Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to our Give, Send, Go fundraiser. If you have not yet donated and you want the work of the Kolbe Center to continue, please give generously between now and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
In this newsletter I would like to focus on the way that the traditional reading of Genesis offers a cure for the diabolical disorientation of our times. These reflections flow from a conversation that I had recently with a brilliant young Catholic intellectual who is thoroughly disgusted with the way that traditional Catholics in the West have failed to preserve their Catholic cultural heritage and have allowed their families to be amalgamated into the globalist anti-culture. He cites the example of Catholic families who have emigrated to the United States from other countries with a rich Catholic cultural heritage only to allow their children to be absorbed into the evolution-based secular humanist mainstream. He is extremely pessimistic about the future of Catholicism in a country where many young Catholics know next to nothing about their Catholic ancestors and dramatic productions at the most conservative Catholic colleges include plays like “Annie Get Your Gun.”
The night after this conversation, I was tormented by this young man’s negativity and by the accuracy of his critique of conservative Catholicism in this country. Mercifully, in the middle of the night, Our Lord brought to my mind a striking image—the image of St. Adam and St. Eve when they came forth from Him in the beginning. He reminded me that St. Adam and St. Eve had no parents, no ancestors, no cultural heritage. Yet they had an intimate relationship with the Most Holy Trinity from the first moment of their existence. Of angels and man in their original state, St. Thomas Aquinas writes:
Their contemplation was higher than ours, and by means of it, they drew nearer to God than we do and so could in a clear way know more things about divine actions and mysteries than we can. For this reason, there was not in them a faith by which God is sought as being absent, in the way that He is sought by us. For He was more present to them by the light of wisdom than He is to us, even though He was not present to them as He is to the blessed through the light of glory.
The Original Holiness of St. Adam and St. Eve
According to Fr. Thomas Crean:
Our first parents, thinks St Thomas, were conscious of God in a way that surpasses all experience on earth, unless perhaps it may sometimes have been matched in the lives of the greatest mystics. Part of the reason for this, he also explains, is that until we see God face-to-face, all our knowledge of Him is mediated by creatures; what St Paul calls the knowledge “through a mirror.” Now in this regard, immaterial things provide a better mirror than material ones, being more similar to God Himself, who is Spirit. But in our fallen state, we experience considerable difficulty in grasping non-material realities directly, which, in passing, is one reason why we need the sacraments. Our first parents, however, would have been able to attend to non-material creatures without difficulty, having as they did a reason that dominated the imagination and was not dominated by it. For example, they would have had a much clearer idea of the spirituality of their soul than we do. For this reason, they would also have had a clearer knowledge of God the Creator, who is reflected by all His works, but especially, as I have just said, by the non-material ones. So Aquinas writes:
The rectitude in which man was divinely instituted was such that lower things were subordinate to higher ones, and higher one were not obstructed by lower ones. Therefore the first man was not prevented by external things from having a clear and steady contemplation of [God’s] intelligible effects, which he grasped under the light coming to him from the first Truth, both by natural and supernatural knowledge.
For this reason, this antelapsarian knowledge of God is said to be “in a certain sense midway between the knowledge of our present state, and the knowledge of heaven where God is seen in His essence.” Adam did not reason from God’s effects to God’s existence, as we have to; rather, in the light both of a clear reason and a clear faith, he saw God in His effects, even though not according to God’s essence. Perhaps we might compare this knowledge to the knowledge of a friend’s soul that we can have by seeing his face; we don’t see the essence of his soul, and yet there is no process of reasoning or interval of time between seeing our friend’s expression and knowing his thought. Somewhat in this way did Adam see God in creation.
Divine Orientation in Space and Time
As I followed Our Lord’s promptings, I recalled that St. Adam had received a revelation from God as to how, when and over what period of time He created the world and that this allowed him to orient himself correctly in time and space from the beginning of time. This divine orientation informed him that he was the “apple of God’s eye,” that God had created everything for him, his wife and their descendants, and that God was holding everything in the cosmos in existence with His love, just to have the joy of receiving love from St. Adam and St. Eve and their descendants. This realization brought me great joy, as I realized that even the most culturally impoverished victim of secular humanist brainwashing can be rapidly liberated and rightly oriented in space and time by having the Gospel of the Catholic Faith proclaimed to him on the foundation of God’s Genesis Revelation. Conversely, I could be, say, an Irish Catholic, fluent in Irish Gaelic and well versed in the music, poetry, dance, dress, and customs of traditional Irish Catholic culture; yet if I believed in Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology, I would be just as disoriented in the ways that matter most as my globalist neighbors.
This conviction was fully confirmed a few days later when I traveled to the Midwest for a Kolbe seminar and spent several hours with a young man who drove me to and from my seminar venues. He testified to the way that the trailer for our DVD series “How the World Was Made in Six Days” had completely transformed his life in fifteen minutes, as it drove home to him the reality that God had made everything for him and for mankind, and that he was “the apple of God’s eye.” It suddenly struck me that a young man could know every aspect of his family’s Catholic cultural heritage, yet if he did not know his orientation in space and time as revealed by God first to St. Adam, then to St. Moses, and then as handed on to the whole Christian faithful by Holy Church, he would be almost as much a victim of the diabolical disorientation of modern times as a child raised to think of himself as a “global citizen”—since both of them would be equally convinced that they lived on a speck of dust in a remote corner of a vast universe in which man evolved as an after-thought after billions of years.
St. Adam and St. Eve: Patron Saints of the Culturally Impoverished
I now realize that St. Adam and St. Eve should be invoked and identified as saints who derived their original joy and dignity from their relationship with their Creator and His Divine Revelation and not from any cultural heritage that was handed down to them. In these times of cultural impoverishment, we should be determined to give our children and grandchildren the same orientation in time and space that St. Adam and St. Eve and all of the Apostles and Fathers of the Church received, so that they will grow up knowing their infinite value in God’s sight and experiencing God’s love in and through the things He has made for them. This knowledge will liberate our young people from slavery to machines that mediate between them and God’s creation and will encourage them to relate directly to the plants, animals, and human beings that God created for them to know, love and enjoy. On this foundation, our young people will come to appreciate their Catholic cultural heritage and to recognize that the Faith that produced the greatest achievements of Catholic art, architecture, agriculture, and craftsmanship was firmly founded on God’s Genesis Revelation.
Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. In the summer of 2024, Hugh Owen taught a 10-week class hosted by Teach to the Text on his book I Have Spoken to You from Heaven: A Catholic Defense of Creation in Six Days. Mr. Owen gave a 30-45 minute presentation each week followed by 15-30 minutes of Q&A ,which may be especially beneficial for auditory and visual learners. The recordings (10 hours of educational viewing) are now available for purchase at Teach to the Text. In these lectures and discussions, Mr. Owen expounds on arguments for creation in six days, presented from Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, Magisterial teaching, history and natural science. He presents and explains the evidence for the truth that God created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain in six natural days is so overwhelming that the Magisterium—the teaching authority of the Catholic Church—has all of the precedent that it needs to define this truth once and for all in the future. Finally, he answers questions from students about the material. The book I Have Spoken to You from Heaven can be purchased from the Kolbe web store. Click here to purchase the recordings of Hugh Owen’s classes in which he teaches the book to a class of adults and young people.
