The Debate between Dr. Thomas Seiler and Fr. Robert Boyd can be viewed at this link.
Dear Matthew,
Pax Christi!
Thank you for organizing the debate a few days ago.
I was disappointed that Fr. Boyd chose to answer my question with an ad hominem attack instead of with a direct response. However, while I could have proven that the interpretation of “the seventh day” that he gave was in total contradiction to the teaching of the Catechism of Trent in the passage I had quoted, I felt bound by the rules of post-debate Q and A etiquette to receive his insult in silence. However, for the sake of those in the audience who would interpret my silence as an inability to answer Fr. Boyd’s dismissive response, I have prepared a response to some of the theological points that he made. If there is a way to post my response in such a way that everyone who viewed the debate can see it and so that Fr. Boyd can also respond to what I have written within that forum, that would be splendid. If not, at least you can consider these points as you continue to discern the truth regarding this subject.
With regard to the claim that I (Hugh) or we—I am not sure if the “you” in Fr. Boyd’s statement was singular or plural—know nothing of systematic theology and philosophy, my colleagues on the advisory council and other friends and supporters of the Kolbe Center include Catholic scholars with advanced degrees in Theology, Philosophy and in every area of natural science. For myself, while I do not have academic degrees in Theology or Philosophy, I have sat at the feet of some of the finest traditional Catholic theologians and philosophers in the world during the last thirty years, and have studied the sources to which they directed me, so that the statements that I make about creation theology are not my own musings, but a distillation of the wisdom of outstanding traditional Catholic theologians and of the Fathers, Doctors and greatest Catholic commentators on the Bible in the history of the Church.
As an example of the benefit I have derived from this teaching and guidance, I am able to state confidently that Fr. Boyd’s dismissal of Dr. Seiler’s interpretation of 2 Peter 3 as referring exclusively to those who would deny the imminent Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ brings him into conflict with no less an authority than Fr. Cornelius à Lapide, who I am sure Fr. Boyd would recognize as one of the greatest Biblical commentators of the last 500 years. In his commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel 18:8 which states: “But yet the Son of man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?” Fr. Lapide writes:
Our dear friend, shall He find faith—perfect faith, that is; faith formed by certain confidence (fiducia) and charity. “This,” says S. Augustine (tract xxxvi), “is scarcely found on earth, for the Church of the faithful is full of imperfect faith, and is, as it were, half dead.” For only a perfect faith strengthens a man to pray always, and to overcome all tribulations bravely. Christ Himself explains it so in Matthew (24:12), saying, Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved.
This will happen more especially at the end of the world, before the coming of Christ to judgment, when men shall eat and drink and give themselves over to pleasure and think not of the judgment, as Christ said, (Luke 17:26 ff). Thus Bede says that when Christ appears, the number of the elect shall be very small, indeed, at that time many will not have the orthodox faith. For there shall arise false christs and prophets and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect (Matthew 24:24) And as S. Peter says in his second epistle (3:3-4), In the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts, saying: Where is his promise or his coming? That is, they will deny that Christ is coming to judgment, even when His coming is near at hand; and they give their reason: For since the time that the fathers slept, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. As if they had said, “Nature has made the world: the same Nature continues to guide the world along the same course, and always will continue it. Therefore, there is no God to put an end to it: no Deity who will judge our works, and punish them” (emphasis added).
The words underlined and bolded give the same interpretation that Dr. Seiler gave in his presentation. That being the case, that interpretation certainly cannot be dismissed the way that Fr. Boyd dismissed it—especially when, as Fr. Lapide observed, it perfectly describes the fundamental premise that undergirds all of the naturalistic uniformitarian accounts of the origins of man and the universe that have been proposed since the time of Descartes, and that are now all but universally accepted by the intellectual elite of the western world.
One of the theologians from whom my colleagues and I received a tremendous formation in the traditional creation theology of the Church was Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, formerly professor of dogmatic theology at the Seraphicum, who attended and spoke at our First International Catholic Symposium on Creation in Rome in 2002. On our website we have posted his masterful summary of traditional creation theology, In the Beginning, in which he demonstrates that special creation in six-days ought to be the “default” position for post-Vatican II-Catholics, in the light of Scripture, Tradition, and authoritative Magisterial teaching, and in light of the inability of natural scientists to present any “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” for alternative accounts of the origins of man and the universe, based on unwarranted extrapolation from the present order of nature back to the beginning of the universe, as in the speculative scenarios of Big Bang cosmology and molecules-to-man-evolutionary biology. In his treatise on creation theology, Fr. Fehlner sets forth the distinction between creation and providence in perfect agreement with the teaching of Dr. Seiler:
In the work of creation, the six days of Genesis, the Church has always understood God to be the principal Agent, although each of His actions during that period may not have been creative in the strictest sense, but only in the broader sense of miraculous. He may have used instruments already created, or acted Himself on pre-existent matter as in the case of Adam's body "from the slime of the earth." In any case, although individual creatures once created may have acted before the end of the sixth day when God "rested," they did so directly under the creative power of God, and only after completion of the entire work did the world begin to function with a relative autonomy in the sense of secondary, principal causality.
The importance of this distinction can be illustrated with the popular objection to the creation of the heavenly bodies in a single day of 24 hours. It is claimed in the objection that the formation of these bodies would have postulated a duration of enormous length, since such is the time required for light from these bodies to reach the earth at present, and that light was observed by the first man on his appearance (according to Genesis). The objection, however, begs the question. It assumes as certain what in fact the proponents of evolutionary theory should prove, that the processes now observed in the transmission of light from the heavenly bodies to earth - and the duration needed to traverse the distance between them - are the same by which they were made to shine initially. Where the Creator is the principal Cause, there is no reason why He cannot do all this without the aid of natural processes and with or without any duration pleasing to Him and appropriate to His ends (24 hours as Genesis tells us). Nor should it be said that the appearance of long "light-years" is a deception. Appearances are deceptive only where no key to their interpretation is provided. Thus, what looks like bread and smells like wine is bread and wine except where those elements have been "transubstantiated" into the Body and Blood of Christ by the consecratory action of a priest. There the appearances of bread and wine, real enough, indicate not bread and wine, but the Body and Blood of the Savior. This is known because God has told us so, that such power has been given to an ordained priest. So too in this case, the Creator, being the only witness to what happened in the beginning, has told us that He made the stars and made them shine within a period of 24 hours, thus providing a key to the interpretation of the appearances "in the beginning."
Thus, the divine creative act is distinguished from His conservative act, both of which, though identical in God with His power, have different terms outside of God. The second conserving act presupposes the completion of the "founding" of the world, and is directed to its relatively autonomous operation. The first is a reflection of what Catholic theologians subsequently called God's absolute powers, by which He not only made the world, but can destroy it, modify it, or temporarily interrupt its ordinary rhythms, as in the case of a miracle. The full extent of this power we cannot know simply from what He has already done, for He can always do something more. The second reflects His ordered power and is known from nature and the laws of nature discerned in creation. https://kolbecenter.org/in-the-beginning/
Fr. Fehlner never tired of saying that this traditional distinction between the order of creation and the order of providence was of fundamental importance but that it had been largely forgotten by contemporary theologians. This distinction is directly related to the question that I asked Fr. Boyd about the teaching of the Catechism of Trent on the Sabbath:
We now come to the meaning of the word sabbath. Sabbath is a Hebrew word which signifies cessation. To keep the Sabbath, therefore, means to cease from labor and to rest. In this sense the seventh day was called the Sabbath, because God, having finished the creation of the world, rested on that day from all the work which He had done. Thus it is called by the Lord in Exodus. (emphasis added)
Fr. Boyd dismissed the idea that the “seventh day” was to be taken as a literal 24-hour-day in this paragraph, but it is clear from the context that it ought to be understood in exactly that way. The proof lies in the reference to Exodus where Moses tells us that God wrote “with the finger of God” the Ten Commandments, the third of which says “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day” and:
declares that the seventh day was consecrated by God to His worship; for it is written: Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy works; but on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God. From these words we learn that the Sabbath is consecrated to the Lord, that we are required on that day to render Him the duties of religion, and to know that the seventh day is a sign of the Lord's rest.
The Catechism is teaching that the seventh day was consecrated by God at the foundation of the world and that pastors should draw a one-to-one correspondence between the days of creation week and the days of the ordinary week with which the Hebrews and the readers of the catechism were familiar. When the Catechism of Trent goes on to explain why the Day of the Lord was changed from Saturday to Sunday, it underscores the meaning of the seventh day as a 24-hour day in the passage quoted above, as it teaches:
But the Church of God has thought it well to transfer the celebration and observance of the Sabbath to Sunday.
For, as on that day light first shone on the world, so by the Resurrection of our Redeemer on the same day, by whom was thrown open to us the gate to eternal life, we were called out of darkness into light; and hence the Apostles would have it called the Lord's day.
We also learn from the Sacred Scriptures that the first day of the week was held sacred because on that day the work of creation commenced, and on that day the Holy Ghost was given to the Apostles. (emphasis added)
So, far from referring to the seventh day in other than the literal and obvious sense of the word as Fr. Boyd suggested, the Roman Catechism not only teaches that the Sabbath was instituted on the seventh day from the creation of the world, it also teaches that the Sabbath was changed from Saturday to Sunday, not only because the Resurrection took place on a Sunday, but because “on that day light first shone on the world,” proving that the Catechism of Trent followed the overwhelming majority of the Fathers in treating the days of the Hexameron as sequential 24-hour days. “The first day of the week” when “the work of creation commenced,” i.e., the “first Sunday of the world” is directly compared to the “day the Holy Ghost was given to the Apostles,” a normal Sunday.
If anyone doubts that the Kolbe Center is interpreting the Catechism correctly on this point, he need only consider the fact that St. Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church, in his catechism, based on the decrees of the Council of Trent, teaches categorically that the Sabbath was established because God created all things in six 24-hour days and rested from the work of creation on the seventh day, consecrating it to Himself from the foundation of the world. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Bishops of the United States mandated the production of a catechism for all of the Catholics in the United States, based on St. Robert Bellarmine’s catechism. Consequently, every Catholic in the United States was taught for many decades, well into the twentieth century, that God created all things in six 24-hour days. Which brings me back to my original question to Fr. Boyd: “Are we to believe that God allowed His Church to teach a false account of the origins of man and the universe right up to modern times?”
In answer to this question, we are often told, as Fr. Boyd told us in the debate, that we are misunderstanding the genre of Genesis 1-3, and that it ought to be read as poetry, not as history. The only patristic source Fr. Boyd cited for that view was St. Augustine, but, as Dr. Seiler demonstrated with his quotation from The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, St. Augustine always held that the genre of Genesis is history and that figurative interpretations of the text ought to be built upon the foundation of the literal historical truth of the narrative. Dr. Seiler could have cited many other passages from St. Augustine to demonstrate that the Doctor of Grace maintained his view that Genesis is history “from beginning to end,” right up to the end of his life. In the City of God, for example, he repudiates the pagan intellectuals who held that the world—not just humanity—was older than six thousand years, stating:
They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed. And, not to spend many words in exposing the baselessness of these documents, in which so many thousands of years are accounted for, nor in proving that their authorities are totally inadequate, let me cite only that letter which Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias, giving her the narrative he had from an Egyptian priest…[…] And therefore the former must receive the greater credit, because it does not exceed the true account of the duration of the world as it is given by our documents, which are truly sacred. (emphasis added); Augustine. The City of God, trans. by G. G. Walsh and G. Monahan, Book 12, Chapter 10(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 390-391.
St. Augustine and the Fathers could be sure of the age of the world because the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 allowed them to calculate from more recent times for which there were historical records of various kinds, all the way back to the creation of the world. That is why even Origen, who, of course, was not a Church Father, but a very influential thinker in the patristic era at the most allegorical end of the exegetical spectrum, wrote that we could be sure that the universe was much less than ten thousand years old because the writings of Moses tell us so. In another passage in the City of God, St. Augustine writes that the long ages of the Patriarchs as given by Moses in Genesis are to be taken in the literal and obvious sense:
It is now time to examine the evidence which proves convincingly that the Biblical years, so far from being only one-tenth as long as ours, were precisely as long as the present solar years. This is true of the years used in giving those extremely long life-spans. […] The truth is that the day was then just what it is now, a period measured by the twenty-four hours in the course of a single daytime and nighttime. So, too, a month then was what it is now, a period fixed by the waxing and waning of the moon. The year also was the same then as now, a period of twelve lunar months plus five days and a quarter required to complete the solar revolution. And it was on the twenty-seventh day of the second month of this kind of a year – which was the 600th of Noe’s life – that the flood began; and the forty days of continuous rain which the Scripture records were not ‘days’ of a little more than two hours but periods of light and darkness each lasting twenty-four hours. The conclusion is that some men of those ancient times reached an age of more than 900 years and these years were just as long as the years that made up Abraham’s age of 170, and his son Isaac’s age of 180, and then of Jacob’s age of nearly 150 and, some time later, Moses’ age of 120, and as long as the years that, in our time, make up the age of men who live to be seventy or eighty or a little more and of which last years it is said, ‘most of them are labor and vanity.’ Whatever the discrepancy in the numbers given in the Hebrew original and in our translations, it does not affect their agreement in this matter of long life-spans in the early days. (emphasis added); Augustine. The City of God, trans. by G. G. Walsh and G. Monahan, Book 15, Chapter 14 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 347-349.
The one and only point on which St. Augustine departed from the overwhelming majority of the Fathers was on the meaning of day in Genesis One. But this was NOT because St. Augustine believed that Genesis was anything other than inerrant historical narrative. It was because in his defective Vetus Latina translation of Genesis, there appeared to be a contradiction between Genesis One and Genesis Two if one interpreted the days of Genesis One as literal 24-hour days. Had St. Augustine been working with St. Jerome’s more accurate Vulgate translation, we can be quite sure that he would never have proposed his idea of an instantaneous creation that was revealed to the angels in segments corresponding to the six days of creation. Moreover, even on this one point, St. Augustine moved much closer to the majority view of the Fathers towards the end of his life. For example, in The City of God, he writes:
[A]ccording to Scripture, the sun was made on the fourth day. Of course, there is mention in the beginning that ‘light’ was made by the Word of God, and that God separated it from darkness, calling the light day and the darkness night. But no experience of our senses can tell us just what kind of ‘light’ it was and by what kind of alternating movement it caused ‘morning’ and ‘evening.’ Not even our intellects can comprehend what is meant, yet we can have no hesitation in believing the fact. (emphasis added); (Augustine. The City of God, trans. by G. G. Walsh and G. Monahan, Book 11, Chapter 7 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 212-213).
In regard to everything except the meaning of “day” in Genesis One, St. Augustine was very consistent in upholding the literal and obvious historical sense of everything in the Genesis narrative. For example, in regard to the physical reality of the Tree of Life, he writes:
It is strange and hardly tolerable to observe how men want to take “Paradise” as figuratively spoken and yet do not want the physical reality to have a figurative meaning. But if in the case of narratives such as those about Hagar and Sarah and Ishmael and Isaac they admit that there is both historical fact and symbolic meaning, I fail to see why they do not grant that the tree of life both existed as a real material tree and at the same time symbolized Wisdom. (emphasis added); Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, Vol. 2, Book 8, Chapter 5, paragraph 10-11, (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 40-41.
St. Augustine even warned his readers against intellectuals who would try to get them to reject the literal historical truth of Genesis in favor of astronomical speculation. He wrote:
But more dangerous is the error of certain weak brethren who faint away when they hear these irreligious critics learnedly and eloquently discoursing on the theories of astronomy or on any of the questions relating to the elements of this universe. With a sigh, they esteem these teachers as superior to themselves, looking upon them as great men; and they return with disdain to the books which were written for the good of their souls; and, although they ought to drink from these books with relish, they can scarcely bear to take them up. Turning away in disgust from the unattractive wheat field, they long for the blossoms on the thorn. (emphasis added); (Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter 20, paragraph 40, (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 44.
It is important to note that there is no contradiction between this passage and that other passage from St. Augustine so often quoted against us where he cautions Christians against attempting to support their poorly-founded opinions about the natural world from Scripture, thus bringing disgrace upon the Word of God and the Catholic Faith when men learned in the natural sciences expose their errors. In the passage quoted above St. Augustine is talking about the Mosaic account of the SUPERNATURAL creation of all things at the beginning of time. In the other passage, he is talking about the NATURAL order of things. Thus, there is no doubt whatsoever that St. Augustine would have rejected Monsignor Lemaitre’s claim to be able to extrapolate from observations in the present order of things all the way back to the beginning of the universe to explain how everything came to be, since St. Augustine taught, together with all the Fathers and Doctors, that the entire work of creation was SUPERNATURAL and that the natural order that we are living in only began when the entire work of creation was finished. Moreover, Genesis is no less historical when it relates supernatural events, like the fiats of creation, than when it relates natural events, like the birth of Cain and Abel. In both cases, the narrative is, in St. Augustine’s words, from beginning to end in the genre of history.
The only authoritative source that Fr. Boyd cited in support of his view that Genesis is poetry and not historical narrative, as St. Augustine and all of the Fathers and Doctors believed and taught, is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, as Fr. Boyd certainly knows better than we do, a Catechism is supposed to be a summary of defined doctrine, not a vehicle for introducing novel teachings. That is why outstanding theologians, like Fr. Brian Harrison, objected to Pope Francis’ introduction of his novel teaching on the intrinsic evil of capital punishment into the CCC, since that teaching has no basis in Scripture, Tradition, or prior authoritative Magisterial teaching, and actually contradicts the authoritative teaching of Pope Innocent III in the profession of faith that he required the Waldensian heretics to make before they could be received into the Church. Yet none of the quotations that Fr. Boyd cited from the CCC on the genre of Genesis as poetry derive from any authoritative prior Magisterial teaching. The CCC is certainly authoritative when it summarizes the doctrines of the Faith as previously defined, but not when it introduces novelties, like the claim, in contradiction to the entire Tradition of the Church, that Genesis is “poetry” rather than “history.”
With regard to St. Maximilian Kolbe and his acceptance of long ages, in reality, far from being an embarrassment to the Kolbe Center, the fact that St. Maximilian, our secondary patron, acknowledged a general acceptance of long ages only underscores the folly of tracing the roots of the current crisis of faith to Vatican II, since the pseudo-scientific assault on the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis appears to have entered the seminaries of Europe during or soon after the pontificate of St. Pius X, and clearly affected St. Maximilian’s understanding of the development of stars, galaxies, and the solar system. In the text that Fr. Boyd cited, St. Maximilian writes:
The grains of dust that are the earth, the sun, the stars and the nebula, and also this chair on which I am now sitting, move in an infinite space. To what destination? From what origin? And for how much time have they been moving? Up to now science has not found answers to these questions.
The key sentence in passage is the one in bold, since it shows that St. Maximilian was by no means convinced that the answers that natural scientists offered to these questions were true. Moreover, St. Maximilian’s awareness of the naturalistic character of scientific speculation in his own day makes us even more confident of his intercession on our behalf, since from Heaven he intercedes all the more fervently on behalf of our efforts to restore the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which, according to the former Franciscan superior general and Doctor of the Church St. Bonaventure, entails that “We must specifically hold that physical nature was brought into existence in six days” (Breviloquium, Part II).
There are many reasons why we believe that the traditional doctrine of creation is the only one that harmonizes with the rest of St. Maximilian’s theology, including the most important concept in his theology—after the Incarnation—the Immaculate Conception. In his writings on the Immaculate Conception, St. Maximilian predicted that theologians would continually derive new insights from their meditation on this mystery. In the last major piece of writing that he dictated before going to the starvation bunker in Auschwitz, St. Maximilian demonstrated that, with the words “I am the Immaculate Conception,” Our Lady of Lourdes gave the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution. He explained:
Who then are you, O Immaculate Conception?
Not God, of course, because he has no beginning. Not an angel, created directly out of nothing. Not Adam, formed out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2,7). Not Eve, molded from Adam’s rib (Gen. 2,21). Not the Incarnate Word, who exists before all ages, and of whom we should use the word “conceived” rather than “conception”. Humans do not exist before their conception, so we might call them created “conceptions.” But you, O Mary, are different from all other children of Eve. They are conceptions stained by original sin; whereas you are the unique, Immaculate Conception.
With these words, St. Maximilian revealed the consoling truth that in 1858, at Lourdes, the Immaculate Conception, our Blessed Mother, gave the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution on the very eve of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Indeed, if theistic evolution is true, then Adam and Eve must have been conceived in the womb of a sub-human primate. And since theistic evolutionists must believe in the dogma of Original Sin as defined at the Council of Trent, they must hold that Adam and Eve were “conceived without sin.” Therefore, if theistic evolution were true, the Blessed Mother would have had to say, “I am AN Immaculate Conception,” or “I am Immaculate Conception Number Three.” But She did not say that—because, as St. Maximilian explained in the passage quoted above, Adam and Eve were created, not conceived.
If St. Maximilian Kolbe had been allowed more time to ponder the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, we have no doubt that his meditation would have led him to the further realization that the long ages of progressive creation, with its conflation of the order of creation with the order of providence, cannot be harmonized with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, rightly understood. We say this for several reasons. In the first place, it is important to recognize the profound connection that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church made between the first created world and the Immaculate Conception. St. Bridget of Sweden, Doctor of the Church, beautifully illuminates this connection in the office that the Bridgettine Sisters have prayed for more than six hundred years and which they pray to this day:
God's creation of the world and all it contains
took place in the instant of His Will's expression;
and with that design and perfection foreseen by Him.Yet there remained still uncreated another work of creation which would surpass what He had already done . . . Mary, we may see in God's act of creation . . . an image of your creating.
With these words, St. Bridget acknowledged that the only thing more beautiful, more perfect, than the first created world is the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. In light of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, this insight underscores the impossibility of death, deformity, disease, or other natural defects, like harmful genetic mutations, in the first created world before the Original Sin, because the existence of these natural evils in the first created world would render it incapable of serving as a type of the Immaculate Conception.
The failure of Big Bang cosmology to explain the origins of the solar system, stars and galaxies, the undisputed reality of genetic entropy within the biosphere, and the overwhelming evidence for the centrality of the Earth in relation to the rest of the universe, would only have confirmed for St. Maximilian the first perfection of the first created world as an essential element of its character as a type and foreshadowing of the Immaculate Conception. Indeed, in light of these considerations, the founder of the Militia Immaculatae, who was always quick to defend the immaculacy of the Blessed Virgin against the slightest slander, would have been the first to insist on the completeness of the universe at its first founding, meaning that all of the different kinds of creatures, each one perfect according to its nature, necessarily existed together at the same time, with man, and for man, in perfect harmony at the beginning of creation. As St. Maximilian observed in one of his articles: "The manifestation of God’s perfections is the end of all creation."
By accepting the Lyellian-Darwinian uniformitarian chronology of Earth’s history, theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists must hold that most of the phyla created by God since the beginning of the world had died out by the time God created Adam and Eve. But this contradicts St. Maximilian’s vision of the centrality of man in God’s plan of creation and his conviction that all of the different kinds of creatures were created for man—not just in view of man’s future appearance on Earth after hundreds of millions of years. Hence, he wrote:
For me You created the heavens adorned with constellations of stars, for me the earth, the seas, the mountains, the rivers, and the many, many beautiful things here on earth.
In light of the fact that the diseased, deformed, and defective creatures contained in the fossil record cannot reflect God’s perfections as completely as the first of each kind of creature that God created in the beginning of time, progressive creation appears to be quite incompatible with St. Maximilian’s understanding of the purpose of creation as “the manifestation of God’s perfections” in which every kind of creature was created specifically for man. Indeed, contemplating the current state of the scientific evidence in the light of the Immaculate Conception, it is safe to say that no one would have been quicker than St. Maximilian Kolbe to acknowledge the absurdity of attributing natural evils to the universe before the Original Sin, as all progressive creationists and theistic evolutionists do.
In light of Fr. Boyd’s exaltation of the Big Bang hypothesis above the literal and obvious sense of Scripture as understood by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, it is interesting that St. Maximilian Kolbe describes the sin of Eve in Paradise as one in which she exalted reason above God’s revelation. He writes:
In the Garden of Eden Satan . . . manages to persuade the woman [Eve] to oppose the will of God and to seek perfection not in submission to God’s intentions, but in following one’s reason.
Dr. Seiler reminded us that, according to St. Thomas and all of the Fathers and Doctors, the supernatural fiat creation of the heavens and the earth and all they contain at the beginning of time cannot be a proper subject for natural scientists, since the natural order only began to operate with relative autonomy once the work of creation was finished on the seventh day. On the other hand, the relationship between the Earth and the Sun and the rest of the Solar System pertains to the natural order of the universe and falls within the proper domain of the natural scientist. This is an important distinction because it reminds us that we can only know how and over what period of time God created all things by supernatural faith and not by extrapolation from the natural order in which we live. And this knowledge of the way in which (and when) God created all things is certain knowledge precisely because it has been given to us by Divine Revelation.
Our knowledge of the relationship between the Earth and the rest of the solar system is in one respect different and in another respect similar to our knowledge of the how and when of creation. It is different in the sense that the relationship between the Earth and the rest of the solar system can be observed and is thus part of the natural order and, hence, falls within the proper sphere of the natural scientist. On the other hand, since all that a natural scientist can detect from within the universe is relative motion, only someone with a vantage point outside of the universe—a divine vantage point—can actually determine what is moving and what is at rest within the universe. That is why, even though the Earth-Sun relationship falls within the legitimate sphere of the natural scientist, at the end of the day human beings need a revelation from God to know that the Earth is at rest at (or near) the center of the universe.
Growing up in Poland, St. Maximilian Kolbe could not help being caught up in the cult of Copernicus as a national icon. However, anyone who examines the life of Copernicus will soon discover how little he did to demonstrate the superiority of his model of the solar system to the Ptolemaic system.
The greatest astronomer of his age was Tycho Brahe, but Tycho never embraced the Copernican model. Instead, he developed the model named after him—the same model of the universe that God showed to St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, in the 12th century—a model which placed the Earth motionless at the center of the universe, while the planets revolved around the Sun, and the Sun and the stars revolved around the Earth.
Fr. Boyd reminded us of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus in which he taught that Catholic exegetes must follow the rule of St. Augustine not to depart from the literal and obvious sense of Scripture except where reason dictates or necessity requires. St. Robert Bellarmine showed remarkable prudence by his ability to distinguish between the authority of Aristotle, whose opinions about the natural world could be contradicted by observations, and the authority of Sacred Scripture whose statements about the natural world were inerrant.
If anyone who watched the debate doubts the truth of the Kolbe Center's claim that no one has come close to proving that the heliocentric model of the solar system is true, I urge them to watch talks 9 and 10 at this link for a demonstration that the burden of proof remains where it has always been--on those who deny the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis and of the many passages in Scripture which, as St. Robert Bellarmine taught so cogently, teach that, in the words of the Catechism of Trent, "the earth He made to stand firm in the midst of the world." Indeed, as Dr. Seiler demonstrated in his presentation, the evidence from red-shifts in all directions, the micro-wave background radiation (the so-called "axis of evil"), the spherical arrangements of galaxies, the experiment of Airy ("Airy's failure") and the combination of the Michelson-Morley experiment with the Sagnac experiments, we can say that the centrality and stability of the Earth is well established by observations within the present order of nature. (For a detailed defense of the Neo-Tychonian geocentric-geostatic model of the universe, please see the article “Scoffers Will Arise” on the Kolbe website, specifically the section “Farewell to Apologetic Apologetics”.
One of the devil’s greatest tricks is 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 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.[1]
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. We recognize that the 1909 PBC rulings on the interpretation of Genesis 1-3 are—together with Humani Generis—the last authoritative magisterial statements on the subject. In the Motu proprio, “Praestantia Scripturae,” on November 18, 1907, Pope St. Pius X declared that no one could contest the rulings of the PBC without “grave sin.” The following are the questions submitted to the Pontifical Biblical Commission on June 30, 1909 “Concerning the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis”:
I: Do the various exegetical systems excogitated and defended under the guise of science to exclude the literal historical sense of the first three chapters of Genesis rest on a solid foundation?
Answer: In the negative.
II: Notwithstanding the historical character and form of Genesis, the special connection of the first three chapters with one another and with the following chapters, the manifold testimonies of the Scriptures both of the Old and of the New Testaments, the almost unanimous opinion of the holy Fathers and the traditional view which the people of Israel also has handed on and the Church has always held, may it be taught that: the aforesaid three chapters of Genesis Contain not accounts of actual events, accounts, that is, which correspond to objective reality and historical truth, but, either fables derived from the mythologies and cosmogonies of ancient peoples and accommodated by the sacred writer to monotheistic doctrine after the expurgation of any polytheistic error; or allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths; or finally legends in part historical and in part fictitious freely composed with a view to instruction and edification?
Answer: In the negative to both parts.
III: In particular may the literal historical sense be called in doubt in the case of facts narrated in the same chapters which touch the foundations of the Christian religion: as are, among others, the creation of all things by God in the beginning of time; the special creation of man; the formation of the first woman from the first man; the unity of the human race; the original felicity of our first parents in the state of justice, integrity, and immortality; the command given by God to man to test his obedience; the transgression of the divine command at the instigation of the devil under the form of a serpent; the degradation of our first parents from that primeval state of innocence; and the promise of a future Redeemer?
Answer: In the negative.
IV: In the interpretation of those passages in these chapters which the Fathers and Doctors understood in different manners without proposing anything certain and definite, is it lawful, without prejudice to the judgement of the Church and with attention to the analogy of faith, to follow and defend the opinion that commends itself to each one?
Answer: In the affirmative.
V: Must each and every word and phrase occurring in the aforesaid chapters always and necessarily be understood in its literal sense, so that it is never lawful to deviate from it, even when it appears obvious that the diction is employed in an applied sense, either metaphorical or anthropomorphical, and either reason forbids the retention or necessity imposes the abandonment of the literal sense?
Answer: In the negative.
VI: Provided that the literal and historical sense is presupposed, may certain passages in the same chapters, in the light of the example of the holy Fathers and of the Church itself, be wisely and profitably interpreted in an allegorical and prophetic sense?
Answer: In the affirmative.
VII: As it was not the mind of the sacred author in the composition of the first chapter of Genesis to give scientific teaching about the internal Constitution of visible things and the entire order of creation, but rather to communicate to his people a popular notion in accord with the current speech of the time and suited to the understanding and capacity of men, must the exactness of scientific language be always meticulously sought for in the interpretation of these matters?
Answer: In the negative.
VIII : In the designation and distinction of the six days mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis, may the word Yom (day) be taken either in the literal sense for the natural day or in an applied sense for a certain space of time, and may this question be the subject of free discussion among exegetes?
Answer: In the affirmative.
The PBC’s answers to these questions establish certain truths unequivocally.
Its reply to Question I establishes that the literal historical sense of the first three chapters of Genesis cannot be called into question. This contradicts Fr. Boyd’s claim that Genesis is poetry.
Its reply to Question II establishes that Genesis contains “stories of events which really happened, which correspond with historical reality and objective truth,” not “legends, historical in part and fictitious in part.” In short, the PBC definitively excludes the possibility that even a part of the Genesis narrative could be fictitious and non-historical. This also contradicts Fr. Boyd’s claim that Genesis is poetry.
The PBC’s answer to Question III establishes that the literal and historical truth of the following facts cannot be called into question:
1) “The creation of all things wrought by God in the beginning of time”
Comment:
This passage upholds the Lateran IV doctrine that all things were created by God “in the beginning of time.” This in and of itself contradicts the conjecture that the days of Genesis could represent longer periods of time than a natural day.
2) “The special creation of man”
Comment: This excludes any process in the formation of man and requires that the creation of man was immediate and instantaneous.
3) “The formation of the first woman from the first man”
Comment: This, too, excludes any process in the formation of the first woman and requires that the creation of Eve was immediate and instantaneous.
The PBC’s answer to Question V allows that some expressions in Genesis may be understood improperly when “reason prohibits holding the proper sense” or “necessity forces its abandonment.” (Of course, to understand expressions in Genesis 1-3 “improperly” does not mean “incorrectly”; it means to understand them in a non-literal, non-obvious sense.) However, according to the answer to Question VI, interpretations should be made “with the Holy Fathers and the Church” herself leading the way.
The PBC’s answer to Question VII establishes that the word “dies” in the distinction of the six days of Genesis Chapter One may be understood in the proper sense as a natural day or in the improper sense as “a certain space of time.”
Answers IV and V taken together tell us that some expressions may be understood improperly when “reason prohibits holding the proper sense” or “necessity requires.” These are very strict conditions indeed! According to these criteria, the word “dies” in Genesis One may be understood improperly as a certain space of time IF and only IF reason dictates or necessity requires. In short, the Magisterium is not treating the proper and improper senses of “dies” as equals. On the contrary, the Magisterium lays the burden of proof squarely on the shoulders of those who would challenge the proper sense. It is they who must prove that reason dictates or necessity requires that “dies” be interpreted as a “certain space of time” and not as a natural day.
It follows that the “free discussion among exegetes” allowed by answer VIII is permitted for the purpose of allowing the advocates of the improper sense to demonstrate that the improper sense of “dies” in Genesis One is the only reasonable interpretation. But “free discussion”—being of its very nature an exchange of views—also means that attempts to defend the improper sense as the only reasonable interpretation must be subjected to critical review by other exegetes. Moreover, this free discussion must be undertaken in full knowledge that failure to PROVE that the improper sense of “dies” is the only reasonable interpretation of the word in Genesis One ipso facto establishes “natural day” as the preferred interpretation. Moreover, since the answer to Question VI teaches that the interpretation of Genesis should be made “with the Holy Fathers and the Church” leading the way, the burden of proof falls entirely upon those who question the consensus of the Fathers on the interpretation of any part of Genesis 1-3. Since all of the Fathers held that Adam and Eve were created at the beginning of the world, not billions of years after the beginning, there is no way that the answer to Question VI can be reconciled with Big Bang cosmology.
In this connection, there is an important—and rarely noticed—link between the patristic consensus on Genesis One and the PBC’s decree on the possible interpretation of “dies” as “a certain space of time.” According to the unanimous consent of the Fathers, the Sabbath rest of the Lord after the six days of creation marked the end of the creation period. Consequently, apart from the creation of each human soul at the moment of conception—which is not the creation of a new nature but of a new individual with the same nature as Adam—creation ceased after the sixth day of creation. Now “a certain space of time” is by definition a limited period. Therefore, the PBC decree establishes as a fact that the creation period—whether it was six natural days or a longer period (although, as we have shown, the latter interpretation is not tenable)—is over. It is logically impossible, therefore, to learn anything about the events of creation week by observing present-day natural processes.
The importance of this point can hardly be overemphasized. Rightly understood, this doctrine—explicit in the writings of the Fathers and implicit in the PBC decrees—that the creation period has come to an end renders it absolutely impossible for natural science to discover anything certain about the creation week and the origin of the things created during that period. To repeat, this is because the Holy Fathers and the PBC unite in teaching that the creation period is over, that God is no longer creating new kinds of creatures, and that therefore creation cannot be observed. It is axiomatic that human science cannot arrive at certain knowledge of an order of things—in this case, the order of creation—that it cannot observe. This being the case, it is quite impossible for natural scientists to prove that the improper sense of “dies”—as a measure of the creation period—is the only reasonable interpretation of the word.
When, in 1948, Cardinal Suhard attempted to get the PBC—no longer an arm of the Magisterium as it had been in 1909—to renounce its earlier rulings on Genesis, he was rebuffed and told that the PBC did not wish to issue “new decrees on these questions” (Denz, 2302). Consequently, the next magisterial document dealing explicitly with the historical events recounted in Genesis 1-3, Humani Generis, must be understood in the context of the 1909 PBC rulings. It is in this context—and ONLY in this context—that Pope Pius XII’s permission to inquire “into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” can and must be understood. In view of the Vatican’s refusal to change its 1909 decrees on Genesis One, Catholics are still bound by them. Pope Pius XII himself in Humani Generis condemned those who transgress legitimate
freedom of discussion, acting as if the origin of the human body from previously existing and living matter, were already certain and demonstrated from certain already discovered indications, and deduced by reasoning, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this thinking (DZ, 2327)
It is noteworthy that Pope Pius XII observed that the hypothesis that the human body originated from previously existing and living matter was based entirely on “already discovered indications”—in other words, on pieces of physical evidence—and on deductions from that evidence, and not on anything in “the sources of divine revelation.” Moreover, although Pope Pius XII charged “exegetes” with the task of determining in precisely what sense the first eleven chapters of Genesis are history, he insisted that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are “a kind of history” and that they contain a popular description of the origins of the human race and of the chosen people. He also upheld the constant teaching of the Church that these chapters are “free from all error” (DZ, 2329). As Dr. Seiler demonstrated, Big Bang advocates have not come close to proving that their hypothesis is true beyond a reasonable doubt, any more than the champions of microbe-to-man evolution have provided proof beyond a reasonable doubt for their conjectures.
The scientific claims of Big Bang cosmology, Lyellian geology, and evolutionary biology are refuted in various articles on the Kolbe website, especially in the section “Replies to Critics.” Concerning the age of the universe from a natural science point of view, Dr. Seiler has shown that the age calculation is based on the quotient of distance and velocity of observed galaxies. These in turn are derived from their brightnesses and red-shifts, respectively. Both derivations are unproven since there can also be other factors that contribute to measurements of brightnesses and red-shifts. Furthermore, the simple age calculation relies on the assumption that the proposed expansion has always proceeded by more or less the same rate since billions of years. This procedure of extrapolation into the unknown is not natural science. The bottom-line is that there is no proof for the 13.8 billion years offered to us as a scientific fact.
Similarly, the radiodating results obtained for rocks rely on the principle of extrapolation: Today’s measured half-lives are assumed to have been constant over billions of years. This is another fulfilment of St. Peter’s prediction that scoffers will argue that “things have always been the same since the beginning of creation.” Natural science is based on observation. Since no one could ever observe whether this presumption of constant decay rates is true—and there is considerable evidence that decay rates have varied in the past—it follows that there is no proof for the 4.5 billion years age of the Earth offered to us as established fact. Moreover, Fr. Boyd’s recommended resource on radiometric dating by Wiens is refuted, point by point, at this link.
For a great defense of the viability of C-14 dates for remains of dinosaurs and other creatures alleged to be tens or hundreds of millions of years old, see here.
While there are many natural processes that support the traditional Biblical chronology for the age of the Earth, such as the systematic absence of erosion between sedimentary strata, C-14, soft tissue, proteins, and intact strands of DNA in the remains of dinosaurs alleged to be tens of millions of years old, and the exponential decay of the earth’s magnetic field, it is sufficient here to conclude that neither “reason nor necessity” requires us to abandon the timescale linked to the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which has never been abrogated by any authoritative Magisterial teaching. Therefore, the PBC decrees and Humani Generis leave the very heavy burden of proof where it has always been—on those who question the literal and obvious sense of the sacred history of Genesis 1-3, as interpreted consistently by the Popes (in their authoritative Magisterial teaching), by the Councils, and by the Fathers of the Church.
Dr. Thomas Seiler and Hugh Owen
Feast of the Chair of St. Peter 2024
[1] If anyone would like a copy of the paper by Dr. Dominique Tassot et al, Creation and Time, (2014), and the commendations of the paper from theologians from all over the world, please contact howen@shentel.net
