Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In recent weeks we have been attacked even more than usual—from the left, so to speak, and from the right! An article in Crisis magazine criticized the program for our Restore Truth II Conference in Milwaukee next weekend, and Kolbe advisory council member and aerospace engineer Eric Bermingham and I have posted a thorough response to that article in the Replies to Critics section of the Kolbe website at this link. When you read the article on the Crisis magazine website, you will see that the author did read some materials relevant to his subject, but, unfortunately, he did not study our materials! Had he done so, he would never have reached the conclusions that he drew from his study of other people’s writing and research.
One sad consequence of this kind of careless criticism of our materials is that it prevents many of our Catholic brothers and sisters from making an honest evaluation of the arguments for and against the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis. That, in turn, has the tragic consequence of keeping huge numbers of devout Catholics from entering into the kind of intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father that Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered and died to restore to us. The following is an excerpt from a testimony that was just posted on the Kolbe website by a home-schooling mother which powerfully bears witness to the spiritual consequences of returning to the traditional reading of Genesis. (I strongly encourage you to read the entire testimony in the Testimonies section of the Kolbe website.)
Testimony of a Home-Schooling Mother
I had no idea that the truth about origins mattered so much because I hadn’t been informed about it before, and I didn’t think it affected our Faith. I had been a Catholic all my life, and I had studied apologetics in high school. As part of my formation, I had gone through the Fr. John Laux series on Apologetics. I seem to remember that Fr. Laux taught in that course that evolutionary claims could be compatible with the Faith as long as one saw the long ages of time as corresponding to the six days of creation, and as long as one saw the evolutionary process as only forming the body of man, as a “way” that God might have made his body from the “dust” of the earth, but not as part of the formation of his soul, and certainly not as an atheistic alternative to creation that dispensed with the need for God. Because of this, I was convinced that the Catholic Church taught that it was all right to believe in theistic evolution and that it was compatible with the Faith. And so, I didn’t think it was an issue that mattered much.
I had no idea that embracing the traditional doctrine of creation would affect my concept of God. I never believed in evolution, because as a child, I always thought that it was silly. We always used textbooks in school that were written by Protestants who had a strong belief in special creation, and so I never thought that evolution was true in any way. But when I learned later about this supposed “compatibility” of it with our Faith, I just thought it was somehow just more liberal-minded to not argue about the position, as if it doesn’t really matter or affect anything whichever way a person believes, because either way they hold to the Catholic Faith and believe in God. I was always aware that Protestants were fixed on creationism, but I thought that this might reflect their “fundamentalism,” and that Catholics could take a more moderate position. At the time I was mainly concerned with showing that none of the apparently valid claims of evolution supported atheism, because none of them removed the need for God. Once I wrote a paper in high school about Big Bang cosmology, and how the evidence for the Big Bang hypothesis provides no support for atheism, because it still requires God to have caused the initial “explosion.” But, in reality, I was only drawing the line between atheism and an interpretation of these hypotheses that could be understood in a “theistic” way, without actually reconciling them with the authentic, traditional, orthodox Catholic Faith.
When I heard a Kolbe Center presentation that explained the way that God had made everything special and beautiful for us in the beginning, and how the world and man were before the Fall, this was something I had never been told before, ever. It was so beautiful. I had no idea that it would change my concept of God so much, but it did. I had a pretty strong prayer life by that time and used to practice mental prayer and made a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament almost every day. I used to contemplate the attributes of God, and ponder things like “Why is God good?” Or, “If He is All-powerful, why don’t I trust in Him?” And, taking lessons from those attributes, I tried to apply them to my life, appreciating the fact that if I REALLY believed that all those things were true about God, that He is All-knowing, All-wise and All-good, etc., I would probably never get upset about anything anymore, or fear anything happening, or be offended by anything, or doubt that whatever might happen was His doing. I remember I contemplated a lot of things about who God is, and what that means for my life. Also, sometimes I would say the Creed slowly, and stop on a line, and think about that until I could try to understand what it meant. In general, I was building a habit of contemplation, but I had an idea of God that was based on a lot of abstract things. I was trying to know Him, but I felt as if my ideas about Him were just floating in the air a little bit. I was thinking about things I knew to be true, but I was trying to see how to bring them home to me in my life, and feeling a little lost about that. I was trying to believe that God was good, but I could not quite understand HOW exactly He was good.
But the day that I heard that talk, something changed beautifully for me. I received that truth very easily and believed it immediately with no resistance. It was overturning what I had been taught before, but I wasn’t resistant to that. I wasn’t programmed against these doctrines in any way. I just had truly never thought about it or known about it before. And when I heard it, my concept of God changed. Very suddenly. I saw that God had made everything beautiful, and that the plan of redemption by Christ was to restore all of that, and that it was all meant for me. I thought, “Wow, if God did all of that, and made it all so beautiful for us, then He really is good!” I was so touched. I felt very close to God for the first time in a completely new way. I really felt that God loved me. If He would do all that for me, He must really, actually love me. I remember there was a sort of “honeymoon night” for me with God after I heard about that, because I just wanted to think about God and be very, very close to Him that night. Looking at the stars meant something new, thinking that God made them for me. Thinking that everything in the world was a sign of His goodness to me changed my spiritual life.
It also changed my life as a mother. I remember thinking that I just wanted to learn more about this truth, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have a practical way to implement this knowledge; it was just something I kept in my heart. I continued to do my prayer every day and I felt a newfound relationship with God as my all-loving Creator and Redeemer, and it became part of my contemplation. I used to take my children on little walks in nature, and I would show them pretty little plants and flowers and say to them, “Look at this beautiful thing that God has made!” I felt real joy and innocence together with them, like a child discovering God’s creation anew through their innocent eyes.
I also began to grow in a deeper awareness that not only did God make everything in all creation for us in the beginning, but I also began to realize that He was sustaining everything by His thought in such a way that each flower and each butterfly and each tree I would see, was not only God’s creation for me in a general way, but also specifically for me in that moment. For example, coming to realize that if I saw this little butterfly, or bee, or flower on the path just then, it was only there because it was God’s Will to show it to me, and for it to be right there at that moment, just for me to see. And it might be the only time it ever would ever be seen by anyone. Perhaps by the time someone else would ever happen to be in that place, it would have passed away, or flown away, or maybe they wouldn’t notice it. Perhaps God had made it just for me to appreciate.
And I used to walk by the pine trees and sometimes feel their soft pine needles and think to myself how, if God has made all these things in the world, then it is a sign of the love of the Heavenly Father. And sometimes I would touch them tenderly, in gratitude for God, because He was showing me this sign of Himself in His creation. It was like the feeling of pressing a special and spiritual letter to your heart which was sent to you from someone dear, because you know that he wrote it out of love for you, and that he is a beautiful and holy person. I was beginning to understand the ongoing love relationship that God has with us through His creation, constantly revealing His love to us.
Kolbe Center Leadership Retreat
As explained by a holy priest in a sermon on Sensus Fidelium at this link, theistic evolutionism reigns supreme in most Catholic parishes, schools, universities and seminaries, not through sound evidence and argumentation but through censorship and intimidation. To overcome the prevailing censorship of the traditional Catholic orientation in time and space upheld by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and confirmed by cutting-edge natural science in every area of knowledge, we hold our annual leadership retreat to equip priests and laity to defend the truth within their spheres of influence. This year, we will be joined by Bishop Joseph Oliach, the Ordinary of the Diocese of Soroti in Uganda, who has been one of our strongest supporters among the Bishops of Africa. Please prayerfully consider attending this year’s leadership retreat so that you can help us to spread the Truth as widely and as rapidly as possible. This year’s retreat will be held at the Catholic Conference Center in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. Please send requests for information and registration forms to me as soon as possible at howen@shentel.net.
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. Jim Havens, the host of The Simple Truth Co-Founder/President of The Men's March and Creator/Director of Doorkeepers interviewed me about the book Loved, Lost and Found. Please watch the interview and encourage Jim to give more attention to the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation: https://youtu.be/VVe9e0dTWbs.
