Ecumenism, as it is propagated and practiced today - is an ideological falsehood that believes all non-Catholic-Christian religions are bona fide "faiths" that sprang up over time - from a population of human beings - much as men are said to have emerged over time from populations of primates. But such is very far from the truth. The twelve Apostles and their disciples carried the Church and her sacraments to every continent and corner of the earth. They literally deposited the Deposit of Faith in every place where they found souls to be saved. But over time, all kinds of aberrations - deviations from the True Way, and even heresies crept in and often were allowed to grow. Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the famous English prelate, gave a lengthy series of lectures in Rome during the 1830's. Note well -- the 1830's - a good 20 years before Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

In these lectures, Cardinal Wiseman told of the origin of Hinduism. It rose in the very early centuries of Christendom as an imitation of the earliest monastic institutions. But many aberrations occurred over time and their unchecked accumulation resulted in the Hinduism we observe today. And so it has always been. The earliest pre-Christian religions we speak of today as the Myths of ancient times, are really corruptions of the Primordial Revelation given to Adam, preserved by Noah and the Patriarchs, and collected and compiled by Moses in what we have today in the Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible. This is the Catholic Tradition. Modernist theories and hypotheses about the multiple authorship of the Mosaic books and their so-called borrowings from the mythologies of the ancient pagans surrounding the tribes of Israel. All such hypotheses - such as the Documentary JEDP - should be disregarded as Modernist fiction and deception. The real basis for the divisions is the signature of the eyewitnesses from Adam and Noah to Jacob's sons. This signature is the toledoth. See the introductory pages to the Genesis Record by Henry M. Morris. This is the best explanation I know of the Patriarchal Theory. It is the closest there is to the Catholic Tradition and represents it faithfully.

Incidentally, the Lectures - by Cardinal Wiseman, mentioned above, are a good indication of how far the Modernist heresy had progressed by the 1830's! Cardinal Wiseman rejected the Six Days of Genesis One in favor of what has since been termed - "the Gap Theory". This was a positioning of the geological ages between verses one and two of Genesis One. Morris gives the best explanation of this, also, in his book THE GENESIS RECORD.

Someday, some good Catholic Scholar will do a comparison of Morris's work on the Six Days with the Hexaemera of the Fathers. It will be shown - I am sure - that the Protestant Morris kept the tradition of the early Fathers - while so-called Catholics deviated into heresy - the heresy of evolutionary modernism. (See this writer's lengthy analysis of Cardinal Wiseman's Lectures.)

What is most significant about Cardinal Wiseman's Lectures on Science and Religion - is - I submit, the fact that Holy Scripture - the Divine Scriptures as the early Fathers saw them - by the 19th century are viewed as a thoroughly human book - to be analyzed and dissected in the same manner as one did any other treatise from antiquity. In fact, Wiseman was reputed to be one of the foremost of such scholars - especially in the antiquities of the Orient. His lectures are full of interesting information - but their overall meaning is mainly secular. It could be said to represent the triumph of that aspect of Modernism known as Rationalism, especially in its treatment of the Old Testament books. I wonder why these lectures of Cardinal Wiseman are never referred to these days by people like Scott Hahn? It is probably because Scott Hahn's emphasis is on symbolism - whereas Wiseman's focus was on Scripture as an historical artifact. But Hahn's symbolism is not the same as the old typology. In this latter area of study, the emphasis was upon the literal historical figures and their prophetic role in foreshadowing the events of the New Testament. Scott Hahn's symbolism is a sphere of meaning that rises above the historical-literal and can, therefore, disregard it - as it does the literal meaning of the First Six Days of Genesis One and the real history of Genesis One through Eleven.

These chapters include the Universal Flood and the dispersion of nations from the Tower of Babel. Again, Henry Morris's GENESIS RECORD, as well as THE GENESIS FLOOD - are invaluable resources, for the literal meaning. Unfortunately, Cardinal Wiseman, - like so many other men of the Church before and after him, were taken in by the uniformitarianism of James Hutton and Charles Lyell - which claimed to have proven there were no such catastrophes in Earth's history - such as a universal Flood with its multiple after-effects and especially, with the evidences of its reality in the geological strata. The history of this controversy is of great importance for the real "salvation history" - because it concerns the historical veracity of the Biblical record, especially Genesis 1-11.

I can only refer the reader of this blog - to my own previous - unpublished papers - wherein I attempted to incorporate the evidences of the Protestant Creationists - into a truly Catholic Biblical Theology and Cosmology.