The theology of the Absolute Primacy of Christ can be seen as the antidote to every error of the modern age and as a vivid example of the principle that St. Paul articulates in his Letter to the Romans, “where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). By this principle we are assured that God will never allow evil and error to abound more than goodness and truth, and when evil and error proliferate, He will make goodness and truth superabound for those whose hearts and minds are open to His grace. In this paper, I will argue that Venerable Maria of Agreda, the incorrupt Franciscan religious and approved mystic of the Church, heralded the Absolute Primacy of Christ in the seventeenth century, at the very dawn of the so-called “Enlightenment,” as the divine antidote to its errors—errors which have practically taken over the world and ushered in the current global anti-culture of death.
Our Lord assured Venerable Maria that the heavens, the earth, and our first parents had all been created by fiat during the creation week just as the Roman Catechism maintained. He told her that the Blessed Virgin was shown the six days of creation, just as Moses had been shown them long before. In God’s Providence Venerable Maria was also shown the exact nature of the test of the angels which took place on the first day of the Hexameron and which confirmed the Absolute Primacy of Christ and the Immaculate Conception as the antidote to the errors of the age, including the counterfeit “primacy of Christ” in the writings of the false prophet Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. With the help of St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Hildegard of Bingen, we shall see that Our Lady’s private revelations to Venerable Maria hold the key to understanding the truth that will set us free from these errors so that we can obtain the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the social reign of Christ our King throughout the world.
Venerable Maria of Agreda
One of four children of well-to-do parents, Venerable Maria was born in Agreda, Spain, in 1602. When their children had reached a suitable age, Maria’s parents gave their entire estate to the Franciscan Order and founded the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in their family castle. Maria’s father and her two brothers became Franciscan monks, while Maria, her mother, and her only sister became Franciscan nuns. At the age of only 25, Maria was elected Abbess of the new foundation, an office she held for almost forty years, until her death in 1665.
Between 1620 and 1631, Venerable Maria asked Jesus to send her to the “most God-forsaken people on Earth,” and Our Lord answered her prayer by allowing her to bi-locate more than 500 times to the Indians of what is now the southwestern United States. Mother Maria proclaimed the Gospel to them, catechized them, and prepared them to go to the nearest missionaries to receive Holy Baptism. Venerable Maria also received visitations of her own from the Mother of God, at whose behest she wrote down the insights she received concerning the glories of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, her interior life, and her relations with the Most Holy Trinity. Mother Maria of Agreda died on Pentecost morning, May 24, 1665. Eight years later, she was declared Venerable by Pope Clement X. Many miracles occurred at her grave, and her body has remained incorrupt to this day.
Venerable Maria’s private revelations were eventually published and were esteemed by a great number of holy and learned men who found in them, among other things, a confirmation of the traditional Catholic interpretation of Genesis.[1] For example, the “Apostle of Texas” Venerable Antonio Margil worked every kind of miracle that Our Lord Jesus Christ worked when He walked the earth. He healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, bi-located, drove out demons, converted murderous pagans steeped in sorcery, read hearts, and excelled in prophecy—and every day he nourished his soul by reading a few pages of the Mystical City of God by Venerable Maria of Agreda!
Of the Mystical City of God by Venerable Maria of Agreda, Franz Albert, Archbishop of Salzburg, Apostolic Legate, and Primate of Germany, wrote:
According to the decrees of Pope Innocent XI and Clement XI the book known as “Ciudad de Dios” [The Mystical City of God] written by the Venerable Servant of God, Maria de Jesus, may be read by all the faithful . . . [He goes on to add that] The learned and pious Cardinal D’Aguirre says that he considers all the studies of fifty years of his previous life as of small consequence in comparison with the doctrines found in this book, which in all things are in harmony with the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Fathers, and the Councils of the Church (emphasis added).[2]
In this work of many volumes, Venerable Maria of Agreda recorded the revelations of the Blessed Mother, especially concerning her interior life. In her introduction to the work, Venerable Maria confirmed her willingness to write only under obedience, and “not as a teacher, but as a disciple.” She wrote:
I shall not write as a teacher but as a disciple . . . as an instrument of the Queen of Heaven I will declare what she deigns to teach me and whatever she commands me; for all souls are capable of receiving the Spirit, which her divine Son has promised to pour out over men of all conditions (Joel 2:28). Souls are also able to communicate it in a befitting manner, whenever a higher authority acting according to the dispensations of Christ’s Church so disposes. . . That I should err is possible, and to an ignorant woman, natural; but then I err, while obeying and not acting of my own free will: thus I remit myself and subject myself to those who are my guides and to the correction of the holy Catholic Church, to whose ministers I fly in all my difficulties. And I wish that my superior, teacher, and confessor be a witness and a censor of this doctrine, which I receive, and also a severe and vigilant judge of the manner in which I put it into practice.[3]
Armed with this humble and obedient attitude, Venerable Maria was able to receive profound insights into the interior life of the Blessed Mother. God the Father explained to Venerable Maria:
I have not revealed these mysteries in the primitive Church, because they are so great, that the faithful would have been lost in the contemplation and admiration of them at a time when it was more necessary to establish firmly the law of grace and of the Gospel. Although all mysteries of religion are in perfect harmony with each other, yet human ignorance might have suffered recoil and doubt at their magnitude, when faith in the Incarnation and Redemption and the precepts of the new law of the Gospel were yet in their beginnings. On this same account, the person of the incarnate Word said to his disciples at the last supper: “Many things have I to say to you; but you are not yet disposed to receive them” (John 6:12). These words He addressed to all the world, for it was not yet capable of giving full obedience to the law of grace and full assent to faith in the Son, much less was it prepared to be introduced into the mysteries of his Mother.[4]
According to God the Father, the private revelations of Venerable Maria would provide the faithful with a lens to penetrate more deeply into the Gospel, to understand the greatness of the Blessed Mother and the power of her intercession. He assured her:
If men would seek to please Me by reverencing, believing and studying the wonders, which are intimately connected with this Mother of piety, and if they would all begin to solicit her intercession from their whole heart, the world would find some relief. I will not longer withhold from men this mystical City of refuge; describe and delineate it to them, as far as thy shortcomings allow. I do not intend that thy descriptions of the life of the Blessed Virgin shall be mere opinions or contemplations, but reliable truth.[5]
The Immaculate Conception: A Second Moses
As noted above, the seventeenth century witnessed the dark dawn of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which Our Lord characterized to Venerable Maria as a time of darkness, ignorance, and guilt:
When the majority of mortals are sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness of their ignorance and guilt … when the wicked least deserve my mercy; in these predestined times, I wish to open a portal for the just ones through which they can find access to my mercy[6]
It is significant that in addition to the rationalistic attempts of Descartes and other intellectuals to explain the origins of the universe in terms of the material processes they observed in nature, the false prophet Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) offered a mystical “confirmation” of their anti-Biblical ideas. As Fr. Sean Kopcynzki has noted:
The 16th Century German spiritualist Jacob Boehme, a Lutheran by profession, had various visions of the universe and how it came to be . . . Among other things, Boehme saw the world as the product of a gradual process or evolution . . . He also held the heretical notion that God would not be complete without His Creation. God needed to evolve too.[7]
Boehme was not alone in receiving mystical revelations favorable to an evolutionary account of the origins of the universe. In the early 1600’s, the French mathematical genius Rene’ Descartes attracted the attention of the holy Cardinal De Berulle who appealed to Descartes to put his talents at the service of the restoration of the Church in France. After dabbling in the occult, however, Descartes withdrew from the world and had, by his own account, three mystical dreams in which the “angel of truth” revealed a new philosophy that would revolutionize man’s thinking. Central to this new philosophy were Descarte’s “cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am”—which inverted the right metaphysical order of things and made thought prior in importance to being; the rejection of formal and final causes in the study of nature, in favor of exclusively material and efficient causes; and the rejection of fiat creation as the explanation for the origins of the different kinds of creatures in nature, in favor of naturalistic explanations drawn from the consideration of observable material processes in the present order of providence.
In opposition to these errors, Our Lord assured Maria that the heavens, the earth, and our first parents had all been created by fiat during the creation week, just as He had revealed in the sacred history of Genesis and in the Roman Catechism.[8] Moreover, Our Lord and the Blessed Mother showed Venerable Maria that the entire work of creation was designed and executed in view of the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation. Venerable Maria explained:
[D]ivine knowledge is one, most simple and indivisible, nevertheless since the things which I see are many, and since there is a certain order, by which some are first and some come after, it is necessary to divide the knowledge of God’s intelligence and the knowledge of his will into many instants, or into many different acts, according as they correspond to the diverse orders of created things. For as some of the creatures hold their existence because of others, there is a dependence of one upon the other. Accordingly, we say that God intended and decreed this before that, the one on account of the other; and that if He had not desired or included in the science of vision the one, He would not have desired the other. But by this way of speaking, we must not try to convey the meaning that God placed many acts of intelligence, or of the will; rather we must intend merely to indicate, that the creatures are dependent on each other and that they succeed one another. In order to be able to comprehend the manner of creation more easily, we apply the order of things as we see them objectively, to the acts of the divine intelligence and will in creating them….[9]
Here we are reminded that all things past, present and future are present to God, and that He willed the creation of all things as a unified expression of His Divinity centered on the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation. Venerable Maria continues:
I understood that this order comprises the following instants. The first is: God recognizing his infinite attributes and perfections together with the propensity and the ineffable inclination to communicate Himself outwardly… The second instant was to confirm and determine the object and intention of this communication of the Divinity ad extra, namely…. to set in motion his Omnipotence in order that He might be known, praised and glorified…The third instant consisted in selecting and determining the order and arrangement, or the mode of this communication, so as to realize in an adequate manner the most exalted ends….The fourth instant was to determine the gifts and graces, which were to be conferred upon the humanity of Christ, our Lord, in union with the Divinity….In this fifth decree the creation of the angelic nature which is more excellent and more like unto the spiritual being of the Divinity was determined upon, and at the same time the division or arrangement of the angelic hosts into nine choirs and three hierarchies was provided and decreed.…To this instant also belong the predestination of the good, and the reprobation of the bad angels. God saw in it, by means of his infinite science, all the works of the former and of the latter and the propriety of predestination by his free will and by his merciful liberality, those that would obey and give honour, and of reprobating by his justice those who would rise up against his Majesty in pride and disobedience on account of their disordered self-love. In the same instant also was decreed the creation of the empyrean heaven, for the manifestation of his glory and the reward of the good; also the Earth and the heavenly bodies for the other creatures; also in the centre or depth of the Earth, hell, for the punishment of the bad angels[10]….In the sixth instant was decreed the creation of a people and the congregation of men for Christ, who was already formed in the divine mind and will, and according to his image and likeness man was to be made, in order, that the incarnate Word might find brethren, similar but inferior to Himself and a people of his own nature, of whom He might be the Head. In this instant was determined the order of creation of the whole human race, which was to begin from one man and woman and propagate itself, until the Virgin and her Son should be born in the predestined order….[11]
In the same instant, and as it were in the third and last place, God determined to create a locality and an abode, where the incarnate Word and his Mother should converse and dwell. For them primarily did He create the heaven and Earth with its stars and elements and all that is contained in them. Secondarily the intention and decree included the creation of the members, of which Jesus was to be the Head, and of whom He would be the King; in order that with kingly providence, all the necessary and befitting arrangements might be made beforehand.[12]
Here we see that at the very moment when Descartes and the Enlightenment philosophers began to promote a heliocentric model of the universe and a naturalistic account of the origins of everything in the material universe, Our Lord and our Blessed Mother reaffirmed God’s Revelation regarding the geocentric-geostatic nature of the universe and the supernatural origin of the different kinds of creatures, truths which twenty-first century natural science has confirmed in many remarkable ways.[i] In this connection, it is worth taking a brief look at the writings of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, since her writings affirm the absolute primacy of Christ and the Immaculate Conception, as well as a geocentric-geostatic model of the universe which anticipated the most viable geocentric-geostatic alternative to the Ptolemaic model of the universe, proposed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the days of Copernicus and Galileo. According to St. Hildegard the motherhood of the Immaculate Conception was:
predestined by the ancient counsel, and lay hidden and concealed within the divinity (…). For the moment in which that Son of God was born of the Father, before the oldest of days, was not manifold, but singular within the divinity, because the Father held it forever in his will that he would become Man (III.4.10).
One other particular aspect of Hildegard’s treatment of the eternal predestination deserves notice here, because it arises in part from the special dynamics of light in her visionary experiences: the image of the umbra, “shadow” but also “reflection.” The mesmerizing words of Love speaking from the fountain in III.3 play fluidly upon this image, for the forms of all creation exist eternally in the divine foreknowledge like the umbra cast upon the fountain’s water by an object. Simultaneously, all things are overshadowed by the divine, creative, Living Light that is their source (cf. I.1.6). To live within that light—as Hildegard did—is necessarily to be in its shadow. The preexistence of the forms as shadows within the divine foreknowledge compels them to come into being—for a shadow implies its form, and only an object, not its shadow, is capable of action. Moreover, the very writing (scriptura) of God’s plan for salvation history was revealed first in prophetic shadow (so III.4.7) before ever that shadow’s form was known in the true Light that enlightened every person in the world when it became flesh and dwelt among us. The “many-mirrored flash” (fulgor quasi multorum speculorum) of God’s eternal foreknowledge that appears before the angels in I.1.5 rebounds in III.5.14 as the Incarnate Son appeals to “the mirror of [God’s] fatherhood” on behalf of his own limbs—the very Work that was preordained with his Incarnation, the golden number and tenth choir ready to be fulfilled. The “ancient counsel” beams from eternity, an order for all being contained within the heart of divine foreknowledge and unfolding across time and space, with humankind as its special matrix.[13]
Echoing St. Hildegard’s prophetic vision of the foreordained Incarnation and Immaculate Conception, Venerable Maria continues:
The Most High looked upon His Son, and upon His most holy Mother as models, produced in the culmination of his wisdom and power, in order that they serve as prototypes according to which He was to copy the whole human race. He created also the necessary material beings required for human life, but with such wisdom that some of them act as symbols, to represent, in a certain way these two Beings. On this account He made the luminaries of heaven, the sun and the moon so that in dividing the day and the night, they might symbolize the Sun of Justice, Christ, and His holy mother, who is beautiful as the moon (Cant: 6, 9) for these two divide the day of grace and the night of sin.
The sun illuminates the moon; and both, together with the stars of the firmament, illume all other creatures within the confines of the universe…. He created the rest of the beings and added to their perfection, because they were to be submissive to Christ and the most holy Mary and through them to the rest of men. Before the universe proceeded from its nothingness, He set it as a banquet abundant and unfailing, for he was to create man for his delight and to draw him to the enjoyment of his knowledge and love. [14]
The First Perfection of the Universe vs. The Idea of Progress
Here we see that God contradicts another one of the principal dogmas of modern thought—the idea of progress. Whether the philosophers of the Enlightenment embraced the “primitive simplicity” of Rousseau’s imaginary original human beings or Thomas Hobbes’ imaginary conception of a “brutish” original humanity, virtually all of them denied the first perfection of the universe and the perfection of our first parents and saw themselves as poised to lead humanity to a utopian future by abandoning supernaturalism and by embracing human reason and science, without interference from the Catholic Church or any religious authority. Meanwhile, God showed Venerable Maria that Our first parents received the same kind of exalted human nature that Our Lord and the Blessed Mother had (and preserved intact) from the moment of their conception. Perfection was in the beginning: St. Adam and St. Eve were modeled after the perfect prototypes. Venerable Maria was shown that:
On the sixth day [God] formed and created Adam, as it were of the age of thirty-three years. This was the age in which Christ was to suffer death and Adam with regard to his body was so like unto Christ, that scarcely any difference existed. Also according to the soul Adam was similar to Christ. From Adam God formed Eve so similar to the Blessed Virgin that she was like unto her in personal appearance and in figure. God looked upon these two images of the great Originals with the highest pleasure and benevolence, and on account of the Originals He heaped many blessings upon them, as if He wanted to entertain Himself with them and their descendants until the time should arrive for forming Christ and Mary.
It is hardly surprising that the test of the angels and the refusal of the satanic forces to accept the centrality of the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception in God’s plan for creation led them to form a special hatred for our first parents. According to Venerable Maria:
[T]he happy state in which God had created the parents of the human race lasted only a very short while. The envy of the serpent was immediately aroused against them, for Satan was patiently awaiting their creation, and no sooner were they created, than his hatred became active against them. However, he was not permitted to witness the formation of Adam and Eve, as he had witnessed the creation of all other things: for the Lord did not choose to manifest to him the creation of man, nor the formation of Eve from a rib; all these things were concealed from him for a space of time until both of them were joined. But when the demon saw the admirable composition of the human nature, perfect beyond that of any creature, the beauty of the souls and also of the bodies of Adam and Eve; when he saw the paternal love with which the Lord regarded them, and how He made them the lords of all creation, and that He gave them hope of eternal life: the wrath of the dragon was lashed to fury, and no tongue can describe the rage with which that beast was filled, nor how great was his envy and his desire to take the life of these two beings. Like an enraged lion he certainly would have done so, if he had not known that a superior force would prevent him. Nevertheless, he studied and plotted out some means, which would suffice to deprive them of the grace of the Most High and make them God’s enemies….[15]
St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Immaculate Conception Before Her Coming into the World
St. Maximilian Kolbe was certainly one of the saints of modern times who “meditated on the Law of the Lord day and night,” and who from his meditation drew forth a deep understanding of the role of our Immaculate Mother in God’s plan of salvation. In an article entitled “The Immaculata Before Her Coming into the World,” written in the monastery of Niepokalanόw, in August 1940, St. Maximilian wrote:
After creating the Angels, God willed that, in full consciousness and will, they should give proof that they would always and in everything desire to accomplish His Will. He showed them the mystery of the Incarnation, that is to say, that He would call into existence a human being, with body and soul, and that He would raise up such a creature to the dignity of Mother of God, so that She would become also their Queen and they would have to venerate Her as well. Countless legions of angelic spirits joyfully greeted the one whom their Creator had decided to raise so sublimely and humbly paid homage to their Lady. Some of them, however, headed by Lucifer—forgetful of the fact that all they were and possessed they had received from God, while they alone were absolutely nothing—rebelled and refused to submit to God’s Will. For they considered themselves superior to a human being covered with flesh. Such an act of veneration seemed to them a debasement of their dignity. They allowed themselves to be carried away by pride and refused to do the Will of God.
Because of that, immediate, eternal punishment befell them: separation from God, Hell. Being pure spirits, they possessed penetrating intelligence, whereby their action was fully conscious and voluntary, and in their guilt the features of mortal sin, committed with absolute awareness, were most evident. That is why those angels immediately became demons, and forever.
Since then, the memory of the fact that this creature had become the affirmation of the good Angels and the assurance of their eternal happiness, while to the demons She was the cause of scandal and separation, filled the latter with hellish hatred toward Her, a hatred like the hatred they harbored toward God, of whom She was supposed to be such a faithful image.
In the Garden of Eden, Satan saw a being like the one who was the object of his anger. He cannot reach God, he cannot reach Her [Mary], but pours out his hatred onto Her future mother, on the first mother of mankind [Eve]. He manages to persuade the woman to oppose the will of God and to seek perfection not in submission to God’s intentions, but in following one’s reason. He wins her over with pride. The human being, who knows with the help of the senses, is far from the clarity of knowledge that a purely spiritual being possesses. And it is for this very reason that man’s sin is much less severe. That is why God’s mercy promises [to our first parents] a Redeemer, while to Satan God predicts that the victory he has achieved over Eve, the mother of the foretold being, will not in any way alter the divine plan. Indeed, He predicts that “She will crush his head,” although he continuously “lies in wait” for “Her heel,” as happens to this day.[16]
There is no doubt that each and every one of us will be given some special insight into this mystery if we, like St. Maximilian, meditate on the Law of the Lord day and night. In the last few years, as I have tried to obey this exhortation, I have been struck by the fact that Our Lord in addressing Satan in Genesis 3:15 refers to “the Woman” as someone who is already familiar to Lucifer. But how could this be—when Moses makes no particular mention of any woman besides Eve prior to the Fall of Adam?
While the Magisterium of the Church has not made a final decision on this question, I believe that this reference to “the Woman” strongly supports St. Maximilian’s thesis that the fall of the angels involved a rejection of “the Woman.” Since “the Woman” is identified as Our Blessed Mother in the papal definition of the Immaculate Conception, it follows that God must be referring to Our Lady when He addresses Satan in Genesis 3:15. But this, in turn, must mean that “the Woman” has already been made known to Lucifer, since the Lord clearly presumes that Satan knows exactly which “Woman” He is talking about. And that would support St. Maximilian’s thesis that the fall of the angels occurred when Lucifer and his followers rejected that very “Woman” as their queen.
Providential Reasons for the Delay in the Church’s Recognition of the Primacy of Christ
Before looking more closely at the way that the theology of the Absolute Primacy of Christ provides the antidote for the principal errors of modern times, it would be important to take note of the reasons that Our Lord gave to Venerable Maria as to why the Church’s recognition of the Primacy of Christ has been delayed. The Heavenly Father told Venerable Maria:
Know that the principal and legitimate end of the decree which I had in view in resolving to communicate My Divinity in the hypostatic union of the Word with human nature, was the glory, which would redound to my name through this communication, and also that which was to redound to the creatures capable thereof. The decree would without doubt have been executed in the Incarnation, even if the first man had not sinned: for it was an express decree, substantially independent of any condition. Therefore, the intention of my will, which was primarily to communicate Myself to the soul and humanity of the Word, was to be efficaciously fulfilled. This was conformable to the justice and rectitude of my works, and, although it was subsequent in its execution, it was nevertheless antecedent in my intention.[17]
Those that say that the Word became incarnate in order to redeem the world say well; and those that say, that He would have become incarnate also, if man had not sinned, likewise speak well, only it must be understood in the right way. For if Adam had not sinned, Christ would have descended from heaven in that form, which would be suitable to man’s innocence; but as Adam sinned, I resolved by the secondary decree, that He should be made of passible nature; since foreseeing sin, it was proper, that it should be repaired in the way in which He has done it. And as you desire to know, how the mystery of the Incarnation would have taken place, if man had preserved the state of innocence; know, that the human substance would have been essentially the same as now, only it would be clothed with the gifts of impassibility and immortality, such as my Only-begotten possessed after his Resurrection and before his Ascension. He would live and converse with men; the hidden sacraments and mysteries would all be manifest; and many times would his glory shine forth as it happened once in his mortal life (Mark 17:1). He would, in that state of man’s innocence, have become manifest to all men in the same manner as He once showed Himself to the three apostles in his mortal state. All those on the way to heaven would see the great glory of my Onlybegotten; they would be consoled by conversing with Him and they would place no obstacle to his divine workings, for they would be without sin.[18]
Here we see the deeper significance of the Holy Transfiguration, as it not only revealed the glory of St. Adam’s nature in the first created world before the Original Sin but also showed forth the glory of the sacred Humanity of Christ as it would have been revealed throughout His incarnate life in a world without sin. As to why God allowed a recognition of the truth of the Absolute Primacy of Christ and the Immaculate Conception to be delayed, the Heavenly Father explained to Venerable Maria:
One of the reasons why the opinion, that the Word came from heaven mainly for the sake of redeeming the world, is more common can be partly explained by the fact, that the mystery of the Redemption with its object has already been consummated and has been mentioned so often in Scriptures, thus causing it to be better understood and manifested. The impassibility of Christ on the contrary was neither effected, nor was it simply and absolutely decreed. All that pertained to this state remains concealed and nobody could be sure of it, except those particular ones, whom I select for the reception of that light, and for the revelation of this decree of my love for man. And although this would certainly be capable of moving men, if they would ponder over it and penetrate it; yet the decree and the work of his Redemption from sin is more powerful and efficacious to move them toward some acknowledgment and return of my immense love; for this is the end which prompts my works. Therefore, I fittingly provide, that these motives and mysteries be kept especially before the mind and be more frequently expounded. Advert also, that in one work two results can be well intended, when one of them is conditional. Thus it was that the Word would not have descended in passible flesh, if man had not sinned, and if he would sin, He would come in a body capable of suffering: whatever would happen the decree of the Incarnation would not be left unfulfilled. I desire, that the sacraments of the Redemption be recognized and held in esteem and that be always remembered, in order that they may bring the proper fruit. But just as much I desire, that the mortals recognize the Word as their Head and as the final Object of all Creation and of all the rest of the human race. For, conjointly with my own kindness, his formation was the principal motive for giving existence to creatures. Therefore, He should be honored, not only because He has redeemed the human race, but also because he furnished the motive for its creation.[19]
The Absolute Primacy of Christ: A True “Development of Doctrine”
During the last century, all kinds of errors and deviations from sound doctrine have been justified under the banner of “development of doctrine,” but our Heavenly Father explained to Venerable Maria that the Absolute Primacy of Christ was a true development of doctrine which He allowed to come into focus in our times, as an antidote to modern errors. He told Venerable Maria:
I desire also that the holy doctors acquire for themselves much grace, light, and glory by their earnest, laudable, and sacred study, and that the truth be more and more clearly detected and purified, and be traced to its source. By humbly investigating the mysteries and the admirable works of my right hand, they come to be partakers of them and of the bread of understanding, the holy Scripture (Eccli. 15, 3). I have especially shown my Providence in regard to doctors and teachers, although their opinions and doubts have been so diverse and for such different ends. Sometimes, for my greater glory and honor, and sometimes for earthly purposes, they are permitted to dispute, and to contradict each other; and there is a great inequality in the manner in which they have proceeded and do proceed to show their emulation and earnestness. But with all this I have directed, governed and enlightened them, giving them my protection in such a manner, that the truth may be investigated and clearly manifested. The light has spread out, so that many of my perfections and wonderful works have been made known, and the holy Scriptures have been interpreted according to high standards, which has been very pleasing to Me. For this reason the fury of hell, with inconceivable envy (especially in these, our times), has raised its throne of iniquity, pretending to engulf the waters of the Jordan (Job 40, 18), and obscure the light of holy faith by heretical doctrines and seeking to sow its false seeds by the help of man (Matth. 13, 25). But the rest of the Church and its truths are in most perfect order; the Catholics, although much involved and blind in other respects, hold nevertheless the truths of faith and its holy light without diminution. I call all men with fatherly love to share this happiness, yet few are the elect who respond to my call.[20]
Here we see that the Absolute Primacy of Christ, as a true “development of doctrine,” leaves the previously defined “truths of the Church” “in perfect order,” as any authentic development of doctrine must do. The dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 gave the Church’s highest stamp of approval to one of the essential elements of the theology of the Absolute Primacy of Christ, while leaving all of the previously defined doctrines of the Faith fully intact. Since then, as the Heavenly Father predicted, the demonic forces have redoubled their efforts to “obscure the light of holy faith by heretical doctrines” by “seeking to sow false seeds by the help of man.” That is why we must now turn our attention to the false prophet Fr. Teilhard to Chardin and to his counterfeit theology of the Primacy of Christ.
Teilhard de Chardin and the Counterfeit Primacy of Christ
In light of Venerable Maria’s private revelations, which merely illuminate the constant teaching of the Church on the origins of man and the universe, we can see that the goal of Catholic social action ought not to be the transformation of the world into some new form, but rather the “restoration of all things in Christ” according to God’s original plan for man and the universe. According to Venerable Maria, the goal of the Christian life is to follow the perfect example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, confident that when we live our consecration to Jesus through Mary in all of our actions, we will call down the graces necessary to establish the social reign of Christ our King throughout the world. In opposition to this divine plan, the satanic forces have raised up a counterfeit spirituality of the primacy of Christ in the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin.
According to Fr. Teilhard, the “Body of Christ” is not the Catholic Church, as the Church Herself has always taught. Rather, in his system, the body of Christ is the universe, the “cosmic Christ” which is evolving towards its ultimate perfection, carrying everyone and everything within it, to the final stage of evolution, “the omega point.” On the surface, Fr. Teilhard’s spirituality appears to teach the primacy of Christ, because it seems to make Christ all in all. But this is an illusion. The fundamental difference between Teilhard de Chardin’s theistic evolutionary concept of God and the true Catholic doctrine of the divine nature is that the god of theistic evolution is not the perfect, transcendent, unchanging Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world. Instead, the god of evolution is identified with the world. Thus, the god of evolution did not create a perfectly harmonious world out of nothing for man in the beginning of time—nor did the character of that world change because of the Original Sin of Adam, requiring the transcendent God to atone for the sins of the world when He assumed a human nature. On the contrary, the god of theistic evolution intentionally uses demons, death, destruction, mutation, natural selection, struggle for existence and extinctions to evolve his handiwork.
Catholic doctrine holds that God created a perfectly harmonious world for man in the beginning. In Fr. Teilhard’s system of theistic evolution, perfection never existed. Perfection lies at the “Omega point” in the future; and the god of evolution uses everything that happens to reach that “Omega point.” Catholic doctrine holds that man was created in the state of grace, sharing in God’s very own life, until sin separated Adam and Eve from God and deprived them of grace. Not so in the theistic evolutionist system of Teilhard de Chardin. For him:
grace represents a physical super-creation. It raises us a further rung on the ladder of cosmic evolution. In other words, the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological.[21]
One of Teilhard’s favorite themes was that the evolution of the individual man had come to an end and had given way to a collective evolution of mankind. According to Teilhard, this collective evolution requires the erection of some kind of global government that will guide mankind to its ultimate fulfillment. Both of these themes appear in Gaudium et Spes, which boldly asserted that the eradication of war:
requires the establishment of some universal public authority . . . endowed with the effective power to safeguard, on behalf of all, security, regard for justice and respect for rights.[22]
The traditional teaching of the Church has always been that the tranquility of order is achieved through the social reign of Christ the King, and not through merely human efforts or institutions. However, after Gaudium et Spes, Pope Paul VI hailed the United Nations as a the “last great hope for concord and peace” . . . and exhorted the world to “Let unanimous trust in this institution grow, let its authority increase . . .”[23] Pope St. John Paul II reinforced this new attitude, expressing the “esteem of the Apostolic See and the Catholic Church for this institution” . . . and hailing the United Nations as “a great instrument for harmonizing and coordinating international life.”[24]
That the “coordination of international life” by the United Nations might not be favorable to the glory of God or to His Church has become increasingly apparent, as the various agencies of the United Nations use their moral authority and financial resources to advance the anti-culture of death, promoting godless sex education, sexual immorality, abortifacient contraception and abortion, while hailing as “rights” sins which cry out to heaven for vengeance and undermining traditional morality throughout the world. To make matters worse, the champions of global government have intensified their efforts to enforce these “rights” through an International Criminal Court which will have authority over the whole world.
Theistic Evolution and the New World Order
According to Teilhard de Chardin, the evolution of consciousness and global government must be accompanied by a new religion that will bring all prior religions to their fulfillment. Teilhard even waxed poetic over the exciting evolutionary breakthroughs that could be achieved as man—dare we add, through his enlightened global government?—discovers how to manipulate his “biological” make-up to assist in his own evolution. Enraptured by the possibilities opened up by atomic fission and the detonation of the first atomic bomb, Teilhard asked:
Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in a series of fantastic events which, having afforded us access to the heart of the atom, would lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the many other strongholds which science is already besieging? The vitalization of matter by the creation of super-molecules. The remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones. Control of heredity and sex by manipulation of genes and chromosomes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psychoanalysis. The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable intellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass.[25]
In the fifty years since The Future of Mankind was published, the world has seen plenty of “remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones” in the form of birth control pills – resulting in the deaths of a quarter of a billion tiny children each year by conservative estimates, ten times the number of children murdered in surgical abortions. During the same period, the world has witnesses an orgy of “control of heredity and sex” not so much by the manipulation of genes as by the destruction of tens of millions of little girls (for the crime of being girls) and of children of both sexes for the crime of having some real or imagined genetic defect. And as to the “liberation of our souls” through “psychoanalysis,” there is no doubt that the psychologist and psychiatrist have replaced the priest and confessor as the liberators of souls, offering secular humanist counseling and drugs in place of Catholic teaching and the life-giving sacraments. Moreover, the fulfillment of Teilhard’s vision has been accomplished in large part through the work of that “last great hope for concord and peace,” the United Nations.
Passive Diminishment with the Cosmic Christ vs. Suffering in Union with Christ Crucified
One of the most disturbing aspects of Fr. Teilhard’s theistic evolutionism in comparison with the theology of the absolute primacy of Christ concerns its treatment of suffering. The perverse influence of Fr. Teilhard’s theology can be clearly seen in the writings of the Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor who is rightly considered one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. Flannery O’Connor struggled with various forms of physical and psychological suffering because of hereditary disease. As one author explains:
Before her tragic death at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor had written two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as commentaries and reviews. She died from Lupus, the same disease which shortened the life of her father. . . By reading Teilhard de Chardin and his thoughts on ‘passive diminishment’, (those afflictions that you can’t get rid of and have to bear), Flannery seems to have been able to accept her lupus and her disability and its consequences. She saw her disability and death as a mysterious stage in her evolution as a spiritual being. Her sickness and pain also opened new outlooks for her as a writer. . . Flannery could joke about her disease as from this letter to a friend:
You didn’t know I had a Dread Disease didj’a? Well I got one. My father died of the same stuff at 44 but the scientist hope to keep me here until I am 96. I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois, at the Armour packing plant.
To another friend:
I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.[26]
The writings of Teilhard de Chardin profoundly shaped O’Connor’s attitude to the mystery of suffering and its relationship to the goodness of God and to human goodness. In The Habit of Being, she reflected:
Pere Teilhard talks about ‘passive diminishment’ in The Divine Milieu. He means those afflictions that you can’t get rid of and have to bear. Those that you can get rid of he believes you must bend every effort to get rid of. I think he was a very great man. (Habit of Being 509).
It would seem that O’ Connor sees modern science’s ability to use “the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily” to extract a palliative treatment for a hereditary illness as a wonderful confirmation of the fact that we live in “a scientific age,” and that we have a Christian duty to embrace the advances of modern science and to “bend every effort to get rid of” our defects. However, behind the Teilhardian version of “taking up the Cross” lies the conviction that perfection has never been part of our past, but only lies in the future, at the Omega Point, so that when we accept the infirmities that modern science cannot (yet) remove or alleviate, we participate in our own evolution and in the evolution of the whole cosmos to that final state of perfection.
The perversity of this new Teilhardian Way of the Cross becomes fully apparent in a memoir that Flannery O’ Connor considered one of her most important writings—her account of the saintly child and victim soul Mary Ann Long. As author Ann Ball explains in her book Young Faces of Holiness, Mary Ann Long was one of four children from a poor family in Kentucky:
Misfortune had followed the family, leaving it in poor circumstances. Mary Ann’s mother was ill and could not care for a sick child. At the age of three and a half, in spite of x-rays, radium, and the removal of her eye, Mary Ann was diagnosed as incurable at the tumor clinic in Louisville. The hospital could no longer keep her. The family doctor advised her parents to send her to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home, which was run by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, in Atlanta. The thought of sending their dying child so far from home and to strangers was terrible to her loving parents. However, no other option was financially possible, so they reluctantly agreed to let her go there until her mother could regain her health.
From the time of her arrival at the home, Mary Ann entrusted herself to the care of the sisters and devoted herself to trying to cheer up the other residents. Mary Ann had been brought up without any church affiliation, but when the sisters suggested to her parents that she be baptized into the Catholic Church, they gave their permission, and Mary Ann received the life of grace in the home with the help and support of many of the other patients. As the sisters instructed her in the Faith, Mary Ann’s sanctified soul embraced the mysteries of creation, redemption and sanctification, and received the grace to long for Heaven as her true home.
Once Mary Ann wistfully questioned Sister Loretta about heaven, suggesting that it would be light and she would be able to see with both her eyes. “When I get to heaven,” she said, “I will have two good eyes and I’ll run around heaven and be able to see everyone in heaven at once!”
Sister Loretta told her, “Heaven is everything that is perfect and is our true home, but this must not make us forget our work here, the things God put us here to do.”
The tiny four-year-old shocked Sister by her immediate grasp of this definition. Mary Ann said, “You mean we make it so bright and cheerful here that everyone will know what it’ll be like in heaven?”
During the period that Mary Ann spent at the Home, the Baltimore Catechism was recommended to teachers by Bishops throughout the United States, so there is little or no doubt about what the Dominican Sisters taught her about creation and the original perfection of mankind before the Original Sin. In the Teacher’s Guide to the Baltimore Catechism that was recommended by dozens of Bishops throughout the United States prior to Vatican II, teachers were instructed to teach their students the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis:
In the beginning God created all things: something particular on each of the six days of creation . . . The chief things created [were] . . . Plants and trees . . . [and] men . . . The sun, moon, stars, etc. . . . All these are the works of God’s creation. All these he has called into existence by merely wishing for them.[27]
The Teacher’s Guide to the Baltimore Catechism emphasized that God created Adam body and soul and Eve from Adam’s side on the sixth day of creation to show that holy marriage was of divine institution, permanent and indissoluble. Mary Ann would have been taught that God placed our first parents as the king and queen of a perfectly beautiful, complete and harmonious universe, a universe completely free from human death, deformity or disease. In the words of the Teacher’s Guide:
God placed our first parents in Paradise, a large beautiful garden, and gave him power over all other creatures. Adam gave all the animals their appropriate names and they were obedient to him. Even lions, tigers and other animals that we now fear so much came and played about him. Our first parents, in their state of original innocence, were the happy friends of God without any sorrow or suffering.[28]
Like Catholic children throughout the United States, Mary Ann would also have been taught that it was the Original Sin of Adam that brought death, deformity, disease, struggle for existence, and misery into the world; but that God promised a Redeemer who would come to take away the sins of the world and restore everything back to its original goodness and to an even more wonderful perfection at the end of time. The Baltimore Catechism taught that after four thousand years the Second Person of the Holy Trinity became man and suffered and died for our sins, rose from the dead and founded the Holy Catholic Church, so that those, like Mary Ann, who accept the Lordship of Jesus and are incorporated into His Mystical Body can cooperate with Him through the Holy Spirit in the great work of restoring all things in Christ, so that God’s Will can be done “on earth as it is in Heaven.”
With this traditional catechesis, Mary Ann had no doubt about the perfect goodness of God or about His personal love for her. When the Sisters taught her the Way of the Cross, she was filled with compassion for the sufferings of Jesus on her behalf. She also learned from the Sisters and visiting Priests how to unite her sufferings with His, offering them up to God the Father with Him for the conversion of sinners. A couple of times, Mary Ann’s parents tried to bring her home, but the neighborhood children stared at her deformity and made her feel extremely uncomfortable, so she returned permanently to the Dominican Sisters. As Ann Ball explains:
The retreat master of the nearby Trappist monastery paid a visit to her soon after her first attempt to live at home. She told him about her family and about the bad children who had stared at her there. He asked her, “Mary Ann, do you want to help those children to become good? They haven’t been taught to be good and they need help.” After Mary Ann indicated how willing she would be to help, the priest explained to her how she could express her disappointments, hide them, and offer them as a gift to Baby Jesus to help these children. She never forgot the lesson . . .[29]
This was Mary Ann’s situation at the Home, when the sisters contacted the noted author Flannery O’Connor and asked her to write something about their saintly child-resident. At first, O’Connor rejected the invitation, because she feared that “pious children” would be dull and saccharine. Eventually, by contemplating the goodness that Mary Ann expressed through her deformed face and that she cheerfully put into practice by serving her fellow patients, O’Connor became fascinated by Mary Ann’s goodness and resolved to write about it. Unfortunately, for her readers, Flannery O’Connor’s perspective on Mary Ann’s goodness was profoundly influenced by the evolutionist theology of Teilhard de Chardin. In her memoir of Mary Ann, O’Connor reflected:
The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliché’ or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of the good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise (Memoir 5, MM 215).
No one in his right mind would disagree that it is easier to portray evil (at least superficially) in a believable and interesting way than it is to believably portray heroic goodness and sanctity. But such portrayals do exist in literature, like the portrayal of Fr. Zosima and Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov and the portrayal of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Teilhard helped Flannery O’Connor to find meaning in her sufferings by seeing them as a necessary part of her evolution as a spiritual being. But did Teilhard really help O’Connor to understand and embrace her sufferings in an authentically Catholic Christian way?
No, he did not!
The great saints and spiritual writers of the Church never fail to counsel suffering souls to unite their sufferings to the sufferings of Christ that they might say with St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians:
I rejoice in my sufferings, and I make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body the Church (Colossians 1:24).
In Teilhard’s “better Christianity” based on evolution the soul finds meaning in suffering not by uniting her sufferings to the sufferings of Jesus but by seeing them as a necessary part of one’s own evolution and, simultaneously, of the evolution of the whole universe to the Omega Point. Teilhard states plainly that he does not believe in an original perfection of the universe that Our Lord came to restore through His Church or in a personal transformation in Christ that will find its fulfillment in the perfection of Heaven. His primary—if not his sole—focus is on the Omega point in this world, which will be achieved by evolution, willy-nilly, with or without our cooperation.
Towards the Omega Point
Since “the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological,” in Teilhard’s system, it is not a gift of participation in the divine nature, conferred upon our first parents at creation or restored to souls through baptism. It is a by-product of evolution. Even Christ is “saved by evolution” since His incarnation is a product of the same evolutionary process by which He, according to Teilhard, evolves the entire universe to its cosmic fulfillment. Indeed, in this system, even atheists participate in the evolutionary process which propels them along with adherents of the Catholic religion towards the “Omega point.”
This brand of Teilhardian theistic evolutionism has become the predominant religious belief of the champions of global government and a New World Order. Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber, a favorite of such globalist luminaries as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, has become one of the most widely translated academic authors in the United States by peddling an elaborated version of Teilhard’s theistic evolutionary religion. Wilber credits Teilhard with hastening the Western world’s acceptance of the most important shift in modern thought – from:
The idea of history as devolution (or Fall from God) . . . [to the idea] of history as evolution (or a growth toward God) . . . Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action, God in the making, and that making is destined to carry all of us straight to the Divine.[30]
The appeal of this way of thinking to powerful individuals and groups seeking a justification for harsh measures deemed necessary to hasten mankind’s “growth toward God” appears starkly in the statements of Adolf Eichmann at the end of his life. As Hitler’s choice to implement the “final solution” and eliminate as many Jews as possible, Eichmann was kidnapped from South America after the Second World War and taken to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity. As he awaited execution, he was interviewed several times by a Lutheran pastor who sought to reconcile him with God before his death. Eichman repeatedly dismissed the pastor’s call to faith and repentance, arguing that he believed in the god of evolution who had used millions of years of struggle for existence to evolve the first human beings. Rather than take responsibility for his part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Eichmann insisted that such actions were an inevitable part of the evolutionary process which would be overcome, not through repentance and conversion to a new life in Christ, but through evolution, which would gradually transform human nature, willy-nilly, over aeons of time.
Reading the works of Wilber and his fellow travelers brings home how much the architects of the New World Order resemble Eichman and his Nazi colleagues in their willingness to use whatever means will achieve their evolutionary ends. The cooperation of Church leaders in the establishment of a godless global government supported by a Teilhardian one-world religion is suicidal; it shockingly demonstrates what Sister Lucia of Fatima referred to as the “diabolical disorientation” of our times. Yet even Pope Benedict XVI fell prey to Fr. Teilhard’s distorted theology when he wrote:
The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy. This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.[31]
Here we see that in Fr. Teilhard’s system, the universe is the body of Christ which evolves until it reaches its final perfection and becomes “a living host” so that everyone and everything in the universe is divinized by its participation in the evolutionary process. This is the complete opposite of the true spirituality of the “living host” as it has been articulated in the lives and writings of some of the greatest saints of modern times, whose testimony confirms the Absolute Primacy of Christ.
The Spirituality of the Absolute Primacy of Christ: Divine Antidote to Modern Errors
The Catechism tells us that Jesus willed humanly all that He willed divinely with the Father and the Holy Spirit for our salvation (CCC, 475). In Ephesians 2:10, St. Paul tells us that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, [that is, in the God-man,] for good works that He has prepared for us that we should walk in them.” This means that Jesus continually willed that each of our acts be good, pure, and holy with His own divine holiness, as acts of God’s own handiwork. It means that Jesus suffered for and in our every act that falls short of His divine holiness. He suffered the pain, the shame, the guilt and the punishment for each and every sin. But it also means that He has willed a perfect act of love for you and for me for each and every moment of our lives. If we appropriate this gift, each one of those acts of love, those “works,” takes on Jesus’ perfect intention—the greatest glory of the Father, and the good of all souls, past, present, and future. Moreover, those acts of love that Jesus willed in time and in eternity are made present in the Holy Eucharist. As Jesus told Blessed Conchita de Armida, “All My life is renewed on the altar, My incarnation, My life, and My death”—not just the sufferings of Calvary—but His whole life, because the whole span of His 33 years was marked by the Cross.
This truth—that Jesus has prepared acts of perfect love for you and for me—is the key to understanding the divine intimacy that the Holy Spirit is offering us in our time. And the fact that these acts of perfected love that Jesus has prepared for us are made present in the Holy Eucharist unlocks the meaning of that phrase that recurs so often in the writings of these holy souls of recent times—the phrase “living host.” In their lives and writings Jesus invites us to renounce the independent use of our human will and to ask the Holy Spirit to consecrate us into living hosts. Then the Holy Spirit will inspire us to do those acts of perfect love that Jesus has prepared for us in the secret recesses of His Heart. And if we allow Him a free reign, He may bring us to the point where we will always be doing the perfect acts of love that Jesus has prepared for us. Thus, we may become a “real presence” of Jesus in the world, a “living Eucharist.”[32]
Transformation in Christ: The Calling of All Christians
One of the most important words in the New Testament appears only three times. It is the Greek word metamorpho. Translated as “transfiguration,” “transformation” or even as “changed,” the Greek word means a transformation of one kind of thing into another—hence, our English word “metamorphosis,” meaning a transformation like that of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The first use of the word occurs in St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 16 and 17. In Matthew 16:28, Jesus tells his Apostles, “There are some standing here who will not die until they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom.” Modernist Scripture scholars, like Alfred Loisy, saw in this remark proof positive that Jesus did not know what He was talking about—that He was wrong about the future. Had Loisy and his disciples respected the wisdom of the Church Fathers, they would have been able to explain the apparent failure of Jesus’ prediction. Indeed, the Fathers had found the fulfillment of Matthew 16 in the verses immediately following—perhaps all the more easily because their Gospel scrolls were not divided into chapters and verses:
And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. And He was transfigured before them, and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became white as light (Matthew 17:1-2).
The Eastern Fathers of the Church understood that this was “the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom”: The manifestation of the divinity of Christ in His Humanity. And in the Byzantine Vesper Verses for the Feast of the Transfiguration, the Church still proclaims:
Through Your transfiguration, You returned Adam’s nature to its original splendor, restoring its very elements to the glory and brilliance of Your Divinity. Wherefore we cry out to You, the Creator of All, “Glory be to You.”
Thus, the first use of the word metamorpho in the New Testament refers to the full manifestation of Christ’s Divinity in His Humanity. But the other two uses of the word do not refer to Christ. They refer to ordinary believers—like you and me.
“Be Transformed by the Renewal of your Mind”
In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 11, St. Paul predicts the ultimate conversion of “all Israel” when the “fullness” of the Gentiles enter in to the Kingdom of God. This “fullness” can be interpreted in at least three different ways—as the total number of Gentiles who will be saved; as a representative number of Gentiles from every nation on earth; and as a remnant perfected by the Holy Spirit in whom the fullness of divinity dwells bodily as it did in Christ’s Humanity. It is this last interpretation that makes the most sense in relation to the verses that follow—because St. Paul begins his next section, chapter 12, verses 1-2, by saying to his Gentile audience:
I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Be transformed (metamorpho) by the renewal of your mind that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).
Here the Holy Spirit, in and through St. Paul, applies the same word for the revelation of the Divinity of Christ in His Humanity to the manifestation of the Divinity of Christ in the humanity of His disciples. And lest this should scandalize anyone, St. Paul uses the word a second time, in the same sense—as if to remove all doubt about its meaning—in his second letter to the Corinthians. He writes:
We beholding the Lord are being changed (metamorpho) from one degree of glory into another, into His perfect image and likeness. This is the work of the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:16-18).
In this passage St. Paul once again affirms that every Christian is called to be transformed into the perfect image and likeness of Christ, from one degree of holiness to another, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The Blessed Mother Ushers in a Eucharistic Age of Divine Intimacy
Only one human being ever lived perfectly transformed in Christ at every moment, from her conception until her last breath—the Blessed Virgin Mary Our Mother. According to Venerable Maria of Agreda, the Blessed Virgin confided to her that She was so transformed into the perfect image and likeness of Christ, that She preserved within herself the Eucharistic species, from one Holy Communion to the next—from the Last Supper until the end of her life. From the time of the Apostles until the nineteenth century, not even the greatest saints of the Church—like St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Catherine, and St. Teresa of Avila—ever received this grace. Only in recent times has the Holy Spirit seen fit to usher in an age of such intimacy with God that even ordinary men and women can enjoy an unbroken Eucharistic communion with Jesus in the Holy Spirit.
The first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a message for the Church in modern times was the apparition of La Salette, France, in 1846. In addition to the public call for repentance that Our Lady gave to the Church through the two visionaries, Maximin and Melanie, the Blessed Mother also gave each of the seers a private message to be revealed at a later time. In Melanie’s message the Blessed Virgin was said to have foretold that “in 1864 all of the devils would be loosed from hell.” In light of the Romans 5:20 principle, mentioned above, this shocking prediction contained the promise of a new outpouring of grace, and—true to His word—the Lord gave unmistakable signs of such an outpouring during the period shortly before, during and after that fateful year.
Perhaps the least-noticed sign of an intensification of God’s presence in the world took place on August 26, 1861, in the life of Archbishop Antonio Maria Claret, the former Archbishop of Santiago, Cuba, founder of the congregation of missionary priests known as the Claretians, and confessor to the Queen of Spain. On that day, the archbishop received a grace which crowned a life of unstinting missionary labors, in which he had preached an estimated 25,000 sermons, authored 144 religious books, founded three religious orders, confirmed 300,000 souls, and validated more than 9,000 marriages. It was a grace that came to him in the midst of continual threats of assassination and attempts on his life by enemies of God and of the Church. It was the grace of the Real Presence of Jesus abiding in him from one Holy Communion to the next. From that time, until the end of his life, he confided, “Day and night, I have the Most Holy Sacrament in my breast.”[33]
What was the significance of this grace, previously granted only once, and to the Mother of God Herself?
The Multiplication of Living Hosts
Further light can be shed on the meaning of this grace and its relationship to the Absolute Primacy of Christ from the life of one of the souls destined by God to become a sort of “matriarch” of this new intimacy with Jesus—the “Little Flower,” St. Therese of Lisieux. Born three years after the death of St. Antonio Maria Claret, from a young age St. Therese longed to love Jesus as He had never been loved before. As a teenager, Therese received the grace to abandon herself completely to the Will of God. But she looked for a simple, child-like way to live this abandonment. Thus, she wrote:
We are living now in an age of inventions, and we no longer have to take the trouble of climbing stairs, for, in the homes of the rich, an elevator has replaced them very successfully. I wanted to find an elevator which would raise me to Jesus, for I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection.[34]
Simplicity became the distinguishing characteristic of what St. Therese came to call her “little way.” The “little way” is simple, in the same sense that St. Louis De Montfort’s true devotion is simple: it requires nothing more for its accomplishment than an act of the will. St. Therese insisted that God would act with infinite generosity towards those who would make a simple act of perfect self-surrender. She wrote:
The Good God does not need years to accomplish his work of love in a soul; one ray from his heart can, in an instant, make His flower bloom for eternity (emphasis added).[35]
This insight led St. Therese to another, even more important, revelation—namely, that the love of God is not a series of acts but a single successionless Act in which a soul can actually abide through perfect abandonment. Thus, on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, 1895, St. Therese performed the most important act of her life, her “great offering.” She wrote:
In order to live in one single act of perfect love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of your Love, O my God (emphasis in original).[36]
“To live in one single act of perfect love” implies that the perfectly abandoned soul not only does good and loving acts with the help of God’s grace, but rather lives in God’s Eternal Act. Significantly, the Little Flower’s greatest mystical experience occurred shortly after her consecration to live in a single act of perfect love, thus confirming the central importance of this act in her spiritual life. Through her entrance into God’s Eternal Act, St. Therese could fulfill her desire to be present to all times and all places out of love for Him:
Ah, in spite of my littleness, I would like to enlighten souls as did the Prophets and the Doctors. I have the vocation of the Apostle. I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach Your Name and to plant Your glorious Cross on infidel soil. But O my Beloved, one mission alone would not be sufficient for me, I would want to preach the Gospel on all the five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years only but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages (emphasis in original).[37]
By living in a single act of perfect love, St. Therese could begin to experience the fulfillment of Our Lord’s prayer at the Last Supper, “Father, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). Like the great mystical saints who succeeded her, St. Therese realized that her Little Way of living in God’s Eternal Act was not merely a personal grace. She foresaw that the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary would come about through the “victims of merciful love,” souls who would follow her little way of perfect abandonment. She prophesied:
The legion of little souls, the victims of merciful love, will become as ‘numerous as the stars of Heaven and the sands of the seashore.’ It will be terrible to Satan; it will help the Blessed Virgin to crush his proud head completely.[38]
According to St. Therese, the victims of merciful love entered into the very heart of the Church, into eternity, so as to embrace “all times and places.” She wrote:
I understood that the Church has a HEART and that this heart is burning with love. I understood it was Love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES . . . IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL! (emphasis in original).[39]
St. Therese also believed that the victims of merciful love would do the Will of God “on earth as in heaven.” Loving God “with His own love,” they would enter into heaven after death without passing through Purgatory. She wrote:
It appears to me that for victims of love there will be no judgment, but rather, that the Good God will hasten to recompense with eternal delights His own love, which He will find burning in their hearts (emphasis added).[40]
At the end of her life, St. Therese was inspired to crown her great offering by pleading for the grace of Christ’s continuous Real Presence. She begged Jesus, “Remain in me as in a tabernacle and never separate Yourself from Your little victim!” After her death, Mother Agnes of Jesus testified that:
She spoke to me about this several times, but not very often. All the same, I am sure that, in this prayer, she had in mind the miraculous permanent presence of the sacred species and not just the permanent presence of the divine influence which is produced without a miracle in faithful souls. Moreover, in her Act of Offering she appealed in this regard to the omnipotence of Jesus Christ.[41]
One of the novices who enjoyed the guidance of St. Therese as novice mistress, Sr. Marie of the Trinity, testified to her confidence that God granted Therese’s prayer before she died. She stated:
For me, I have an interior conviction that she was heard . . . She told me on this subject that nothing is impossible to the omnipotence of God and that He would not have inspired the request, if He had not wanted to fulfill it . . . In the canticle which she composed for me for my profession, and which has been printed in her poetry under the title I Thirst for Love, there is a stanza which begins like this: You, the great God Whom all Heaven adores, You live in me, a prisoner night and day. A sister suggested to her that she must have made a mistake and should have said: “You live for me . . . etc.” but she replied: No, no, I said it correctly, and she gave me a look which meant: We understood one another (emphasis in original).[42]
An Army of Living Hosts
The Little Flower’s prediction of a multiplication of the “victims of merciful love” began to be fulfilled in the lives of several twentieth century saints. The Polish nun St. Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament, the Canadian religious Blessed Dina Belanger, the Mexican wife and mother Blessed Conchita de Armida, and her spiritual director, the Servant of God Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez—to name but a few—all embraced the life of a “living host.”
In Quebec, a religious of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, Blessed Dina Belanger also embraced the state of a living host. On June 16, 1925, Blessed Dina testified to the likeness between the presence of God in her state of “living host” and the same presence in the Eucharist. She wrote:
I am still aware of, and even have a clearer understanding of the presence of the adorable Trinity in which I am submerged, and of the same grace concerning the presence of Our Lord in the sacred Host.[43]
As a “living host,” Blessed Dina no longer experienced the sufferings of Jesus as a compassionate observer. Instead, she identified completely with the interior sufferings of Jesus by sharing in the “chalice of His agony.” She wrote:
Physical suffering is mild compared to what I felt in my soul; my suffering was centered in my heart and from there spread through my entire being as if to crush me. I felt an overwhelming sense of weariness and yet, how happy I was![44]
Blessed Dina compared these sufferings to the “real presence” of Jesus in Holy Communion. She wrote:
My union with the Heart of Jesus has been like His real presence after Holy Communion, while the consecrated Host is still with me. This morning, Our Lord gave me to understand that it is just as easy for Him to give Himself to me—through His blessed chalice—and to extend His sensible presence over two days—through an interior and invisible act—as it is for a quarter of an hour, more or less, under the appearance of the sacred Host (emphasis added).[45]
Meanwhile, in San Luis Potosi, in Mexico, Blessed Conchita de Armida, a wife, widow, and mother of nine children, also answered God’s call to become a “living host.” Jesus told her:
I want you to be My host and have the intention, renewed as often as possible day and night, of offering yourself with Me on all the patens on earth. I want you transformed in Me by suffering, by love and by the practice of all the virtues, to raise heavenward this cry of your soul in union with Me: “This is My Body, this is My Blood.” Thus by making yourself but one with the Incarnate Word out of love and suffering, with the same intentions of love, you will obtain graces for the whole world. You will offer Me Myself and yourself also, with the Holy Spirit and through Mary, to the eternal Father (emphasis added)[46] . . . In fact, the Father wishes that I Myself, united to your soul as victim, have you sacrifice Me and immolate Me with the same love of the Father on behalf of a world which has need of this spiritual shock and of a grace of this nature to be converted (emphasis added).[47]
Largely through the example of Blessed Conchita, Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez was also inspired to join the ranks of the little victims of merciful love. As he reflected on the grace of becoming a “living host,” he came to understand it as the perfecting of the priesthood. He wrote:
The perfect transformation gives the perfect priesthood, since it makes perfect the sacrifice of every moment, of the two victims united, Jesus and I, so that I may be able truly to say: “This is my Body, This is my Blood.”
The official priesthood is a transformation into Christ, realized by ordination, and which makes it possible to say the divine words in the Mass. But since it is not total transformation of itself, by the sacramental character only the Eucharistic sacrifice can be offered.
When the “marvelous exchange” is realized, through the perfect transformation in which we give to Christ a passible body, and blood which He can pour out in a bloody manner, and Christ gives Himself to us, divinizing our being, making it His, making us Him, assuming our humanity through a union which is the image of the Hypostatic Union, then in every moment we can offer the two victims united in one same immolation; we can renew unceasingly the sacrifice of Christ.[48]
“As Numerous as the Stars in the Heavens”
As the spiritual father of lay persons and lay associations as well as priests and religious, Archbishop Martinez realized that this “marvelous exchange” held the key to a new growth of holiness among all the faithful, of all states in life. Indeed, Jesus told Blessed Conchita:
When I pronounced the words: “Do this in memory of Me,” I was not addressing Myself only to priests. Of course, they alone have the power to change the substance of bread into My most holy Body and the substance of wine into My Blood. But the power to unite in one single oblation all oblations belongs to all Christians.[49]
St. Therese had predicted that the “little victims of merciful love” would become “as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the grains of sand on the sea shore.” For the “little victims of love,” she said, “God will work wonders; but ordinarily, they will work in faith, because otherwise they would be unable to live.”[50] It follows that those who want to enlist in Our Lady’s army of living hosts must be prepared to live a life of radical faith—in which they fully participate in the divine-human life of Jesus by performing the most ordinary actions with Him and with His intentions, but without any tangible reward or visible sign of their exalted activity.
In short, the authentic saints and prophets of the Church teach that Our Lord is calling us to become living hosts, by living one life with Him in all our actions, which will call down the graces necessary to usher in the social reign of Christ which will ensure that even the natural order will be partly restored by the effects of divine grace. Meanwhile the false prophets of Fr. Teilhard’s counterfeit spirituality call us to support man’s efforts to take evolution into his own hands so as to hasten the consummation of all things by “the cosmic christ,” achieving perfection through the use of science and technology, without regard for natural or divine law.
The Absolute Primacy of Christ establishes that perfection existed in the beginning and can be largely restored, even in this life, by our cooperation with divine grace as members of—but never apart from—the Mystical Body of Christ. The false theology of the cosmic christ denies the original perfection of the universe and the possibility of restoring all things in Christ and transfers perfection to the future, to the omega point, the attainment of which justifies the use of unnatural and immoral means such as contraception and eugenics and promises (falsely) that everyone and everything will be sanctified by their participation in the cosmic christ, whether or not they are members of the Mystical Body of Christ.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost free us from all error and from every evil and transform us into those “living hosts” that He created us to be from before the foundation of the world! Amen.
Footnotes:
[1] According to one recent report, “12,000 people flocked to Agreda, Spain in 2002 for the 400th anniversary of Venerable Maria de Agreda’s birth. Newspapers echoed popular support for her beatification and bemoaned the lengthy process. Padre Angel Martinez Monux reminds advocates of the solid progress in her Cause since the Centennial began. First, the Vatican Secretariat of State confirmed that he found no theological errors in Mystical City of God, an issue that had clouded her Cause in the past. Second, the Franciscan Postulator General, Luca M. DeRosa recently submitted a new petition for the ”nihil obstat” (go-ahead) for the pursuit of her Cause for Sainthood, an official action necessary to proceed. Summarized from Publicación Para Beatificación, December 2003, Translation © Marilyn H. Fedewa. http://www.cambridgeconnections.net/Maria_News.html (accessed 7-14-08)
[2] MARIA OF AGREDA, City of God, Volume I (Washington, NJ: AMI Press, 1996), p xxiii.)
[3] MARIA OF AGREDA, City of God, Volume I, pp. 15-16.
[4] MARIA OF AGREDA, City of God, Volume I, pp. 33-34.
[5] MARIA OF AGREDA, City of God, Volume I, p. 34.
[6] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Volume I (Washington, NJ: AMI Press, 1996), pp. 32-33.
[7] SEAN KOPCZYNSKI, C.P.M., Homily, Third Sunday after Epiphany, 2014.
[8] Theologians identify two forms of fiat creation, immediate and mediate. In immediate creation, God brings forth something from nothing without making use of any pre-existing material, as when He created the light on the first day of creation week. In mediate creation, God creates something by His divine power using some pre-existing material, as when He created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth on the sixth day of creation. God alone can produce something by mediate creation, because the matter that is used is entirely passive to the divine action; for example, there was nothing in the dust of the earth that had the potential to become the body of the first man without God’s divine creative action.
[9] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God (Rockford: TAN Books, 1978), p. 29.
[10] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, p. 35.
[11] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God (Rockford: TAN Books, 1978), pp. 29-35.
[12] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, p. 34.
[13] HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, The Book of Divine Works, Translated by Nathaniel M. Campbell for the Series: Fathers of the Church Medieval Continuations (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), p.
[14] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Vol. I, (Washington, NJ: Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, 1996), p. 125-126.
[15] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Vol. I, (Washington, NJ: Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, 1996), p. 127-128.
[16] ST. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE, “The Immaculata Before Her Coming into the World,” written in the monastery of Niepokalanόw, August 1940, published in The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Vol. II (Lugano: Nerbini International, 2016), pp. 2281-2282.
[17] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Vol. I, (Washington, NJ: Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, 1996), p. 76.
[18] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Vol. I, (Washington, NJ: Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, 1996), pp. 77-78.
[19] MARIA of AGREDA, City of God, Vol. I, (Washington, NJ: Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, 1996), pp. 79-80.
[20] IBID, pp. 80-81.
[21] TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, quoted in Teilhardism and the New Religion, WOLFGANG SMITH, p. 217.
[22] Gaudium et spes, XX
[23] PAUL VI, Address to the United Nations, October 4, 1965.
[24] JOHN PAUL II, Address to the United Nations, October 5, 1995.
[25] TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, The Future of Mankind, p. 149.
[26] FLANNERY O’CONNOR, quoted in “Flannery on Teilhard” https://tcreek1.jimdofree.com/flannery-on-teilhard/ (accessed 8-01-24)
[27] BALTIMORE CATECHISM, Volume IV, 1891, “On Our First Parents and the Fall” https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14554/pg14554-images.html (accessed July 31, 2024)
[28] IBID.
[29] ANN BALL, Modern Saints
[30] K. WILBER, quoted in S. ROSE, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, CA: St. Herman Brotherhood, 2000), p. 562.
[31] POPE BENEDICT XVI, “Remarks made in a homily during Evening Prayer in the cathedral in Aosta, in northern Italy, on July 24, 2009.”
[32] For the most part, the process of abandoning oneself to the Holy Spirit so as to perform the perfect acts of love prepared by Jesus entails great suffering. However, the knowledge that one can do his acts together with Jesus at every moment is so powerful and inspiring that it may enable souls to overcome their human weaknesses faster than ever before.
[33] FANCHON ROYER, Saint Anthony Claret (Rockford: TAN, 1957), p. 216.
[34] THERESE OF LISIEUX, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux, translated by John Clarke (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), p. 207.
[35] THERESE of LISIEUX, quoted in Thoughts of St. Therese (Rockford: TAN, 1988), p. 5.
[36] THERESE of LISIEUX, Story of a Soul, p. 277.
[37] THERESE of LISIEUX, Story of a Soul, pp. 192-193.
[38] THERESE of LISIEUX, quoted in Legio Mariae: The Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary (Dublin: Concilium Legionis Mariae, 1993), p. 257.
[39] THERESE of LISIEUX, Story of a Soul, p. 194.
[40] ANN BALL, Modern Saints, p. 11.
[41] ANGEL DES LES GAVARRES, Therese the Little Child of God’s Mercy (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1999), p. 230.
[42] ANGEL DES LES GAVARRES, p. 231.
[43] DINA BELANGER, Autobiography, p. 229 (June 16, 1925).
[44] BELANGER, p. 272 (September 4, 1926).
[45] BELANGER, p. 276 (December 2, 1926).
[46] Quoted in MARIE_MICHEL PHILIPON, O.P., Conchita, translated by Aloysius J. Owen, S.J. (New York: Alba House, 1978), p. 161.
[47] PHILIPON, p. 159 (Oct. 22, 1907).
[48] By the “marvelous exchange” Archbishop Martinez means the exchange of wills, whereby the soul abandons the independent use of her human will so that the Will of the Father may reign in her through the Holy Spirit, as It reigned—and reigns—in the Humanity of Jesus.
[49] PHILIPON, Conchita, p. 189 (June 7, 1916).
[50] ANGEL DE LES GAVARRES, op. cit., p. 233.
[i] As St. Robert Bellarmine pointed out to Galileo’s party, from the time of King Solomon, the entire Tradition of the Church maintained that the Bible teaches geostatic-geocentrism. Moreover, the Magisterium has never abrogated its formal condemnations of heliocentrism in 1616 and 1633. The outstanding biographer of Galileo, Stillman Drake, has confirmed that Galileo himself sincerely rejected the heliocentric hypothesis in one of the last letters that he wrote before his death, and even Galileo’s staunchest defenders admit that he had no proof for his heliocentric model of the solar system. The champions of Galileo as a “martyr for science” usually argue that the “proof” for his hypothesis was provided by Newton, or Foucault or any one of a number of scientists who lived after Galileo’s day. However, as Alexander Von Humboldt admitted in 1825, and as other leading scientists have affirmed down to the present day, there has never been any proof beyond a reasonable doubt for the truth of the heliocentric hypothesis. On the contrary, the scientific evidence supports the Neo-Tychonian model of the universe which places the sun in orbit around a stationary Earth and the planets in orbit around the sun. This was the very model of the solar system revealed by God to St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, in the 12th century, now confirmed by the discoveries of contemporary astronomers. In the words of Dr. Dean H. Kenyon:
Virtually every empirical finding (e.g., stellar parallax and aberration, retrograde motions of the planets) purportedly supporting heliocentrism can be shown to be consistent with Neo-Tychonic geocentrism. Especially persuasive are recent data on the distribution of galaxies in the cosmos, gamma-ray bursts, and the distribution of quasars, all of which strongly suggest that the earth lies at or very near the center of the cosmos. And then there are the astounding data obtained by the Wilkerson (2001) and Planck (2009) probes on patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. These data show that the CMB dipole axis is aligned with the earth’s equator and that the CMB quadrupole and octopole axes are aligned with the ecliptic! So much for the Copernican Principle![i]
Another phenomenon showing that the Earth rests in a central position is the red-shift of star-light. As Steven Hawking explained:
Now at first sight, all this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look [i.e., redshifted] might seem to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe.[i]
Other interpretations of red-shifts which are not based on an expanding universe, e. g. gravity, lead to the same conclusion. As Paul Davies observed:
It has always been realised, however, that a redshift of light can have another cause – gravity… As we see only redshifts whichever direction we look in the sky, the only way in which this could be consistent with a gravitational explanation is if the Earth is situated at the centre of an inhomogeneous Universe.[i]
This conclusion, however, was dismissed by the scientific community – not on scientific grounds but on philosophical ones, as Edwin Hubble admitted:
Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, analogous, in a sense, to the ancient conception of a central earth. The hypothesis cannot be disproved but it is unwelcome and would be accepted only as a last resort in order to save the phenomena. ….The unwelcome supposition of a favored location must be avoided at all costs.[i]
To avoid this “unwelcome supposition,” physicists introduced an unscientific force: A space expansion with each point in space being a center of expansion. In Hubble’s words:
all observers, regardless of their location, will see the same general picture of the universe…if we see the nebulae all receding from our position in space, then every other observer no matter where he may be located, will see the nebulae [galaxies] all receding from his position. However, the assumption is adopted. There must be no favored location in the universe, no center, no boundary; all must see the universe alike.[i]
Using light beams, it was possible for scientists to measure the speed of the Earth’s movement in space. George Airy used a specially prepared tube through which a beam of star light could not have been travelling fast enough to reach the exit of the tube if the Earth was moving as fast as an annual revolution around the Sun would imply. However, Airy could see the light beam reaching the exit. This experiment is known as “Airy’s Failure.” Airy’s experiment was followed by the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in which a light beam was emitted into the direction of the Earth’s assumed movement around the Sun and its time of arrival at the target allowed the experimenters to measure the Earth’s velocity. The result showed that the movement of the ether against the Earth was only a tiny fraction (circa 5%) of what it would have been had the Earth been in orbit around the sun.
As the only way to avoid drawing the straightforward geostatic conclusion from this experiment, Albert Einstein invented his “Special Theory of Relativity” according to which there would be a natural process which contracts space and dilates time in just such a way as to produce the result obtained by the Michelson-Morley experiment. However, time dilation and space contraction are unscientific, supernatural phenomena which do not deal with material processes within the natural world but with the framework of the natural world, space and time itself. The theory does not explain why such unobserved phenomena should occur exactly at rates that make the speed of light look constant, not 200 % more or 17 % less, or any of the other infinite numerical possibilities. With a similar kind of light beam measurement, Albert Michelson and Georges Sagnac measured the daily relative motion between the Earth and the universe around the Earth’s axis. The resulting rotation period was circa one day as confirmed by our experience. This proved that the Special Theory of Relativity is wrong and that the straightforward interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, i.e., a small ether current moving around a non-moving Earth, was correct.
