten Son, She joined Him in His prayers and sacrifices. She also pitied the parents of the martyred infants in their heartrending tears and sorrows for their sons. She, indeed, was the first and true Rachel weeping for the children in Bethlehem (Jer. 31, 15); and there was no mother who sorrowed for them as She did, since no one could be such a Mother as She was to them.

The materialist, like Albert Camus, looks at the exterior and judges God according to the tiny superficial part of reality that he sees.  But the saints, by the grace of God, penetrate into the interior, and are often permitted to see what takes place between souls and God, without any external manifestation.  On Judgment Day, we will no doubt be astonished to learn all that God did for the souls of the Amalekite children in their last moments—and even in the souls of hardened sinners at the moment of death.  Indeed, while it could be objected that victims of surgical abortion and abortifacient contraception could be likened to the Holy Innocents, while children who die at later ages but before the age of reason do not, the Word of God clearly teaches that it was “through the envy of the devil that death entered the world,” so that every child who dies before the age of reason is as much a victim of the devil’s envy as the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem.

God Brings Good Out of Evil

One of the most terrible effects of a decline in faith is the resulting decline in sanctity which creates a vicious cycle, as God withdraws Himself from souls who no longer obey Him or even sincerely seek after Him.  In our unbelieving age, Fr. Giovani Salerno distinguished himself as a living saint, a priest who dedicated himself to the service of the poorest of the poor, in Peru and throughout the world, both as a medical doctor and as a physician of souls.  In his memoirs, which he wrote and published before his recent death, Fr. Salerno bore witness to the miracles that Our Lord Jesus Christ continues to grant in answer to the cry of the poor and to the way that Our Lord works secretly within souls, even in the midst of terrible suffering and injustice.  In On Mission with God in the Andes, Fr. Salerno tells the story of one of the children who attended a school run by his congregation, the Missionary Servants of the Poor of the Third Word, in Cuzco, Peru.  He writes:

Natividad . . . hadn’t even reached nine years of age.  Her situation had always been difficult because her father, even though he wasn’t a heartless drunk, was in the habit of beating her severely when he had drunk too much, and was prone to ferocious attacks when annoyed, completely in contrast to his normal calm and affectionate manner . . .  On Wednesday, 28^th May, 1997, on the eve of Corpus Christi, Natividad left our dining room at St. Maria to return to her house, where her family waited for her in vain.  Her body, naked and with signs of strangulation was discovered in the river, on the morning the following day.  The news got a small space in the local press, and the police started investigations to clear up the murder. However, very soon afterwards, it was all forgotten and the case was left unsolved because the family was poor and unable to influence the local authorities.

The pain and anguish of parents, brothers and sisters was indescribable. Naty was the eldest daughter. Two weeks after this tragic episode, Naty’s mother came to find us, visibly transformed.  . . . She came to tell us of a dream she had had the night before.  In this dream, she saw herself walking alone in the desert crying over the death of her daughter, when suddenly Naty appeared to her, dressed in a bright white tunic, barefoot, her face radiant and her hair down.  She radiated peaceful happiness.

So her mother asked her in despair why she had gone and left them in desolation.  Natividad told her in a calm and peaceful voice that God had allowed it for the good of many people, even though at the moment she couldn’t understand it.  She said that her mission was to stay and keep watch over them and help them.  Her mother, still not at peace and unsatisfied, asked what had happened and how it had happened.  So Natividad told her of her final hours, but not with a traumatic or an angry tone.  In the words of her own mother, “It was like seeing a sad film but without hate.”

In this visual dream, Naty’s mother could see how her daughter was kidnapped for hours in a forest close to her house on the slope of a mountain on the outskirts of Cuzco.  From there, Naty could see how her parents searched for her and called out for her.  She shouted but they couldn’t hear her.  One of the kidnappers, after a short struggle with the child, who in the attempt to free herself, injured herself with the school scissors that she carried with her, strangled her with the strap of her own rucksack.  Her body was then taken to the river and thrown in the water.

Throughout the whole account of Natividad’s last few hours, she was completely free of any hint of hatred or despair or the desire for vengeance.  Natividad bade farewell to her mother with a smile and disappeared, rising upwards and leaving her mother with an indescribable sense of peace.  At first we would tend to think of this dream as a despairing mother’s nice but sadly false way of consoling herself.  But the fact is that Naty’s mother, when she woke up, remembered the whole dream perfectly.  Not only that, but she decided to check the place where the crime took place, which wasn’t far from her house.  She woke her husband up, and together, they went to the place from the dream.

Natividad’s mother afterwards showed us the small pair of scissors which belonged to her daughter, and the strap from her rucksack, which they found in that exact spot.

Her mother told us all of this in a completely natural way.  For her, it was evident that what her daughter had told her in that dream couldn’t be more certain, and she had gone to that place sure that she would find something . . . Coincidence?  Revelation?  Perhaps the Gospel gives us the answer: “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children” (Luke 10:21).[13]

One of the reasons why it is so hard for human beings to understand why God permits and in a few instances may have actively willed the death of young children is that we tend to evaluate the morality of acts solely in terms of their consequences in this life.  The story of Natividad shows how the pain and suffering of Natividad’s kidnapping and murder were swallowed up in the joy of everlasting life with God.  In this life even holy people often suffer the traumatic effects of unjust treatment and cruelty for the rest of their lives, so it is hard for us to comprehend the reality that innocent children who die cleansed of the stain of Original Sin enter immediately into heavenly joy, regardless of the extent of their sufferings prior to the moment of death.  In that heavenly joy, every tear is “wiped away” and, like Natividad, the souls of the blessed are completely freed from the slightest shadow of resentment towards those who inflicted suffering upon them during their earthly lives.  Exegetes and theologians who “put God in the dock” for ordering the execution of children in the desperate and singular circumstances described in the Book of Numbers would do well to remember this fact.

The Good God Respects Man’s Free Will

To rescue His people from slavery in Egypt, God worked tremendous miracles to move them to obedience, but He would not give them the interior graces that He had reserved for the time of His Incarnation until they had cooperated sufficiently with His grace to merit, in some degree, the unsurpassable graces that He merited and made available through His Passion, Death and Resurrection.  That is why the laws that He gave to His children through Moses had to take into account their “hardness of heart.”  He would not remove the “hardness of heart” that mankind had acquired through free evil choices without the prayers and sacrifices of the prophets, confessors, and martyrs from the time of Moses until the coming of Jesus.  This truth finds expression in the sacred liturgy, especially during the holy season of Advent, as the Servant of God Dom Gueranger explains:

With what gratitude ought they not to assist at that divine Sacrifice, for which the world had been longing for four thousand years! God has granted them to be born after the fulfillment of that stupendous and merciful oblation, and would not put them in the generations of men, who died before they could partake of its reality and its riches! This notwithstanding, they must earnestly unite with the Church, in praying for the coming of the Redeemer, so to pay their share of that great debt which God has put upon all, whether living before or after the fulfilment of the mystery of the Incarnation. Let them think of this in assisting at the holy Sacrifice.

Tragically, many contemporary Catholic theologians and Church leaders revive the error of Marcion by making a false dichotomy between the “primitive,” “punitive” God of Genesis and the Old Testament and the merciful God of the New Testament.   These theologians cite the same examples from the Old Testament that the champions of perversity cite to impugn the goodness of God’s character, ignoring the wisdom of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who always defended the coherence of God’s conduct in the Old and the New Testaments and turning a blind eye to the many ways that modern man—even modern Churchmen—tolerate and even condone attacks on innocent women and children far worse than anything that Joshua ever contemplated or carried out at God’s command.

Are Contemporary Catholics Morally Superior to Joshua and his Army?

During the recent Coronamania, a number of local governments in Virginia took action to change the names of government buildings that had been named after officers in the Confederate Army.  This action was justified on the grounds that Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate officers were slave-owners or that they, at least, approved of slavery.  On a number of occasions I participated in virtual school board or county supervisors’ meetings on this topic and pointed out that it was hypocritical to remove the names of Confederate officers from schools and colleges for their alleged approval of slavery when there was not a single one of them who would have approved of the cutting to pieces of an unborn child in his mother’s womb up to the very moment of birth—an action that had the unqualified support of the governor of Virginia and his entire administration!

Theologians and exegetes who insist that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same as the God of the New almost always indulge in the same kind of hypocrisy and self-contradiction. On the one hand, they condemn the God of the Old Testament for ordering Joshua to remove the Amalekites from the land while tacitly or explicitly approving of actions by the United States government that inflicted much greater suffering on innocent non-combatants, including huge numbers of children.  In Japan, for example, a vast number of children and other non-combatants were subjected to terrible suffering and lingering deaths by the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.  As reported by the K1 Project at Columbia University:

Within the first few months after the bombing, it is estimated by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (a cooperative Japan-U.S. organization) that between 90,000 and 166,000 people died in Hiroshima, while another 60,000 to 80,000 died in Nagasaki. These deaths include those who died due to the force and excruciating heat of the explosions as well as deaths caused by acute radiation exposure.

While these numbers represent imprecise estimates—due to the fact that it is unknown how many forced laborers and military personnel were present in the city and that in many cases entire families were killed, leaving no one to report the deaths—statistics regarding the long term effects have been even more difficult to determine.

Catholic apologist Christopher Check has commented insightfully on the overwhelming contemporary consensus in the United States in favor of the view that the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II and the firebombing of German and Japanese cities were morally justified:

In his thought-provoking 1995 work, On Killing, retired Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman examines the extent to which physical distance creates emotional distance from the act of taking a human life. He shows with numbers what we know intuitively: A soldier is more likely to resist driving his knife into an enemy soldier’s abdomen than a bomber pilot is to resist dropping a bomb on a civilian neighborhood.

Grossman reports that, despite all of the historical evidence of soldiers’ unwillingness to kill in hand-to-hand combat or with their rifles from within a line-of-sight range, he did not find a single incident in which a soldier refused to fire a long-range weapon such as an artillery piece or missile launcher—nor did he find a pilot or bombardier unwilling to drop his bombs. More unsettling, while psychological trauma is not uncommon among infantrymen who have been in close combat, Col. Grossman did not find “a single instance of psychiatric trauma” associated with long-range killing. That includes the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped “Little Boy” on the people of Hiroshima. Indeed, Enola Gay’s pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, went to his death claiming that he never felt guilt or lost sleep over having dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Indeed, he flew reenactments of the event at air shows.

Grossman provides eerily antiseptic testimony given by Allied bomber pilots and crews who firebombed Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. These campaigns together claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 noncombatants, mostly women, children, and elderly (because men of fighting age were off fighting). The bombers reported feeling “fascination” and “satisfaction” but not guilt or regret.

Grossman’s argument should provoke us to ask if many people’s comfort with the bomb does not derive, at least in part, from a condition of distance from the event. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 180,000 civilians. Would supporters of the bombings be as sanguine if a battalion of Marines had been sent into the same cities to bayonet an equal number of women, children, and elderly? The killers’ distance from the event is not the only distance that impairs our judgment: We now have the distance not just of an ocean, but also of almost seven decades. A 2009 Quinnipiac University poll reports that only one in five Americans feel certain that Truman’s action was wrong.[15]

More recently, United States military forces in Iraq have inflicted terrible suffering on huge numbers of children and other non-combatants in Iraq.  Most contemporary Bishops in the U.S. would probably say that the God of the New Testament would never have authorized the execution of Canaanite children.  Yet during the Iraq War in which tens of thousands of Catholics participated, many children were killed by bombs or by illnesses brought on by exposure to depleted uranium ordinance.  According to one report:

independent researchers have found that the bodies of Iraqi children born with congenital disabilities, such as heart disease and malformed limbs, near a former United States air base in southern Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radioactive heavy metals associated with toxic depleted uranium pollution leftover from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The findings appear to bolster claims made by Iraqi doctors who observed high rates of congenital disabilities in babies born in areas that experienced heavy fighting during the bloody first year of the most recent Iraq war.

In 2016, researchers tested the hair and teeth of children from villages in proximity to the Talil Air Base, a former U.S. air base, located south of Baghdad and near the city Nasiriyah. They found elevated levels of uranium and of thorium, two slightly radioactive heavy metals linked to cancer and used to make nuclear fuel.

Thorium is a direct decay product of depleted uranium, a chemically toxic byproduct of the nuclear power industry that was added to weapons used during the first year of the war in Iraq. Thanks to its high density, depleted uranium can reinforce tank armor and allow bullets and other munitions to penetrate armored vehicles and other heavy defenses. Depleted uranium was also released into the environment from trash dumps and burn pits outside U.S. military bases.

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an independent researcher based in Michigan and a co-author of the study, said that levels of thorium in children born with congenital disabilities near the Talil Air Base were up to 28 times higher than in a control group of children who were born without congenital disabilities and live much further away.

“We are basically seeing a depleted uranium footprint on these children,” Savabieasfahani said in an interview.

Using statistical analysis, the researchers also determined that living near the air base was associated with an increased risk of giving birth to a child with congenital disabilities, including congenital heart disease, spinal deformations, cleft lip and missing or malformed and paralyzed limbs. The results of the study will soon be published in the journal Environmental Pollution, where the authors argue more research is needed to determine the extent that toxins left behind after the U.S.-led war and occupation are continuing to contaminate and sicken the Iraqi population.

For years following the 2003 U.S-led invasion, Iraqi doctors raised alarms about increasing numbers of babies being born with congenital disabilities in areas of heavy fighting. Other peer-reviewed studies found dramatic increases in child cancer, leukemia, miscarriages and infant mortality in cities such as Fallujah, which saw the largest battles of the war. Scientists, Iraqi physicians and international observers have long suspected depleted uranium to be the culprit. In 2014, one Iraqi doctor told Truthout reporter Dahr Jamail that depleted uranium pollution amounted to “genocide.”[16]

In light of the current theological consensus that the God of the New Testament could not have authorized the execution of children during the conquest of Canaan, it is remarkable that, to this author’s knowledge, Romanian Catholic Bishop Michael Botean was the only United States Catholic Bishop who condemned the Iraq War as an unjust war and forbade his faithful to participate under pain of excommunication.   Indeed, only a tiny number of American bishops have condemned the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, the fire-bombing of German cities during World War II, or the use of depleted uranium ordnance during the Iraq War and now in Ukraine.  The ongoing, well-documented, genocide in Gaza, involving the slow starvation of tens of thousands of women and children, fully supported by the United States government, has recently been condemned by retired Bishop Joseph Strickland and by 60 Catholic priests in the United States.  But they are a small minority within the larger community of Bishops and priests in this country.  And there is little doubt that the vast majority of Bishops and theologians in the United States believe that the temporary authorization of Joshua’s army to swiftly execute the men who refused to make peace with him and in a few cases to execute their women and children constitutes an act so evil that it could not have been authorized by the God of the New Testament!

Conclusion

Before concluding this reflection, I would like to address an argument that could be used to bolster the Neo-Marcionite thesis that the God of the Old Testament does not possess the same character as the God of the New.  Those who hold this view sometimes argue that there are many manuscript traditions, that they disagree on many points, and that it is impossible for us to know the original text of the inerrant Word of God.  It follows that the original account of the Conquest of Canaan could have been lost and the accounts that have come down to us could contain some errors that misrepresent the character of God.  As credible as views of this kind may sound to contemporary scholars, they would have carried no weight with the Fathers of the Church.  The Fathers understood that the Church is “the pillar and foundation of the Truth” (1 Tim 3:15) and that God delivered on His promise to give the Pope and the Bishops the grace to preserve the inerrant Word of God intact.   When Pope St. Damasus commissioned St. Jerome to make what was to become the official Latin translation of the Scriptures, St. Jerome was fluent in the Biblical languages, was almost two thousand years closer to the sources of Revelation, and had access to a host of manuscripts that have been lost or destroyed.  Thus, when the Council of Trent, guided by the Holy Ghost, declared St. Jerome’s Vulgate to be “free from any error in faith or morals,” the faithful received a tremendous assurance of the reliability of the Vulgate text.  Indeed, it would be very difficult for any significant error to exist in the text of the Vulgate without it leading to some kind of error in a matter of faith or morals.

I hope and pray that the arguments presented in this essay will help Catholics who have passed judgment on the God of the Old Testament to make their own the words of St. Job after God spoke to him out of the whirlwind and he replied to His all-knowing, all-loving Savior:

I know that Thou canst do all things, and no thought is hid from Thee. Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I have spoken unwisely, and things that above measure exceeded my knowledge.  Hear, and I will speak: I will ask Thee, and do Thou tell me. With the hearing of the ear, I have heard Thee, but now my eye seeth Thee. Therefore, I reprehend myself, and do penance in dust and ashes.

THE END

Since Holy Mother Church has not made a definitive judgment regarding the souls of children who die before the age of reason without the Sacrament of Baptism, I submit in advance to her final judgment.

Hugh Owen

All Saints Day

November 1, 2025

Footnotes:

[1] Cf. “Starvation in Gaza Turning People into Monsters”  https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/starvation-in-gaza-turning-people-into-monsters-a-stage-of-pre-humanity-un-official/  (accessed 10-27-25).

[2] St. John Chrysoston, Homily on Romans Chapter Nine; chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/0345-0407,_Iohannes_Chrysostomus,_Homilies_on_The_Epistle_To_The_Romans,_EN.pdf 240/416 (accessed 10-25-25).

[3] Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? https://archive.org/details/is-god-a-moral-monster-making-sense-of-the-old-testament-god-by-paul-copan/page/187/mode/2up

[4] Daniel J. Castellano, Cherem: The Israelite Wars of Destruction (2012), 2.3-2.5:  https://www.arcaneknowledge.org/catholic/cherem.htm#s2_5  (accessed 10-27-25)

[5] Dr. Kevin Mark, personal communication.

[6] Aidan Nichols, O.P., Introduction to Abortion and Martyrdom  http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/anichols/abortion&martyrdom1.htm  (accessed 10-27-25).

[7] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/former-satanist-and-high-wizard-fight-abortion-with-spiritual-weapons/

[8] Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 2-3.

[9] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 15, 24  https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310115.htm

[10] Thomas M. Reynolds, April 27, 2011, a book review of Infant Homicides through Contraceptives, written and published by the Ad Hoc Commission to Study Abortion Deaths 1994, revised 1998 and 2003 https://www.prolifehealthcare.org/abortifacient-contraception/ These numbers do not take into account the huge number of children who are killed through the process of In Vitro Fertilization. Reportedly, between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are not brought to term annually in the United States. This figure is based on the CDC estimate that about 238,000 patients attempted IVF in 2021, with clinics typically creating between seven and eight embryos per patient, resulting in approximately 1.6 million to 1.9 million embryos created each year. Despite this high number, fewer than 100,000 embryos are brought to term annually, indicating that the vast majority are either discarded, die during the process, or remain frozen (Tony Ambrosetti, personal communication. October 29, 2025).

[11] “Extermination of the Canaanites”  https://www.knowingthebible.net/topical-studies/the-extermination-of-the-canaanites  (accessed 10-27-25).

[12] John Sanford, “Genetic Entropy in the Bible,” www.kolbecenter.org

[13] Giovanni Salerno, MSP, On Mission With God in the Andes (Toledo: Opus Christi Salvatoris Mundi, 2015), pp. 120-123.

[14]  https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki (accessed )

[15] https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/dropping-the-atomic-bomb-was-wrong-period Sadly, Christopher Check’s organization, Catholic Answers, defends and promotes theistic evolution which holds that God used hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity and disease to evolve the bodies of the first human beings—in contradiction to Word of God as understood by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.  This teaching undercuts Mr. Check’s excellent defense of the thesis that the use of the atomic bombs contradicts the teaching of the Catholic Church since the fact that “God made not death” is an essential element of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which underscores the evil of the wanton destruction of non-combatants in war

[16] https://truthout.org/articles/iraqi-children-test-positive-for-depleted-uranium-near-former-us-air-base/