Newsletter

Kolbe Report 12/29/22

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

The feast of the Nativity of Our Lord reminds us of the wonderful truth that God created a complete and perfect Humanity for Himself in the virginal womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, just as He created the flawless humanity of St. Adam from the virgin earth on the sixth day of creation.  The season of Advent has also turned our thoughts to the final Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to the Resurrection of the dead, a doctrine that constitutes another powerful argument for the special creation of St. Adam and St. Eve at the beginning of time.

Special Creation and the Resurrection of the Body

Not even the most diehard theistic evolutionist believes that the Lord will evolve a resurrected body for every human being who has ever lived at the end of the world.  “The resurrection of the body” has always been understood to mean that God will instantaneously restore the bodies of all the dead.  As St. Robert Bellarmine explained in his famous catechism:  

In the beginning of the Creed it was said that God is Almighty, because He can do what seems impossible to us.  After considering that God made heaven and earth from nothing, you can have little difficulty believing that He can return a body that has been reduced to ash to its previous state  . . .

All will rise in that age and stature which we had or are going to have in our 33rd year of life, in which Our Lord rose from the dead.  The reason for this is that boys will reach that greatness which, had they attained it, they would have reached in their 33rd year.  And old men will rise in the flower of their youth at which, when they were 33 years of age, they enjoyed.   And if anyone were blind, or lame, or a dwarf, or deformed in any way in this life, he will rise again healthy, whole, and provided with every sort of perfection, because “the works of God are perfect,” therefore, what is necessary to a man will be proper, and all vices and defects of nature will be amended.

The Final Judgment

How incoherent it is to teach our young people that God took millions of years to evolve the bodies of the first human beings but that He will raise the same bodies of the just in a glorified state instantaneously at the end of the world!

The Resurrection of the Body: A Consoling Doctrine for Those with Disabilities

This beautiful doctrine has a special meaning for our modern world, since in 2022, according to LifeSiteNews:

Recent reports in The Atlantic and CBS News found that nearly 100 percent of unborn babies who test positive for Down syndrome are aborted in Iceland, 95 percent in Denmark, 77 percent in France and 67 percent in the United States.

It is good to remember that Our Lord created Adam and Eve instantaneously with infused knowledge of how to use a perfect, fully-developed human body without having gone through years of learning how to use the organs, muscles and other systems of that body.  In the Resurrection, those who had genetic defects or deformities will receive a perfect body, and, like St. Adam and St. Eve, they will receive infused knowledge of how to use a perfect, fully-developed human body without having gone through years of learning how to use their bodies. They will lack nothing integral to a perfect human nature, and for all eternity they will thank God for loving parents and brothers and sisters, if they were blessed to have them—and if they were robbed of those natural benefits, they will thank God for anyone who loved and appreciated them in this valley of tears.

The Creation of St. Eve

The Holy Innocents

Since we have just celebrated the feast of the Holy Innocents, I would like to add one final thought about the relationship between special creation, the sanctification of the Holy Innocents, and the possibility of salvation and sanctification for children who die before the age of reason, most especially those who are the victims of abortion.   According to the incorrupt Venerable Maria of Agreda in her mystical masterpiece the Mystical City of God, through the intercession of Our Blessed Mother, Mediatrix of all Graces, the Holy Innocents received the grace to unite their sufferings and deaths to the suffering and death of Our Lord, and, so, became true martyrs.

She knew as if She were present the great number of children that were killed and that all of them, though some were only eight days, two or six months old, and none of them over two years, had the use of their reason; that they all received a high knowledge of the being of God, perfect love, faith and hope, in which they performed heroic acts of faith, worship, and love of God, reverence and compassion for their parents. They prayed for their parents and, in reward for their sufferings, obtained for them light and grace for advance in spiritual things. They willingly submitted to martyrdom, in spite of the tenderness of their age, which made their sufferings so much the greater and consequently augmented their merits. A multitude of angels assisted them and bore them to limbo or to the bosom of Abraham. By their arrival they rejoiced the holy ancients and confirmed them in the hope of speedy liberation. All these were effects of the prayers of the divine Child and His Mother. Aware of all these wonders, She was inflamed with ardor and exclaimed: “Praise the Lord, ye children” and joined with them in the praise of the Author of these magnificent works, so worthy of His Goodness and Omnipotence.

Massacre of the Holy Innocents

Theistic evolution conditions its adherents to see man as the product of a natural process, either “front loaded” by the god of evolution from the beginning or mysteriously “guided” in some nebulous and undefined way over billions of years.  This perspective makes it difficult to conceive how God could not only create St. Adam and St. Eve as mature human beings but also instantaneously infuse into them the knowledge of how to use their newly-created bodies.  Theistic evolution also presumes that “death” has been an integral part of God’s plan for the universe from the beginning and so desensitizes its adherents to the horror of death and blinds them to the truth of His Revelation that it was “through the envy of the devil that death entered the world” (Wisdom 2:22) and that “God made not death; neither hath He pleasure in the destruction of the living; for He made all things that they might be” (Wisdom 1:13-14). When the death of children who have not reached the age of reason is considered in the light of these truths, it becomes apparent that they are all, like the Holy Innocents, victims of the devil’s envy, and that they would only need to receive the same grace that was granted to the Holy Innocents, to be able to unite their sufferings and deaths to the suffering and death of Our Lord, to be saved and sanctified.

In keeping with the principle, “In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity,” I do not claim that this possibility is actualized; I am only saying that it is consistent with the character of God when one considers it in the light of the way that He created our first parents and the way that He saved and sanctified the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem.  For that reason, I, for one, will continue to pray continually that all children who die before the age of reason, past, present and future, will receive the same grace that was granted to the Holy Innocents, in the same way that they did—through the prayers of the Mother of God, the Mediatrix of all Graces.

Yours in Christ through the Holy Theotokos in union with St. Joseph,

Hugh Owen

P.S.  For those interested in reading a theological defense of the thesis that aborted babies are probably saved and sanctified, Dominican theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols has written such a defense, drawing heavily from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.  It can be read at this link.

P.P.S.  We are in the midst of planning our seminars for 2023. If you would like to schedule a presentation or a full weekend seminar in a parish, school, home-school coop or other venue in your area in 2023, please contact me as soon as possible at howen@shentel.net.

P.P.P.S. The great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky prophesied that "Beauty will save the world!"  And it is no coincidence that sacred art that celebrates the fiat creation of all things is especially beautiful.  Keith Jones and his family have created an array of beautiful traditional Catholic flags that can be used to adorn your home or garden, one of them with a creation theme.  Please visit their website at this link. NB: for any sales generated through the Kolbe Center’s link, they will donate 20% of each sale to the Kolbe Center.

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