Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
One of our strangest experiences in almost 25 years of work with the Kolbe Center has been to observe the contrast between the indifference shown by many highly educated Catholics to blasphemies against the character of God and their outrage at challenges to the consensus view in Catholic academia. Years ago, one of the scientists on our advisory council and I were in the parking lot of a parish school after giving a presentation to a group of 10-to-14-year-old students when the father of one of the students came up to us and vented his rage that we had dared to question the evolutionary hypothesis. His anger seemed to flow from his conviction that his child’s academic and professional success would somehow be jeopardized if she dared to dissent from Darwinian dogma. On the other hand, we were amazed that the angry parent was not disturbed by the fact that—if the Darwinian account of origins were true—it would mean that God had allowed His Church to teach a completely false account of the origins of man and the universe from the beginning and that, instead of raising up saints and scholars from within the Church to enlighten Her, He had raised up godless men like Charles Darwin and T.H. Huxley, to enlighten the Church leadership about the true origins of man and the universe.
More recently, I was giving a presentation in a parish, when, just a few minutes into the seminar, the former head of education in the local archdiocese interrupted me and corrected me for claiming that Moses was the principal author-redactor of the Book of Genesis. He angrily scolded me for contradicting “the consensus view in Biblical scholarship,” and challenged me to name a single Biblical scholar who upheld the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. I recommended that he go to the Kolbe website and read Mike Gladieux’s great article on the Wiseman father and son’s amazing research into “how Moses wrote Genesis.” My distinguished critic proceeded to get up and walk out on my presentation while fact-checking my suggestion on his phone, undeterred in his dogmatic devotion to the consensus view in Biblical scholarship by the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in St. John’s Gospel: “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote of Me. But if you believe not His writings, how will you believe My words?” Indeed, for this highly-educated and influential Catholic layman, it was a much greater offense to question the consensus view in Catholic academia than to question Scriptural inerrancy and the integrity of the Son of God.
On another occasion a few months ago, when a local Catholic pastor offered to host a debate between two of our speakers and two Catholic theistic evolutionists, the local representative of a Catholic think tank that promotes Big Bang cosmology explained that there was no point in having a debate or taking us seriously since, in his words, we were “ultra” conservative, and there were only a handful of Catholics who believed as we do. This tendency to dismiss the reading of Genesis maintained by every Father and Doctor of the Church on the grounds that the number of Catholic intellectuals who uphold that reading has dwindled to insignificance represents one of the biggest obstacles to restoring the foundations of our faith and stopping the mass exodus of young adult Catholics out of the Church. Yet when young adult Catholics actually LISTEN to the arguments for and against the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis, our experience has been that most of them are won over.
When Dr. Thomas Seiler debated Big Bang Cosmology with a priest-astrophysicist a few months ago, the majority of viewers going into the debate adhered to the Big Bang hypothesis. But by the time that the debate was finished, the majority had embraced the traditional reading of Genesis. One of the main reasons why more and more Catholic young people are abandoning theistic evolution for the traditional doctrine of special creation is their recognition that Catholic academia has allowed the father of lies to shift the burden of proof from the challenger of God’s Word to its defender. If the Guardians of the Faith had not allowed Satan and his agents to do this on a grand scale in the early days of the Evolution Revolution, evolution-based modernism would never have been able to take over most of our institutions. One Catholic intellectual who refused to be fooled by the devil’s tactic in the early days of the Revolution was perhaps the greatest lay apologist in American history, the self-taught New England convert Orestes Brownson (1803-1876).
Brownson entered the Church after having earned a stellar reputation as an original writer and thinker, a member of the intellectual circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. His Review offered a bold and uncompromising defense of the Catholic Faith which earned the respect and admiration of the entire episcopate. On May 13, 1849, Brownson received a letter from Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia, signed by the Archbishop of Baltimore and by all of the American Bishops in attendance at the Council of Baltimore in 1849, to encourage him by their "approbation and influence" to continue his "literary labors in defense of the faith." When Charles Darwin published his speculations on the origins of man and living things, beginning with his Origin of Species and continuing with the Descent of Man, Brownson recognized immediately that the Emperor of Evolution was naked but that his nakedness needed to be exposed swiftly, lest the world begin to admire the magnificence of the Emperor's New Clothes as described by the disciples of Darwin. Brownson's critique of Darwin's Descent of Man rings as true today as when he penned it 150 years ago.
Brownson begins his critique of Darwin by exposing his failure to provide any actual evidence for his hypothesis—in terms that remain as valid today as they were then. After exposing Darwin’s abject failure to provide any solid evidence for his hypothesis, Brownson takes the offensive and places the burden of proof where it should always be—on anyone who challenges the Word of God in Genesis as it has been understood in God’s Church from the beginning. Lest anyone think that Brownson's critique applies to evolutionary biology but not to Big Bang cosmology, please reflect on two statements that Fr. Boyd made during the debate with Dr. Seiler: 1) He said that he does not have an in-depth knowledge of biology, and 2) that he believes that Adam was specially created, body and soul, and that Eve was created from Adam's rib. Taken together, these two statements signify that Fr. Boyd has rejected the consensus view in academia in favor of the evolution of the human body without having acquired a thorough knowledge of biology. Why? Because Scripture, Tradition and authoritative Magisterial teaching, up to and including the PBC decrees of 1909, tell us that we must believe those things on the authority of God revealing them in the sacred history of Genesis. This is the position of the Kolbe Center as well—and we applaud him for it. On the other hand, he takes the Kolbe Center to task for NOT believing in Big Bang cosmology and its 13.8 billion year time-frame, in spite of the fact that the same PBC decrees that told us we must believe in the special creation of Adam and Eve also teach that we must believe that God created all things at the beginning of time. (This is a reaffirmation of the teaching of Lateran IV that God created all things “simul” “ab initio temporis” and of the Roman Catechism which teaches that “The Divinity created all things in the beginning. He spoke and they were made. He commanded and they were created”).
Fr. Boyd argued that Lateran IV does not teach that God created all things at the same instant or relatively instantaneously, because “simul” in the Firmiter can be translated "together," as in the Nicene Creed, "together (simul) with the Father and the Son He is adored and glorified." However, in a paper that Kolbe Center members submitted for approval to (and received approval from) outstanding theologians all over the world, we have demonstrated that the greatest commentators on Lateran IV, like St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Doctor of the Church, for the 600 years from the time of the Council until the widespread acceptance of Lyellian geology at the end of the nineteenth century, consistently held that "simul" was intended by the Council Fathers and Pope Innocent III to be understood as "at the same time," which would be compatible with the Augustinian minority view of an instantaneous creation of all things and with the overwhelming majority view of the Fathers and Doctors, that God created all things in six 24-hour days but not with theistic evolution or a progressive creation over long ages of time.
Here are excerpts from the commentaries of Cornelius à Lapide and St. Lawrence of Brindisi in which they explicitly state that Lateran IV defined that “simul” in the Firmiter means “at the same time” and rules out the view—held by a number of Church Fathers—that the angels might have existed for a long time before the creation of the material universe. First, Lapide:
You will ask, where and when were the angels created? Some have thought that they were created before the world. This was the opinion of Origen, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome and St. Hilary. Others such as Acacius and Gennadius have also thought that they were created before the world. However, I hold that they were created together with the world in the beginning of time, and that their creation took place in the empyrean heaven, for they are its citizens and inhabitants. So teach St. Bede, Peter Lombard and the scholastics along with St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and Rupert. St. Gregory of Nazianzus writes: “The angels came forth from God like the rays from the sun.” Moreover, as St. Gregory the Great says: “They broke forth like sparks from flint.” To be sure, the [Fourth] Lateran Council under Innocent III declared: One must believe with firm faith that from the beginning of time God created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures, viz., the angelic and the mundane. This declaration is properly said against Origen, who thought that souls were created before bodies, [but] the Council’s words seem too well expressed and clear as to be able to be twisted into another meaning. Wherefore, my opinion is no longer just probable, but is both certain and de fide, for this is what the Council itself declares and defines.
The next quotation is taken from St. Lawrence of Brindisi’s Commentary on Genesis, which the Kolbe Center arranged to be translated into English for the first time. Like Lapide, he addresses the question of when the angels were created, in view of the different opinions recorded by the Church Fathers, some of whom held that the angels had been completed long before the material universe. He writes:
If, however, we accept the sense of the third explanation that in Genesis the empyrean heaven was created at the same time as the angels in it, everything is plain and every question arising theretofore is silenced. Thus the first, more powerful, and the highest spiritual and corporal creatures—the angels and the First Heaven (which the Saints called by the Greek word empyrion)—are not missing from the catalogue of creation. It is called empyrion or “fiery” because of the prominence of the place and the splendor of its light. This explanation, embracing both spiritual and bodily creatures, comprises everything within the other two opinions. It contains the thesis of St. Augustine, who was mindful of only spiritual creation, and it embraces the opinion of St. Basil, who supposed only a bodily creature.
This opinion was ratified by the Fourth Lateran Council held under Pope Innocent III. The Holy Roman Church professes that, from the beginning, God at once created corporeal creatures (those belonging to the world) and spiritual creatures (the angels). We find the same doctrine in the Decretals. Even the original Hebrew text of Genesis seems to be in agreement with this belief, where for heaven it reads hashamayim, a noun in the dual number, as if there were two kinds of heavens, to wit, a spiritual heaven and a corporeal heaven.
In other words, St. Lawrence of Brindisi, the last Doctor of the Church to write a detailed commentary on Genesis (with a specific reference to Lateran IV), confirms the truth of Dr. Seiler’s argument that “simul” in Lateran IV, in the context of a paragraph that contains two other terms that pertain to time—“ab initio temporis” and “deinde”—means “at once” in the sense of “at the same time.” However, as we document in the article at this link on the Kolbe website in the Latin Vulgate in use at the time of Lateran IV there are numerous passages in which “simul” has the meaning of relative simultaneity, so that “simul” in its temporal meaning can mean “at the same moment” or “more or less, at the same time.” For example, Joshua 10:5 reads:
“Congregati igitur ascenderunt quinque reges Amorreorum rex Hierusalem rex Hebron rex Hieremoth rex Lachis rex Eglon simul cum exercitibus suis et castrametati sunt circa Gabaon obpugnantes eam.”
“So the five kings of the Amorrhites being assembled together went up: the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jerimoth, the king of Lachis, the king of Eglon, they and their armies, and camped about Gabaon, laying siege to it.”
In other words, the five kings went up together (simul) not at the same instant but in a coordinated series of movements. In the same way, God made all things simul in a coordinated relatively simultaneous series of creative acts.
Similarly, in Numbers 6:17, Moses writes:
“Arietem vero immolabit hostiam pacificam Domino offerens simul canistrum azymorum et libamenta quæ ex more debentur.”
“But the ram he shall immolate for a sacrifice of peace offering to the Lord, offering at the same time (simul) the basket of unleavened bread, and the libations that are due by custom.”
In this instance, these items are not offered at the same instant, but in a coordinated series, with relative simultaneity, like the fiats of the Hexameron in Genesis Chapter One.
Fr. Boyd implied that the leaders of the Kolbe Center are being disobedient to the 1909 decrees of the PBC by holding that Catholics are bound to interpret “day” in Genesis One as a 24-hour day. But that is not true. We are adhering faithfully to those decrees, which place the burden of proof on those who challenge the literal and obvious sense of Genesis 1-3, NOT on those of us who defend the literal and obvious sense of the text, as did all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Indeed, we confidently expect a restoration of the Catholic Faith throughout the world, to the extent that clergy and laity alike once again place the burden of proof where it should always have remained—on those who question the Word of God as believed in the Church from the beginning, and NOT on those who defend it!
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the saints, may the Holy Ghost lead us into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. You can read our complete response to Fr. Boyd’s critique of the Kolbe Center’s position at this link in the Replies to Critics section of the Kolbe Center website.
P.P.S. As we enter the holy season of Advent, our co-worker Stephen Ogol is planning an outreach to the poorest of the poor in his area in Uganda, especially people with disabilities, the elderly, widows and orphans. He wants to distribute food and other essential household items worth about $11,000, but he needs our help. Please prayerfully consider going to the Kolbe home page and making a secure donation with a note indicating that it is for Stephen Ogol’s Christmas outreach.
