Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
Have you ever wondered why the evolutionary belief system is so hard to dislodge, in spite of the fact that experimental and observational evidence consistently contradicts its claims? Leaving aside the role that the demonic forces play in perpetuating evolutionary mythology, there is a philosophical reason why almost everyone in the world today is conditioned to believe in molecules-to-man evolution. The idea of progress that gained widespread currency during the so-called Enlightenment period has become so embedded in our consciousness that the average person firmly believes that we have “progressed” far beyond the intellectual capabilities of “primitive” man. The success of the Enlightenment thinkers in convincing the intellectual elite of the Western world of the truth of this claim played an indispensable role in paving the way for the acceptance of Darwinian evolution, especially when technological advances, like the harnessing of electricity, the telegraph, and the telephone, seemed to demonstrate the superiority of modern man to his less-technologically-advanced ancestors. It is interesting to note, however, that the saints who were blessed with the gift of prophecy during the so-called Enlightenment period continued to bear witness to the exalted nature of our first parents and of the first-created world before the Fall, thus giving the lie to the claim that modern man was naturally superior to his most remote ancestors.
Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich
Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich was born on September 8, 1774, in Flamske, in Westphalia, Germany, as the errors of the so-called Enlightenment began to sweep across the once-Christian countries of Europe, sowing seeds of doubt that soon produced a widespread denial of divine revelation, divine creation, and the reality of the spiritual world. From infancy, Blessed Anne experienced the presence of God, of angels, saints, and disembodied spirits, more vividly than most people experience the every-day world of clouds and trees. By bearing witness to these transcendent realities, she gave the lie to the skeptics, sophists, materialists and naturalists, who sought to reduce everything to matter and to the activity of natural causes.
From the first time she attended Holy Mass as a child, Blessed Anne had an infused understanding of Church Latin and a mystical knowledge of the mysteries that take place during the Holy Sacrifice. Discerning a call to religious life, she consecrated herself to God as a contemplative nun of the Augustinian Order, in Dulmen, Germany. As enlightenment philosophy took hold in the highest echelons of the German government, contemplative religious orders were suppressed—as “useless”!—and Blessed Anne was forced to leave the convent. By the age of 28, she began to bear the wounds of the Crown of Thorns, and spent most of the rest of her life in bed as a victim soul, eventually receiving the stigmata of Jesus, a cross on her heart, and the Lord’s lance-wound in her side. For the last several years of her life, Blessed Anne lived on the Holy Eucharist alone, offering herself as a “living Host” (cf. Romans 12-1-2) in reparation for the sins of the world and for lukewarm and apostate Catholics in particular.
Our Lord once told Blessed Anne that no other prophet had ever been shown a more complete vision of the mysteries of God’s providential action, past, present and future. As a confirmation of this extraordinary gift, Anne’s revelations led directly to the discovery of the ruins of the Blessed Mother’s home in Ephesus, in present-day Turkey. Blessed Anne’s friend and secretary, Clemens Brentano, recorded her descriptions of the home in Ephesus which St. John had built for the Blessed Virgin after they left Jerusalem.
A French priest named Gouyet read Brentano’s account and went to Ephesus to see if he could find the remains of Our Lady’s home. He found the ruins of a structure that matched the description in Brentano’s work, but he could not persuade the Church authorities to investigate. Many years later, however, in 1891, two Lazarist priests persuaded the local diocese to make a full investigation. The authenticity of the site was confirmed, and the House of the Virgin became a recognized place of pilgrimage for Catholics in 1892. The Lazarist Fathers have cared for the shrine and its pilgrims ever since, assisted by a small number of religious sisters. Both Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to the shrine, which is one of the few places in the Middle East where Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims worship side by side.
Blessed Anne’s Biblical Revelations
During Blessed Anne’s lifetime, Enlightenment thinkers launched an all-out assault on the historical truth of Genesis and the Biblical history of the world. As the skeptics of her day embraced pagan conjectures regarding the origins of man, the Earth, and the universe, Blessed Anne, in her visions, saw Jesus conversing with the Jewish scholars of his time, defending the accuracy of the Mosaic account, and exposing serious errors in the Egyptian chronologies. She told Clemens Brentano:
... I beheld Jesus teaching at Aruma. Jesus, speaking before the Pharisees of the call of Abraham and his sojourn in Egypt, exposed the errors of the Egyptian calendar. He told them that the world had now existed 4028 years. When I heard Jesus say this, he was Himself 31 years old.
As Kant, Lyell, Darwin, and their disciples won most of the European intelligentsia over to their naturalist creed—“things have always been the same from the beginning of creation”—Blessed Anne’s visions of the first created world and of the original holiness of Adam confirmed the radical difference between the original creation and the fallen world. According to Darwin, Lyell and their disciples, not only man but plants and animals of all kinds were the product of an evolutionary process. For them, a struggle for existence provided the impetus for the progressive improvement of living things, an improvement that placed any hope of perfection in the future. Their ignorance of the genetic mechanisms behind biological change kept them from recognizing the harmony between the Mosaic account of the decay of man and all living things from an original perfection and real-world observations in nature and in the laboratory. In her visions, Blessed Anne saw the unspeakable beauty of the first-created world, and bore witness to the immaculate state of nature before the Original Sin:
Creation was not then as it is now. Plants and flowers and trees had other forms. They are wild and misshapen now compared with what they were, for all things are now thoroughly degenerate. . . Vegetation was luxuriant, perfectly green, of a species pure, sound, and exempt from decay. Nothing appeared to receive or to need the attention of an earthly gardener. I thought: How is it that all is so beautiful, since as yet there are no human beings! Ah! Sin has not yet entered. There has been no destruction, no rending asunder. All is sound, all is holy. As yet there has been no healing, no repairing. All is pure, nothing has needed purification . . .
The Fall and Its Aftermath
The children of the Enlightenment based their rejection of Divine Revelation on a new faith in naturalism. It was more “reasonable,” they argued, with Descartes, that the same natural processes occurring today produced the present order of nature than that the creative action of God produced the order of nature in the beginning. It followed from this article of their creed that there had not been an original state of perfection in the beginning of creation. Instead of an exalted human nature, which fell into the present state of corruption through Original Sin, they imagined a primitive state, followed by a long history of progress, not through the assistance of God’s grace, but through man’s unaided efforts to acquire knowledge and to master the material world. From her bed of suffering, Blessed Anne gave the lie to these arrogant speculations by bearing witness to the violent contrast between the world before and after the Fall, as she beheld it in her visions. While Enlightenment savants spun fantasies about man’s original happiness in a state of nature, Blessed Anne was shown heart-breaking visions of Adam and Eve’s misery in their fallen condition:
After some time, I saw Adam and Eve wandering about in great distress. They were no longer beaming with light, and they went about, one here, the other there, as if seeking something they had lost. They were ashamed of each other. Every step they took led them downward, as if the ground gave way beneath their feet.
In spite of the terrible consequences of the Fall, St. Adam and St. Eve retained their natural excellence of mind and body. As documented in the genealogies in Genesis Chapters 5 and 11, the long life-spans of the Patriarchs bear witness to the exceptional health that they inherited from our first parents, in spite of the loss of the preternatural gifts. In recent decades, archaeologists have made several discoveries that have confirmed the intellectual prowess of ancient man, one of the most fascinating of which is the way that ancient Egyptians seem to have found to “cast” the building blocks of the pyramids.
The Wonders of Ancient Man’s Technology
Michel Barsoum is a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University. After being introduced to the hypothesis of Joseph Davidovits, one-time director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of concrete using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime and water, Barsoum decided to investigate. As reported in a livescience article:
...[Through] extensive scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations and other testing, Barsoum and his research group finally began to draw some conclusions about the pyramids. They found that the tiniest structures within the inner and outer casing stones were indeed consistent with a reconstituted limestone. The cement binding the limestone aggregate was either silicon dioxide (the building block of quartz) or a calcium and magnesium-rich silicate mineral.
The stones also had a high water content--unusual for the normally dry, natural limestone found on the Giza plateau--and the cementing phases, in both the inner and outer casing stones, were amorphous, in other words, their atoms were not arranged in a regular and periodic array. Sedimentary rocks such as limestone are seldom, if ever, amorphous.
The sample chemistries the researchers found do not exist anywhere in nature. "Therefore," says Barsoum, "it's very improbable that the outer and inner casing stones that we examined were chiseled from a natural limestone block."
More startlingly, Barsoum and another of his graduate students, Aaron Sakulich, recently discovered the presence of silicon dioxide nanoscale spheres (with diameters only billionths of a meter across) in one of the samples. This discovery further confirms that these blocks are not natural limestone. . .
At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original--albeit unknowing--nanotechnologists."
As if the scientific evidence isn't enough, Barsoum has pointed out a number of common sense reasons why the pyramids were not likely constructed entirely of chiseled limestone blocks.
Egyptologists are consistently confronted by unanswered questions: How is it possible that some of the blocks are so perfectly matched that not even a human hair can be inserted between them? Why, despite the existence of millions of tons of stone, carved presumably with copper chisels, has not one copper chisel ever been found on the Giza Plateau?
Although Barsoum's research has not answered all of these questions, his work provides insight into some of the key questions. For example, it is now more likely than not that the tops of the pyramids are cast, as it would have been increasingly difficult to drag the stones to the summit.
Also, casting would explain why some of the stones fit so closely together. Still, as with all great mysteries, not every aspect of the pyramids can be explained. How the Egyptians hoisted 70-ton granite slabs halfway up the great pyramid remains as mysterious as ever.
Barsoum believes that the study of the casting of the stones of the pyramid may lead to dramatic improvements in building methods during the twenty-first century. Whether or not that comes to pass, his research has already helped to call into question the sacred dogma of “progress” and of modern man’s intellectual superiority to our ancient ancestors. As Dr. John Sanford has documented again and again, the evidence from genetics confirms the sacred history of Genesis and shows that the human race is not evolving into superman but devolving from a more highly-ordered state to a less-ordered one. Moreover, the best efforts of the new Nimrods of this world to evolve themselves into supermen in a new Tower of Babel are doomed to failure, as the designed complexity of the human genome is so far beyond our comprehension that any attempts to “improve” on God’s handiwork are likely to fail even more miserably than man’s attempts to modify the genetics of food plants.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. We have received a permit to hold a “demonstration,” i.e., an evangelization outreach in front of the Natural History Museum in the Mall in Washington, D.C., on June 18. However, we need more volunteers to be able to take advantage of this opportunity. If you would be willing and able to join us from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 18, please email me as soon as possible at howen@shentel.net
P.P.S. Our annual leadership retreat has been scheduled to take place from August 27-September 2, 2023, at the Apostolate for Family Consecration retreat center in Bloomingdale, Ohio. For more information or to register, please contact me at howen@shentel.net. If you know of any young adults who would like to attend gratis in exchange for helping out during the retreat, please let me know.
