Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
Acoording to the constant teaching of the Church on the origins of man and the universe, the goal of Catholic social action ought not to be the transformation of the world into some new form, but rather the “restoration of all things in Christ” according to God’s original plan for man and the universe. According to the great Marian saints, like St. Louis de Montfort, the goal of the Christian life is to follow the perfect example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, confident that when we live our consecration to Jesus through Mary in all of our actions, we will call down the graces necessary to establish the social reign of Christ our King throughout the world. In opposition to this divine plan, the satanic forces have raised up a counterfeit spirituality in the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin.
The Body of Christ vs. The Cosmic Christ
According to Fr. Teilhard, the “Body of Christ” is not the Catholic Church, as the Church Herself has always taught. Rather, in his system, the body of Christ is the universe, the “cosmic Christ,” which is evolving towards its ultimate perfection, carrying everyone and everything within it, to the final stage of evolution, “the omega point.” On the surface, Fr. Teilhard’s spirituality appears to teach the primacy of Christ, because it seems to make Christ all in all. But this is an illusion. The fundamental difference between Teilhard de Chardin’s theistic evolutionary concept of God and the true Catholic doctrine of the divine nature is that the god of theistic evolution is not the perfect, transcendent, unchanging Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world. Instead, the god of evolution is identified with the world. Thus, the god of evolution did not create a perfectly harmonious world out of nothing for man in the beginning of time—nor did the character of that world change because of the Original Sin of Adam, requiring the transcendent God to atone for the sins of the world when He assumed a human nature. On the contrary, the god of theistic evolution intentionally uses demons, death, destruction, mutation, natural selection, struggle for existence and extinctions to evolve his handiwork.
Catholic doctrine holds that God created a perfectly harmonious world for man in the beginning. In Fr. Teilhard’s system of theistic evolution, perfection never existed. Perfection lies at the “Omega point” in the future; and the god of evolution uses everything that happens to reach that “Omega point.” Catholic doctrine holds that man was created in the state of grace, sharing in God’s very own life, until sin separated Adam and Eve from God and deprived them of grace. Not so in the theistic evolutionist system of Teilhard de Chardin. For him:
grace represents a physical super-creation. It raises us a further rung on the ladder of cosmic evolution. In other words, the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological.
One of Teilhard’s favorite themes was that the evolution of the individual man had come to an end and had given way to a collective evolution of mankind. According to Teilhard, this collective evolution requires the erection of some kind of global government that will guide mankind to its ultimate fulfillment. Both of these themes appear in Gaudium et Spes, which boldly asserted that the eradication of war:
requires the establishment of some universal public authority . . . endowed with the effective power to safeguard, on behalf of all, security, regard for justice and respect for rights.
The traditional teaching of the Church has always been that the tranquility of order is achieved through the social reign of Christ the King, and not through merely human efforts or institutions. However, after Gaudium et Spes, Pope Paul VI hailed the United Nations as a the “last great hope for concord and peace” . . . and exhorted the world to “Let unanimous trust in this institution grow, let its authority increase . . .” Pope St. John Paul II reinforced this new attitude, expressing the “esteem of the Apostolic See and the Catholic Church for this institution” . . . and hailing the United Nations as “a great instrument for harmonizing and coordinating international life.” Even Pope Benedict XVI fell prey to Fr. Teilhard’s distorted theology when he wrote:
The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy. This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.
Here we see that in Fr. Teilhard’s system, the universe is the body of Christ which evolves until it reaches its final perfection and becomes “a living host” so that everyone and everything in the universe is divinized by its participation in the evolutionary process. This is the complete opposite of the true spirituality of the “living host” as it has been articulated in the lives and writings of some of the greatest saints of modern times.
“Where Sin Abounds, Grace Abounds all the More”
When St. Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, that “when sin abounded, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20), he established a divine principle, that God will never allow evil to increase more than His grace and goodness, even if this requires Him to give to a few receptive souls the graces that are spurned by the greater number in certain periods of history. When Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, the Christian world was convulsed by anti-Christian movements and systems of thought including communism, freemasonry, and rationalism. Yet—true to His word—the Lord gave unmistakable signs of a new outpouring of grace during the period shortly before, during and after that fateful year.
Perhaps the least-noticed sign of an intensification of God’s presence in the world took place on August 26, 1861, in the life of Archbishop Antonio Maria Claret, the former Archbishop of Santiago, Cuba, founder of the congregation of missionary priests known as the Claretians, and confessor to the Queen of Spain. On that day, the archbishop received a grace which crowned a life of unstinting missionary labors, in which he had preached an estimated 25,000 sermons, authored 144 religious books, founded three religious orders, confirmed 300,000 souls, and validated more than 9,000 marriages. It was a grace that came to him in the midst of continual threats of assassination and attempts on his life by enemies of God and of the Church. It was the grace of the Real Presence of Jesus abiding in him from one Holy Communion to the next. From that time, until the end of his life, he confided, “Day and night, I have the Most Holy Sacrament in my breast.”
What was the significance of this grace, previously granted only once, according to Venerable Maria of Agreda, and to the Mother of God Herself?
Further light can be shed on the meaning of this grace from the life of one of the souls destined by God to become a sort of “matriarch” of this new intimacy with Jesus—the “Little Flower,” St. Therese of Lisieux. Born three years after the death of St. Antonio Maria Claret, from a young age St. Therese longed to love Jesus as He had never been loved before. Simplicity became the distinguishing characteristic of what St. Therese came to call her “little way.” The “little way” is simple, in the same sense that St. Louis De Montfort’s true devotion is simple: it requires nothing more for its accomplishment than an act of the will. St. Therese insisted that God would act with infinite generosity towards those who would make a simple act of perfect self-surrender. She wrote:
The Good God does not need years to accomplish his work of love in a soul; one ray from his heart can, in an instant, make His flower bloom for eternity (emphasis added).
This insight led St. Therese to another, even more important, revelation—namely, that the love of God is not a series of acts but a single successionless Act in which a soul can actually abide through perfect abandonment. Thus, on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, 1895, St. Therese performed the most important act of her life, her “great offering.” She wrote:
In order to live in one single act of perfect love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of your Love, O my God (emphasis in original).
“To live in one single act of perfect love” implies that the perfectly abandoned soul not only does good and loving acts with the help of God’s grace, but rather lives in God’s Eternal Act. Significantly, the Little Flower’s greatest mystical experience occurred shortly after her consecration to live in a single act of perfect love, thus confirming the central importance of this act in her spiritual life. Through her entrance into God’s Eternal Act, St. Therese could fulfill her desire to be present to all times and all places out of love for Him:
Ah, in spite of my littleness, I would like to enlighten souls as did the Prophets and the Doctors. I have the vocation of the Apostle. I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach Your Name and to plant Your glorious Cross on infidel soil. But O my Beloved, one mission alone would not be sufficient for me, I would want to preach the Gospel on all the five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years only but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages (emphasis in original).
By living in a single act of perfect love, St. Therese could begin to experience the fulfillment of Our Lord’s prayer at the Last Supper, “Father, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). Like the great mystical saints who succeeded her, St. Therese realized that her Little Way of living in God’s Eternal Act was not merely a personal grace. She foresaw that the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary would come about through the “victims of merciful love,” souls who would follow her little way of perfect abandonment. She prophesied:
The legion of little souls, the victims of merciful love, will become as ‘numerous as the stars of Heaven and the sands of the seashore.’ It will be terrible to Satan; it will help the Blessed Virgin to crush his proud head completely.
According to St. Therese, the victims of merciful love entered into the very heart of the Church, into eternity, so as to embrace “all times and places.” She wrote:
I understood that the Church has a HEART and that this heart is burning with love. I understood it was Love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES . . . IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL! (emphasis in original).
St. Therese also believed that the victims of merciful love would do the Will of God “on earth as in heaven.” Loving God “with His own love,” they would enter into heaven after death without passing through Purgatory. She wrote:
It appears to me that for victims of love there will be no judgment, but rather, that the Good God will hasten to recompense with eternal delights His own love, which He will find burning in their hearts (emphasis added).
At the end of her life, St. Therese was inspired to crown her great offering by pleading for the grace of Christ’s continuous Real Presence. She begged Jesus, “Remain in me as in a tabernacle and never separate Yourself from Your little victim!” After her death, Mother Agnes of Jesus testified that:
She spoke to me about this several times, but not very often. All the same, I am sure that, in this prayer, she had in mind the miraculous permanent presence of the sacred species and not just the permanent presence of the divine influence which is produced without a miracle in faithful souls. Moreover, in her Act of Offering she appealed in this regard to the omnipotence of Jesus Christ.
One of the novices who enjoyed the guidance of St. Therese as novice mistress, Sr. Marie of the Trinity, testified to her confidence that God granted Therese’s prayer before she died. She stated:
For me, I have an interior conviction that she was heard . . . She told me on this subject that nothing is impossible to the omnipotence of God and that He would not have inspired the request, if He had not wanted to fulfill it . . . In the canticle which she composed for me for my profession, and which has been printed in her poetry under the title I Thirst for Love, there is a stanza which begins like this: You, the great God Whom all Heaven adores, You live in me, a prisoner night and day. A sister suggested to her that she must have made a mistake and should have said: “You live for me . . . etc.” but she replied: No, no, I said it correctly, and she gave me a look which meant: We understood one another (emphasis in original).
An Army of Living Hosts
The Little Flower’s prediction of a multiplication of the “victims of merciful love” began to be fulfilled in the lives of several twentieth century saints. The Canadian religious Blessed Dina Belanger, the Mexican wife and mother Blessed Conchita de Armida, and her spiritual director, the Servant of God Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez—to name but a few—all embraced the life of a “living host.”
In Quebec, a religious of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, Blessed Dina Belanger also embraced the state of a living host. On June 16, 1925, Blessed Dina testified to the likeness between the presence of God in her state of “living host” and the same presence in the Eucharist. She wrote:
I am still aware of, and even have a clearer understanding of the presence of the adorable Trinity in which I am submerged, and of the same grace concerning the presence of Our Lord in the sacred Host.
As a “living host,” Blessed Dina no longer experienced the sufferings of Jesus as a compassionate observer. Instead, she identified completely with the interior sufferings of Jesus by sharing in the “chalice of His agony.” She wrote:
Physical suffering is mild compared to what I felt in my soul; my suffering was centered in my heart and from there spread through my entire being as if to crush me. I felt an overwhelming sense of weariness and yet, how happy I was!
Blessed Dina compared these sufferings to the “real presence” of Jesus in Holy Communion. She wrote:
My union with the Heart of Jesus has been like His real presence after Holy Communion, while the consecrated Host is still with me. This morning, Our Lord gave me to understand that it is just as easy for Him to give Himself to me—through His blessed chalice—and to extend His sensible presence over two days—through an interior and invisible act—as it is for a quarter of an hour, more or less, under the appearance of the sacred Host (emphasis added)
Meanwhile, in San Luis Potosi, in Mexico, Blessed Conchita de Armida, a wife, widow, and mother of nine children, also answered God’s call to become a “living host.” Jesus told her:
I want you to be My host and have the intention, renewed as often as possible day and night, of offering yourself with Me on all the patens on earth. I want you transformed in Me by suffering, by love and by the practice of all the virtues, to raise heavenward this cry of your soul in union with Me: “This is My Body, this is My Blood.” Thus by making yourself but one with the Incarnate Word out of love and suffering, with the same intentions of love, you will obtain graces for the whole world. You will offer Me Myself and yourself also, with the Holy Spirit and through Mary, to the eternal Father (emphasis added) . . . In fact, the Father wishes that I Myself, united to your soul as victim, have you sacrifice Me and immolate Me with the same love of the Father on behalf of a world which has need of this spiritual shock and of a grace of this nature to be converted (emphasis added)
Largely through the example of Blessed Conchita, Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez was also inspired to join the ranks of the little victims of merciful love. As he reflected on the grace of becoming a “living host,” he came to understand it as the perfecting of the priesthood. He wrote:
The perfect transformation gives the perfect priesthood, since it makes perfect the sacrifice of every moment, of the two victims united, Jesus and I, so that I may be able truly to say: “This is my Body, This is my Blood.”
The official priesthood is a transformation into Christ, realized by ordination, and which makes it possible to say the divine words in the Mass. But since it is not total transformation of itself, by the sacramental character only the Eucharistic sacrifice can be offered.
When the “marvelous exchange” is realized, through the perfect transformation in which we give to Christ a passible body, and blood which He can pour out in a bloody manner, and Christ gives Himself to us, divinizing our being, making it His, making us Him, assuming our humanity through a union which is the image of the Hypostatic Union, then in every moment we can offer the two victims united in one same immolation; we can renew unceasingly the sacrifice of Christ.
“As Numerous as the Stars in the Heavens”
As the spiritual father of lay persons and lay associations as well as priests and religious, Archbishop Martinez realized that this “marvelous exchange” held the key to a new growth of holiness among all the faithful, of all states in life. Indeed, Jesus told Blessed Conchita:
When I pronounced the words: “Do this in memory of Me,” I was not addressing Myself only to priests. Of course, they alone have the power to change the substance of bread into My most holy Body and the substance of wine into My Blood. But the power to unite in one single oblation all oblations belongs to all Christians.
St. Therese had predicted that the “little victims of merciful love” would become “as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the grains of sand on the sea shore.” For the “little victims of love,” she said, “God will work wonders; but ordinarily, they will work in faith, because otherwise they would be unable to live. It follows that those who want to enlist in Our Lady’s army of living hosts must be prepared to live a life of radical faith—in which they fully participate in the divine-human life of Jesus by performing the most ordinary actions with Him and with His intentions, but without any tangible reward or visible sign of their exalted activity.
In short, the authentic saints and prophets of the Church teach that Our Lord is calling us to become living hosts, by living one life with Him in all our actions, which will call down the graces necessary to usher in the social reign of Christ which will ensure that even the natural order will be partly restored by the effects of divine grace. Meanwhile the false prophets of Fr. Teilhard’s counterfeit spirituality call us to support man’s efforts to take evolution into his own hands so as to hasten the consummation of all things by “the cosmic christ,” achieving perfection through the use of science and technology, without regard for natural or divine law.
Traditional creation theology establishes that perfection existed in the beginning and can be largely restored, even in this life, by our cooperation with divine grace as members of—but never apart from—the Mystical Body of Christ. The false theology of the cosmic christ denies the original perfection of the universe and the possibility of restoring all things in Christ and transfers perfection to the future, to the omega point, the attainment of which justifies the use of unnatural and immoral means such as contraception and eugenics and promises (falsely) that everyone and everything will be sanctified by their participation in the cosmic christ, whether or not they are members of the Mystical Body of Christ.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost free us from all error and from every evil and transform us into those “living hosts” that He created us to be from before the foundation of the world!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.
P.P.S. Our friend Lu Cortese and her team at St. Joseph’s Radio in St. Louis recorded a presentation on the theme of this newsletter. If you would like to watch the video, you can do so at this link.
