Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In this newsletter I will share the first part of a paper that I presented at a symposium on the Absolute Primacy of Christ that was held at a Byzantine Catholic parish in the Chicago area two years ago. 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. 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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….
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….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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine how much closer to God our young people would be if they could grow up like our ancestors in the Faith, believing that God created everything for them from the beginning, in view of the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception!
Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, of St. Joseph and of all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
P.S. The complete paper from which most of this newsletter was taken can be found on the Kolbe website at this link.
P.P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.
