Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Christ is risen! Alleluia!
Almost every day I am brought to tears by the testimonies we receive from souls all over the world whose lives have been transformed by the traditional Catholic reading of the sacred history of Genesis. On the one hand they are tears of joy, especially when the testimonies overflow from the hearts of young people, but they are also tears of sadness when I reflect on the way that so much youth apostolate in the Church all over the world has devolved into emotionalism and sentimentality because young people do not receive the truth that would set them free from sin and error if it were presented to them in a coherent form. Consider the following testimony from a young woman in her twenties:
I had a profound experience when I first attended the seminar you gave for the Apostolate for Family Consecration in 2020. I was homeschooled and taught my Faith from the cradle, but I never knew how to interpret Genesis. To be blunt, I disliked the Book of Genesis because it always felt wishy washy and like a fairy tale. I had always been given the impression that it was unreasonable to take Genesis as history and something fundamentalist Protestants believed. I had been taught that as a Catholic I should follow the science, which says the earth is billions of years old and that the dinosaurs are all extinct. That the stories surrounding fantastical creatures were literally just myths, like St. George and the dragon, or Beowolf. Or that Adam and Eve were not the only two people God created.
When you presented that it is completely reasonable to believe that Genesis is history, in fact a necessity for Catholics to believe, and gave all the evidence, WOW!!!! WOW. How much I still have to learn about our history! I went to the chapel between sessions and I was filled with gratitude to the Father and Our Lord for opening my mind. It touched me to my core. Your presentation on Creation truly forever changed my perspective on the world, Genesis, origins, science and history. It’s been 4 and a half years and I continue down a very unconventional path of learning and exploration of the world. I have also been able to share the Kolbe Center with family and friends, and it’s also changed their perspectives too. Again, just all praise to God . . . and much gratitude that you have been open to proclaiming the truth.
This beautiful testimony reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man from Uganda at a retreat center where we were giving a seminar. He talked about the Feast of the Holy Uganda Martyrs and the euphoria that he and other young people experienced as they walked with millions of other pilgrims to the Martyrs’ Shrine to celebrate their feast day. He commented on the fact that in spite of the euphoria they experienced on that pilgrimage, when they returned home and had to face a difficult challenge—like a serious illness, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one—the happy memory of the pilgrimage receded and they often lacked the spiritual strength to maintain their faith in God and in His Church. In contrast, he noted that the truth of the traditional doctrine of creation provided an unshakeable foundation for his Faith, one that did not depend on external circumstances, on emotional support from other people, or on their approval.
Indeed, the joy that flows from embracing the Truth, without compromise, can be compared to the joy that Catholic spouses experience when they embrace each other without reserve, and with a complete openness to God’s life-giving action in and through their union. Our Heavenly Bridegroom declared that His Word is Truth, so if there were even one error in the Bible, His Name would be dragged through the mud and His faithfulness would be falsified. To doubt Him on any point because of some “scientific” claim would be like Othello doubting the fidelity of his wife Desdemona on the “evidence” of his false friend Iago—only a trillion times worse! If we refuse to accept the Word of God as believed in the Church and handed down to us from the Apostles and Church Fathers on a single point, unless and until the consensus view in secular academia endorses that view, willingly or unwillingly—unless we repent—we will fall into idolatry. This is because in withholding our belief from the Word of God on a single point in this way, we exalt the authority of fallible human science above the authority of our Heavenly Father. We put our trust in man, rather than in God. And that is why Pope Urban VIII considered Galileo’s contempt for the Word of God in relation to geocentrism—as it had been understood since the time of King Solomon—not as a mere academic controversy, but as a serious threat to the Faith.
In What Does Charity Rejoice?
Young people are naturally energetic, lively and enthusiastic, so it is understandable that youth apostolate tries to tap into this natural enthusiasm. However, anyone who reflects on the testimony above—typical of testimonies we have received from young adults from all over the word—can see that none of the media commonly associated with youth apostolate played any part in the explosion of joy that took place in the heart of that young woman. She attended a Kolbe seminar in a mixed group of older and younger adults. There was no lively music playing, no clapping or dancing. It was just the Truth of God’s Genesis Revelation that filled her heart with joy, the unadorned truth of the Word of God.
If someone were to ask us, “What does God say we should rejoice in?” How many of us would answer with St. Paul, “Charity . . . rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the TRUTH” (1 Cor 13:6)? Charity, the greatest of God’s gifts, rejoices in the Truth! And few Truths of the Faith ignite more joy than the Truth of God’s Genesis Revelation, with its account of the first perfection of the universe that He made for us, His willingness to suffer and die to redeem us, and His invitation to us to be sanctified by the Holy Ghost so as to cooperate with Him in “restoring all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.” Indeed, the abandonment of the literal and obvious sense of Scripture in regard to Creation goes a long way to explain the joylessness of so much of contemporary Catholic academia. Once we interiorly declare the Word of Our Heavenly Bridegroom untrustworthy in regard to creation, we can no longer “rejoice with the Truth.” Instead, we will be inclined to substitute some counterfeit intellectual satisfaction in our own efforts to reconcile the Word of God and the traditional doctrines of the Faith with the consensus view in fallible human science—whether in regard to evolution, aliens, the age of the universe, or anything else. We can easily mistake this all-too-human satisfaction for the joy that is a fruit of the Holy Ghost, as experienced in the testimony quoted above.
In reality, the satisfaction that a scholar may experience by inventing a way to reconcile the Word of God with evolution, aliens, or billions of years, cannot possibly be the fruit of the Holy Ghost. To the extent that one can derive any satisfaction from such “creative work,” it will be the all-too-human satisfaction of pride in one’s originality or cleverness, the excitement of novelty, and the respect that one can garner in Catholic academia by being able to reconcile the Word of God and the Tradition of the Church with the current consensus in fallible human science. The wise and the learned of Our Lord’s day exemplify the sterility of scholarship that abandons the sacred history of Genesis. Not once in the four Holy Gospels does any scribe, pharisee, or lawyer even mention Genesis. And when Our Lord answers their questions about Holy Marriage, simply and clearly, from the sacred history of Genesis, they do not rejoice in His teaching as they should but merely plot to kill Him. In this context it is noteworthy that the only time in the four Holy Gospels where Our Lord is said to have rejoiced is in the following passage from St. Luke’s Gospel:
He rejoiced in the Holy Ghost, and said: I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones (Luke 10:21).
The failure to rejoice in the Truth of our Heavenly Bridegroom’s Word without reservation leaves a void in the human heart that will not be left empty. The many examples in recent decades of charismatic founders who have usurped the place of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Word with their own personality cult—often as a means to abuse their disciples physically or psychologically—testify to the loss of childlike faith in the Word of Our Heavenly Bridegroom and the almost total loss of the intimacy, trust, charity, and peace that flow from unqualified trust in the perfect truthfulness of His Word and in the infallibility of the defined doctrines of His Immaculate Bride the Church.
Let us unite ourselves with the great mystical Doctor of the Church St. Teresa of Avila who wrote in her Autobiography:
O God, far from being astonished by Your works, they are for me but one more reason for praising You. The more difficult they are to understand, the more they arouse devotion in me; and the greater they are, the greater is the devotion . . . So the less of a natural foundation these truths of the Faith have, the more firmly I hold them and the greater is the devotion they inspire in me. Since You are almighty, I accept all the wondrous works which You have done as most certain, and in this respect I have never harbored a doubt.
Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error and guide us into all the Truth!
Hugh Owen
P.S. As explained at length in our publication Loved, Lost and Found, the replacement of the sacred history of Genesis with the secular humanist evolutionary origins myth has gone hand in hand with a denigration of the traditions of our ancestors that corroborate the sacred history of Genesis. For example, the accounts handed down to us of Beowulf and St George and the dragon are not myths but mostly-accurate accounts of historical events involving actual encounters between human beings and dinosaurs.
P.P.S. The 2025 Kolbe leadership retreat will take place at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina, from August 1 to August 7. The retreat will equip attendees to defend and promote the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in their spheres of influence as the foundation of our Faith and as the only firm foundation for a culture of life. For more information and to register for the retreat, please contact Hugh Owen at howen@shentel.net.
