In 1858, on the eve of the publication of Charles Darwin’s book Origin of Species, the Queen of Prophets appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous and identified Herself as “the Immaculate Conception,” thus giving the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution. It was St. Maximilian Kolbe who through a lifetime of meditation on Our Lady’s words realized that Our Lady’s self-identification as “the Immaculate Conception” affirmed the special creation of Adam and Eve, body and soul, and excluded the possibility that their bodies could have been produced through an evolutionary process. In the last major piece of writing that he wrote or dictated before going to the starvation bunker in Auschwitz, he wrote:
Who then are You, O Immaculate Conception?
Not God, of course, because he has no beginning. Not an angel, created directly out of nothing. Not Adam, formed out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2,7). Not Eve, molded from Adam’s rib (Gen. 2,21). Not the Incarnate Word, who exists before all ages, and of whom we should use the word “conceived” rather than “conception”. Humans do not exist before their conception, so we might call them created “conceptions.” But you, O Mary, are different from all other children of Eve. They are conceptions stained by original sin; whereas you are the unique, Immaculate Conception.[1]
With these words, St. Maximilian laid bare the consoling truth that, if the human body had evolved and if “theistic evolution” were true, then Adam and Eve must have been conceived in the womb of a sub-human primate. And since theistic evolutionists must believe in the dogma of Original Sin as defined by the Council of Trent, they must hold that Adam and Eve were “conceived without sin.” Therefore, if theistic evolution were true, the Blessed Mother would have had to say, “I am AN Immaculate Conception,” or “I am Immaculate Conception NUMBER THREE.” But She did not say that—because, as St. Maximilian explained in the passage quoted above, Adam and Eve were created, not conceived.
As consoling as it is to read these words of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the relationship between Our Lady’s identification as the Immaculate Conception and the traditional Catholic doctrine of Creation goes far beyond her indirect affirmation of the special creation of our first parents at Lourdes. In this article, we will show that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is inseparable from God’s revelation that the entire work of creation was supernatural and that, like the Immaculate Conception Herself, the first created world was immaculate when it came forth from Him in the beginning. In the light of this truth, it will become clear that theistic evolution—the idea that God used the same kinds of material processes going on now to produce the first human beings, in a process involving hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity and disease—is a blasphemy against the perfect goodness of God and the infallibility of His Holy Church.
The Creation-Providence Distinction
The Catholic doctrine of creation set forth by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church clearly distinguishes between the period of creation when God created, formed, and furnished the universe and established the framework of natural laws, and the period of providence, in which we live, and in which creatures interact according to their God-given natures within the framework of natural law. Thus, traditional Catholic theology respects the integrity of the natural world, provides a proper framework for the development of the natural sciences, and welcomes the discoveries of natural scientists, confident that these discoveries will never contradict but will rather confirm the truth of Divine Revelation.
The traditional Catholic doctrine of creation differs drastically from theistic evolutionism, a system of thought that seeks to reconcile Catholic doctrine with evolution. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created matter and energy but used material processes over long periods of time to produce all of the different kinds of living and nonliving things in the universe. Thus, theistic evolutionism makes no distinction between God’s activity during the creation period and God’s activity in the present order of things—except to acknowledge an ex nihilo creation of matter at the time of the alleged Big Bang. According to this view, natural scientists can extrapolate from natural processes operating in the present all the way back to the beginning of creation and can explain the origin of the different kinds of living things, including the first human body, solely in terms of the material processes operating in the world today.
“Human Nature Cannot Comprehend the Creation of God”
In sharp contrast to this view, the Church Fathers and Doctors, including St. Thomas, held that natural science cannot investigate the origin of the different kinds of creatures—not only because this took place in the past, but also because the order of nature that humans experience through their senses differs radically from the order of creation in which God supernaturally created all things in the beginning. On this point St. John Chrysostom writes:
With great gratitude let us accept what is related (by Moses), not stepping out of our own limitations, and not testing what is above us as the enemies of the truth did when, wishing to comprehend everything with their minds, they did not realize that human nature cannot comprehend the creation of God (emphasis added).[2]
Commenting on Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel, “My Father worketh hitherto and I work,” St. John Chrysostom summed up the consensus of the Fathers on the distinction between the order of creation and the order of providence:
The Divine Scripture indicates here that God rested from His works; but in the Gospel Christ says: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17). In comparing these utterances, is there not a contradiction to be found in them? May it not be so; in the words of Divine Scripture there is no contradiction whatsoever. When the Scripture here says: “God rested from all his works,” it thereby instructs us that on the Seventh Day He ceased to create and to bring out of nonexistence into existence; but when Christ says: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,” it thereby indicates to us His uninterrupted Providence, and it calls “work” the preservation of what exists, the giving to it of continuance (of existence) and the governance of it at all times.[3]
All of the Fathers held that the period of creation was completed with the creation of the first human beings on the sixth day and that the period of Providence began on the Seventh day. They based their teaching on Genesis 2:3: “The seventh day was called the Sabbath, because God, having finished the creation of the world, rested” and on Hebrews 4:3: “God’s works from the foundation of the world were finished.” Summarizing the patristic teaching on these two points, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote:
…the completion of the universe as to the completeness of its parts belongs to the Sixth day, but its completion as regards their operation, to the Seventh (ST.1. Q.73 r. 3) . . .Nothing new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before, in the work of the Six Days ...those individual creatures that are now generated existed in the first of their kind (ST.1 Q.73 r.3)
According to St. Thomas, the perfection of the original creation did not preclude a development of that creation to a final end. But this was not an evolutionary development, because he insists that “all the parts” of the first creation were complete in the beginning:
The perfection of a thing is twofold, the first perfection and the second perfection. The first perfection is that according to which a thing is substantially perfect, and this perfection is the form of the whole; which form results from the whole having its parts complete . . . Now the final perfection, which is the end of the whole universe, is the perfect beatitude of the saints at the consummation of the world; and the first perfection is the completeness of the universe at its first founding, and this is what is ascribed to the seventh day.[4]
St. Augustine is often touted as a proto-“theistic evolutionist,” but he always distinguishes between the finished work of creation and the natural order of providence. In The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, for example, he explains God’s “rest” as His cessation from creating new kinds of creatures:
It could also be said that God rested from creating because He did not create henceforward any new kinds of creatures, and that even until now and beyond He works by governing the kinds that He then made. None the less, even on the seventh day His power ceased not from ruling heaven and earth and all that He had made, for otherwise they would have perished immediately.
Let us, therefore, believe and, if possible, also understand that God is working even now, so that if His action should be withdrawn from His creatures, they would perish. But if we should suppose that God now makes a creature without having implanted its kind (genus) in His original creation, we should flatly contradict Sacred Scripture, which says that on the sixth day God finished all His works.
He also wrote:
…we understand that God rested from all the works that He made in the sense that from then on He did not produce any other new nature, not that He ceased to hold and govern what He had made. Hence it is true that God rested on the seventh day, and it is also true that He works even until now.
In another passage, St. Augustine explicitly reproaches those who, like most, but not all, Catholic theologians today, conflate the order of providence in which we live with the order of creation in the beginning. He writes:
The creation of natures here [in Genesis] is something unfamiliar, because it is the creation of things for the first time. For what is so unique and unparalleled in the constitution of the things of the world as the world itself? Surely we are not to believe that God did not make the world because He does not make worlds today, or that He did not make the sun because He does not make suns today.[5]
St. John Chrysostom sums up the patristic view of the creation/providence distinction in a similar way when he asks:
What does it mean that first there is heaven, and then earth, first the roof and then the foundation? God is not subject to natural necessity; He is not subject to the laws of art. The will of God is the creator and artificer of nature and of art and of everything existing (Eight Homilies on Genesis 1:3).
In contrast to evolutionary models which hold that new kinds of organisms came into existence and others became extinct long before the appearance of the first human beings, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas, with all of the Fathers and Doctors, held that the first created world was perfect because:
- God brought all of the different kinds of creatures into existence together with Adam and Eve in perfect harmony;
- the creation of new kinds of creatures ceased after the creation of Adam and Eve, so that—as St Thomas says in the Summa—“In the works nature creation does not enter, but is presupposed to the works of nature”; and
- because each kind of creature was perfectly designed for its place in the universe.
In the words of St. Augustine, in the City of God,:
In this creation, had no one sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with natures good without exception. (City of God, Book XI, Chapter 23).
The Immaculate Conception and the Immaculate Creation
Except for St. Augustine, who preferred an instantaneous creation of all things, virtually all of the Church Fathers held that God created the heavens and the earth and all that they contain in six 24-hour days. All of the Fathers taught that God created Adam as the King of creation and Eve from his side as the Queen of the first created world. In this way, the seventh day became associated with the rest of the Lord in the perfection of the first created world, and with the creation of Eve. These two types were fulfilled on Holy, or “Great,” Saturday, when the Body of Jesus the New Adam rested in the tomb having brought forth His Bride the Church from His side while He slept on the Cross. Mary the New Eve exemplified the Church holy and immaculate in God’s New creation.
Indeed, in the first millennium most of the Eastern Christian world and much of the West observed the Saturday Sabbath as a day of reflection and Eucharistic worship. According to the fifth century Greek historian Socrates:
The people of Constantinople, and almost everywhere, assemble together on the Sabbath [Saturday], as well as on the first day of the week [Sunday], which custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria.[6]
In the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, a widely-respected document of the 3rd and 4th centuries, bishops were directed to:
observe the Sabbath, on account of Him who ceased from His work of creation, but ceased not from His work of providence: it is a rest for meditation of the law, not for idleness of the hands.[7]
In the early Church, according to The Apostolic Constitutions, Holy or Great Saturday was the only Saturday on which fasting was permitted (cf. Apostolic Constitutions, VII, 23). In the minds of the first Christians, Saturday remained the joyful commemoration of the seventh day of creation. It was a continual reminder that God’s creative work was finished on the seventh day and that He ceased to bring from non-existence into existence on that day. At the same time, it was a reminder that all things visible and invisible had been brought into existence ex nihilo during the hexameron, the six days of creation. In yet another way, the Sabbath foreshadowed the Sabbath rest of the Lord at the end of human history when God would rest in his sanctified people and they would rest in Him.
When Catholics of the Roman Rite began to treat Saturday as a penitential day, this partially obscured the meaning of the Sabbath celebration and blurred the distinction between the order of creation “in the beginning” and the order of providence that began on the seventh day. There is no doubt that the neglect of this distinction helped to pave the way for the all but universal acceptance of theistic evolutionism among bishops and theologians in Europe and North America.
To the evolutionist mentality, “the present is the key to the past.” Thus, there never was a time when God created all of the different kinds of creatures ex nihilo “in the beginning.” Instead, natural scientists are allowed to speculate endlessly as to how all things evolved over billions of years under conditions essentially identical to those that exist today. This in turn has led to an almost total amnesia in regard to the perfect harmony of the first-created world, so that the present fallen order of things is identified with the world as it came forth from God’s hands. Without the Saturday Sabbath as a liturgical reminder that God’s first created world was “very good,” the effects of man’s sin are trivialized and God is made the author of death, deformity, and disease. When the Saturday “Sabbath rest” is understood as the commemoration of “the first perfection of the universe,” the faithful are continually reminded that the Immaculate Conception is inseparable from the immaculate creation.
The Immaculate Conception and the Immaculate Creation
One of the mystical doctors of the Church who powerfully articulated the inseparability of the Immaculate Conception from the immaculate creation was St. Bridget of Sweden.
St. Bridget of Sweden: Wife, Mother, Religious and Mystic
St. Bridget of Sweden was one of the most influential saints of the Middle Ages. Born to members of the Swedish aristocracy in 1302, St. Bridget married a prominent, devout landholder and bore him eight children. After her husband’s death, she consecrated herself to God and founded a religious congregation, the Bridgetines, whose constitutions were approved by the Pope eight years before her death, in 1370. She dedicated the last years of her life to Church reform and to the return of the Papacy to Rome from Avignon.
Throughout her life, St. Bridget was favored with private revelations, many of which were written down by her spiritual advisors. In his letter Spes Aedificandi Pope St. John Paul II wrote that "there is no doubt that the Church, which recognized Bridget's holiness without ever pronouncing on her individual revelations, has accepted the overall authenticity of her interior experience.” The Council of Basel in 1436 actually confirmed the orthodoxy of her revelations.
In Our Lord’s dialogues with St. Bridget, He reaffirmed and elaborated upon His revelations to Moses about Creation and the Fall, emphasizing the goodness of the Divine Nature and of the original Creation before Original Sin. He explained that the first rebellion against the Divine Will was the fall of the angels, and that the possibility of a fall could not be avoided because God created the angels free and rational creatures who could only love as God loves by making a free decision to do so. He told St. Bridget:
It was love that led God to create. There could be nothing lacking in God, nothing wanting to His goodness or His joy.
It was out of love alone that He willed creation, that there might be beings, apart from Himself, who would partake of His infinite goodness and joy. So the Angels came to be, created by God in countless numbers. To them He gave free will, freedom to act, in accordance with their nature, as they willed. As He Himself is under no necessity but has created out of love alone, He willed that the Angels, whom He designed for eternal happiness with Him, should likewise be under no necessity. He looked for love in response to His love, obedience to His offer of eternal joy.
Yet in the first moment of their creation, there were Angels who chose, freely and deliberately against their Creator, in spite of His infinite love, which called them to love in return. Justly they fell, fixed in their evil will, from an eternal joy into an eternal misery. But not all fell. To those Angels who chose love for love, there was given the contemplation of God in all His glory, power and holiness. From this contemplation, they came to know the eternity of God, that He has no beginning and no end; they learnt what it meant to have him for their Creator; and they saw most clearly how everything they possessed had come to them from His love and His power.
They learnt too that His wisdom had given them a wisdom of their own, by which He allowed them to foresee the future. And it was a joy and consolation to them to know that God in His mercy and love wished to replace, in His own way, those Angels who had forfeited by pride and envy their place in heaven.[8]
The Exalted Place of Our Lady in God’s Eternal Plan
Jesus went on to explain to St. Bridget the exalted place of Our Lady in God’s eternal plan of salvation:
In their contemplation of God, the Angels saw with wonder a throne placed next to that of God Himself. They knew that the one for whom this throne had been prepared had not yet been created. Yet already they loved this chosen one, and rejoiced as they waited. Their love for each other was born of their love for God. But between these two loves they saw one who was more lovable than themselves, one whom God loves with great joy more than all his creatures. Virgin Mary, you were the chosen one, destined for that throne near to the throne of God.
It was you whom the Angels loved, after God, from the first moment of their creation, seeing in the contemplation of God, how beautiful He had made themselves, but how much more beautiful He would make you. They saw that in you there would be a love and a joy far greater than their own. They saw too the crown that awaited you, a crown of glory and beauty surpassed only by the majesty of God. They knew how God their Creator was glorified by themselves and they rejoiced. They knew how much more He would be glorified by You, and they rejoiced still more.
Before ever You were created, Mary, God and Angels together rejoiced in you.[9]
On the first Saturday of the first creation, God rested in Adam and Eve and they rested in Him. In the new creation in Christ, God rested in Mary, fully participating in all of her thoughts, words, and actions, while Mary rested in God, participating in all that He does in creation, redemption, and sanctification. Nowhere has this mutual rest been more beautifully portrayed than in the miraculous Icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe: Here we see the Woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12:1. Within her womb She carries the Christ-child who does with Her whatever She does, while She rests in the Sun of the Will of the Father, in the glory of the Holy Spirit, willing with God all that He wills in creation, redemption, and sanctification.
Just as Eve was the Mother of all the living in the natural order, as the Second Eve, Mary became the Mother of all the living in the supernatural order. Just as there is no human being anywhere in the world who is not a physical descendant of Eve, so there is no Christian who is not a spiritual child of Mary. Indeed, from her dwelling place in the Heart of the Most Holy Trinity, Mary sealed even the smallest grace-filled act of the past, present, and future with her fiat.
Our Lady of Fatima and the First Saturday Devotion
We have seen that the practice known as the First Saturday devotion hearkens back to an ancient liturgical practice of the Eastern Church—a practice with profound theological significance for our times. In an apparition of December 10, 1925, in Tuy, Spain, Our Lady told Sister Lucy of Fatima:
I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me.
The purpose of this practice was to establish devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and to make reparation for...
- Attacks upon the reality of Mary's Immaculate Conception
- Attacks against her the reality of Mary's Perpetual Virginity
- Attacks upon Mary's Divine Maternity and the refusal to accept her as the Mother of all mankind
- Those who try to publicly implant in children's hearts indifference, contempt and hatred for Immaculate Mary
- For those who insult Mary directly in her sacred images.
The devotion involves the following practices on five consecutive first Saturdays with the specific intention of making reparation for the offenses (above) against the Blessed Virgin.
- Go to Confession (within 8 days before or after the first Saturday)
- Receive Holy Communion
- Recite five decades of the Rosary*
- "Keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on fifteen mysteries of the Rosary" (separate from the Rosary itself)
Although Our Lady did not make explicit reference to the importance of Saturday in the Eastern Christian traditions of the Church, mentioned above, in light of her request for the consecration of Russia, her emphasis upon the first Saturday takes on a deeper significance.
According to tradition, the Blessed Mother spent most of the years between the Resurrection and her Assumption in Ephesus with St. John the Evangelist. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the most spiritually exalted of all of St. Paul’s letters is addressed to the Ephesians. “You are God’s masterpiece,” St. Paul told them, “created in Christ Jesus for good works that He has prepared beforehand that you might walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The Blessed Mother acted as Mediatrix of all graces by sealing each of those good works prepared for us by Christ with her motherly kiss. From her vantage point in the heart of the Most Holy Trinity, our Blessed Mother also saw and suffered for each and every sin, past, present, and future, thus sharing as co-redemptrix in the saving work of Christ.
But Mary is not only the Mediatrix of all graces and Co-Redemptrix. As the Second Eve she is also a universal Advocate for all souls, past, present, and future. From her resting place in the heart of the Most Holy Trinity, where She now lives and where She lived every moment of her life on earth, Mary intercedes with the Father for each and every soul, invoking the Precious Blood of Jesus upon them, especially at the moment of death. Conscious of this reality, great souls like St. Faustina of Divine Mercy continually asked Our Lady to accompany them to the souls of the dying, both Christian and non-Christian—past, present, and future—even to the souls of dying heretics and infidels.
The more souls believe in Mary’s supernatural maternity and universal advocacy for souls, the more they will join in confidently invoking her intercession not only for their fellow Catholics, but for all souls, past, present, and future—without any limits. Imagine the effect if millions of Catholics prayed confidently for poor sinners in this way! It is this kind of boundless faith that will bring the entire Mystical Body of Christ to its ultimate fulfillment. In the Mystical Body of Christ, the sanctity of Our Lady reveals the fullness to which all Christians are called--a fullness which was first revealed in the humanity of Jesus Christ and which will be achieved by the whole Church when her members attain what St. Paul calls, “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
We are now in a position to understand the importance of Mary’s role as Second Eve and the importance of consecrating ourselves to her as children who imitate her interior life. As St. Louis de Montfort wrote:
Mary has produced, together with the Holy Ghost, the greatest thing which has been or ever will be—a God-man; and she will consequently produce the greatest saints that there will be in the end of time. The formation and education of the great saints who shall come at the end of the world are reserved for her. For it is only that singular and miraculous Virgin who can produce, in union with the Holy Ghost, singular and extraordinary things.[10]
The great saints who practice the perfect interior imitation of Jesus and Mary will not only offer God great glory. With their holy lives they will bring about the ultimate Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the Church and in the world, as St. Louis De Montfort prophesied when he wrote:
They shall be great and exalted before God in sanctity, superior to all other creatures by their lively zeal, and so well sustained with God’s assistance that, with the humility of their heel, in union with Mary, they shall crush the head of the devil and cause Jesus Christ to triumph.[11]
Of these days of Triumph Venerable Mary of Agreda wrote:
It was revealed to me that through the intercession of the Mother of God all heresies will disappear. The victory over heresies has been reserved by Christ for his Blessed Mother... The power of Mary in the latter days will be very conspicuous. Mary will extend the reign of Christ over the heathens and the Mohammedans, and it will be a time of great joy when Mary is enthroned as Mistress and Queen of hearts.[12]
Thus, the commemoration of the first Saturday of the month in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is a reminder of the forgotten meaning of the Sabbath rest of Creation and a foretaste of the future rest of the Lord in His saints during the coming “era of peace.”
The Immaculate Conception and the Immaculate Creation
The Whole Creation Groans
Once one understands that the creation of the whole world was necessarily just as perfect, complete and harmonious as the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, it is easy to recognize the blasphemous character of the claim that God created the world that we see, with death, deformity, disease, and that He deliberately used a process involving hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity and disease to create the human beings He wanted to create in the first place. All of the Fathers and Doctors testified to the historical reality of Original Sin, which made the whole creation subject to decay and deformity. In the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Romans:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:21-23).
Thus, the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation provided a unique framework for scientific research—one that recognized the existence of A lawful universe of well-designed creatures—marred (not ruined) by the effects of Original Sin—whose function (but not their origins) can be discovered through rational investigation. This proved to be an extremely fruitful framework for natural scientists and medical researchers for most of the past two millennia. For example, when Sir William Harvey was asked how he discovered how blood circulates in the human body, he replied that:
He was invited to imagine, that so Provident a Cause as Nature had not so Plac’d so many Valves without design; and no Design seem’d more probable than that, since the Blood could not well, because of the interposing Valves, be sent by the Veins to the Limbs; it should be sent through the Arteries, and Return through the Veins,, whose Valves did not oppose its course that way (emphasis added in all quotes).[13]
In Harvey’s Christian, pre-Darwinian world, biology operated on a presumption of design and function. If a biologist encountered an organ or bodily system in an organism whose function he could not identify, he presumed that it had a function and he sought to discover it. Darwinian evolutionary biology replaced this presumption of function with a presumption of dysfunction. Confronted with organs of unknown function, like the appendix or tonsils, evolutionary biologists did not presume that God had designed the human body purposefully with all of its parts and seek, like Harvey, to discover their function. Rather, they labeled them “vestigial organs”—holdovers from an earlier stage of evolution—and made no effort to discover their function. A deposition from Professor Horatio Hackett, Ph.D., from the University of Chicago, submitted in support of the defendant in the famous Scopes Trial in 1925, asserted that there were over 180 vestigial structures in the human body, including the appendix and the tonsils. Today, almost every one of those structures is known to have an important function in the human body—knowledge obtained in spite of the widespread acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis, not because of it.
Nature Cannot Create Any New Kind of Creature
Indeed, the traditional Catholic distinction between the order of creation in the past and the present order of providence perfectly harmonizes with the findings of cutting-edge biology, which increasingly recognizes that the process of mutation and natural selection observed in the present cannot account for the origin of new organs and biological systems in the past. Indeed, more and more scientists are recognizing that material processes do not produce new functional genetic information and cannot account for the existence of the millions of highly organized genomes of plants and animals. Dr. Dean Kenyon (Ph.D., biophysics) was one of the leading evolutionary experts on the naturalistic origin of life when one of his graduate students helped him to face evolution’s failure to explain the origin of genetic information through mutation and natural selection. According to Dr. Kenyon:
The evolutionary formation of new genera and higher taxa would have required the naturalistic addition of substantial amounts of just the right kind of new genetic information to the genomes of the evolving organisms in order for new structural features and physiological mechanisms to develop. Such an evolutionary process would have entailed the accumulation of perhaps hundreds of favorable and coordinated mutations in the same lineage. But the overwhelming majority of documented mutations are either deleterious to the organisms in which they occur, or at best they are selectively neutral. I gradually became convinced that no naturalistic process of information increase would be found.[14]
Evaluating the state of the natural sciences in the twenty-first century, Dr. Kenyon concludes:
It is my own strong conviction that we now have enough empirical evidence and sound scientific argument to support a vigorous reassertion of the Catholic Doctrine of Creation as understood by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. The many scientific problems of Darwinism should be widely debated, both inside and beyond academia. Such discussions within academic science and in national cultures generally should be broadly encouraged. If offered encouragement from the Holy See, many academics would join the discussion who have heretofore been hesitant. A large, world-wide change in the intellectual climate could follow quickly upon such a gracious and magnanimous show of support from the Vatican.[15]
So fundamental to the Faith is the distinction between creation and providence that the Holy Ghost inspired St. Peter to warn the faithful of a future crisis in the “last days,” when scoffers would arise in the Church and deny the creation-providence distinction, saying “things have always been the same from the beginning of the universe”—in other words, that the same material processes that are going on now have been operating in the same way since the beginning of the world. As documented in the DVD series “Foundations Restored” and in many of the Kolbe Center’s publications, that terrible prediction began to be fulfilled with the rise of the Enlightenment philosophers, like Rene’ Descartes, whose naturalistic uniformitarian approach to the study of nature gradually replaced the traditional creation-providence framework as the all-but-universal framework for the study of the natural world.
St. Thomas, following Aristotle, taught that a small error in the beginning becomes a great error later on. But in this case, a large error in the beginning becomes a monstrous error, as the denial of the creation-providence distinction and the “first perfection of the universe” deceives even brilliant and well-intentioned Catholic intellectuals into thinking that they must reconcile the false molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis with the Catholic Faith and that it is a noble enterprise to attempt such a reconciliation, when the truly noble response is to hold fast to the creation-providence distinction as it was revealed by God and understood in God’s Church from the beginning.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, may the Holy Ghost raise up theologians to restore the foundations of the Faith and to proclaim the inseparability of the Immaculate Conception from the immaculate creation!
Footnotes
[1] St. MAXIMILIAN KOLBE, Sketch: Feb. 17, 1941.
[2] ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, Homilies on Genesis 2:2,
[3] ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, Homilies on Genesis, 10:7.
[4] ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, ST, I, q. 73, a. 1.
[5] ST. AUGUSTINE, Lit. Mean. Gen. VIII, 2(1)-3(1).
[6] SOCRATES, “Ecclesiastical History,” Book VII, Chapter 19.
[7] THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS, Vol. VII, p. 413, from “Constitutions of the Holy Apostles.”
[8] ST. BRIDGET OF SWEDEN, The Prophecies and Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden, Book XI, Chapter IV http://www.catholic-saints.net/saints/st-bridget/st-bridget-of-sweden.php (accessed 4-29-24).
[9] IBID.
[10] ST. LOUIS-MARIE GRIGNION DE MONTFORT, True Devotion to Mary (Rockford, IL, TAN: 1985), Article 35.
[11] ST. LOUIS-MARIE GRIGNION DE MONTFORT, True Devotion to Mary (Rockford, IL, TAN: 1985), Article 54.
[12] VENERABLE MARIA OF AGREDA, quoted in Edward Connor, Prophecy for Today (Rockford, IL: TAN, 1984), p. 49.
[13] http://www.creationsafaris.com/wgcs_1.htm#harvey
[14] DEAN H. KENYON, “Darwin Was Right: Information and the Collapse of Macroevolutionary Theory,” https://kolbecenter.org/darwin-was-right-information-and-the-collapse-of-macroevolutionary-theory/ (accessed 5-15-24).
[15] IBID.
