It Works Both Ways

A pamphlet by a Protestant Creationist, John Blanchard – titled: EVOLUTION – FACT OR FICTION? (Evangelical Press, 2002), raises the question: Does Evolutionism, cosmic and terrestrial, produce atheism in the souls of men, women and children, or, do Atheists, who are already committed to materialism, use evolutionism, even though they know it is false, to justify their materialism/atheism? (Page 11-12).

I am certain it is both. Just think of the millions of children exposed daily, and even hourly, in the schools, to programs and curricular activities that are based on, and permeated with, the evolutionary worldview of millions and billions of years of “prehistoric” time – during which anything could happen, and actually did happen – just as the scientists tell us it did! Children so indoctrinated from kindergarten on, are not likely to believe the Bible “stories” of Adam and Eve, the Great Flood, the miracles of the Exodus and the words of the Wisdom Books and the Prophets. Why, then, should they also believe the Divine Person of Jesus Christ, Incarnate God, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, His Miracles, Death and physical Resurrection and Ascension? The very best fruit that Evolutionism could occasion would be the heresy of Fideism, a “faith” existing only in the abstract, divorced from the divine, inerrant Scriptures and Tradition, but zealously devoted to the corporal works of Mercy – especially with the preferential option of “the Poor”. (God help those of us who do not qualify as “Poor”- we will receive neither charity nor justice!)

The Public Atheists such as Victor Stenger, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett – these seem to offer a somewhat different problem. Children are victims with no defenses (in the absence of responsible parents) but the public atheists are men of developed, often highly educated intellect and will. With them there is no excuse (Cf Romans 1:20). God created human nature with an intellect made specifically for Truth and a will made specifically for the real good. But God wanted – and still wants from us – a willing love and devotion, a love freely given, even when other lesser goods appeal most strongly. Today we see Catholic politicians choosing political favor and advancement, rather than speak out strongly against such moral evils as homosexuality, abortion, divorce, etc. We see Catholic Editors of periodicals choosing to be silent or conciliatory on issues involving heresy, such as Atheism, evolutionism, religious indifferentism, etc…- rather than mounting clean and strong defenses of the Traditional worldview. Often, today, the intellect is confused or clouded by the lack of leadership. For many, even most, there is no time for the necessary study that could bring the mind to clear and certain conclusions, especially about matters of science and history.

But for many others, also, it is simply a matter of intellectual laziness – a fatal kind of mental sloth. In such cases, the media, especially the television and movies, are primary instruments for the propagation of moral evil and heresy. Why is there not a prominent defense and offense concerning the issue of Creation versus evolution – similar to the pro-life movement against the end of Abortion? The corruption of the mind by error and heresy is really a greater evil than abortion or homosexuality, because the mind is a higher, nobler faculty than the will. The intellect is the vision of the soul, whereas, the will is blind and must follow what the intellect shows. If the intellect is corrupted by error from infancy, what chance does the will have to choose the real good? Miracles of divine grace happen because Original Sin did not destroy our nature or totally corrupt it. The most degenerate youth today still retain a longing for truth and purity. We must begin to show them the truth and purity of the Catholic worldview of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, all converging in the Incarnation and Redemption of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, with the Immaculate Virgin Mary, His Mother and Second Eve.

It will not do to focus on just one dogma or one issue. Not today, when the Evil that overwhelms us is the Synthesis of All Heresies, condemned as evolutionary Modernism in Pascendi and Lamentabili. There is needed a Synthesis of all truths. This is easily constructed on the foundational base of Creation, science and theology, because all things, both natural and supernatural, presuppose Creation. The first article of the Creed is “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth..” There we have the answer to Atheism and Evolutionism. Catholics need to realize how the work of Creation in Six literal – 24 hour Days is the only true answer to the deceptive eons of time based on flawed – radiometric dating methods. Catholics need to know that the Deluge – described in Genesis 6-11 - was of such a magnitude as to lay down all the fossils in the so-called geological column, and to leave such landmarks as the Grand Canyon and the present continental nations. They need to know that the universe is Geocentric and that the present, so-called “solar system” is probably of no earlier origin than the Universal Deluge – wherein the Earth itself ejected large pieces of its own rocky mass into the space around it, producing not only the asteroids, meteors and comets, but most probably also Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and all other wandering, celestial bodies outside of the Sun, Moon and Stars, specified by God in Genesis 1:14-18.

Creation Science and Theology bring to the real splendor of Truth – all the discoveries of modern science for the greater honor and glory of God and the sacred Traditions of His Church. May this day come soon to dispel the double darkness of Atheism – the dark corruption of the intellect and the will, made for Truth and Goodness but today, by the Heresy of Evolutionary Modernism, turned to error and vice. Our Lady of Fatima, destroyer of all heresies – by Thy Heel crushing the Head of the Serpent, Pray for us and come with Thy Son, to save us.

Kyrie, eleison.

Georg Hegel's Idea of Authority and The Current Exercise Thereof

First of all, it is necessary to distinguish the Realist notion of Hierarchy from the Idealist's reduction of Hierarchy to a Dialectic. The reality of Hierarchical Grades of Perfection is manifested in Genesis One - the reality of Headship in Genesis 1:26 - and the fact that all Authority comes from God is based on our Lord's Words to Pilate in John 19:11. The Aristotelian-Thomistic view of Hierarchy is the perception of real, existential relations between really unequal beings. This perception of the Real does not attempt to "transcend" into a realm of "spirit" or "Being" - in which all individuals are absolutely equal. In St. Paul's world of Divine Grace, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek - nor bond nor free - nor male or female - but all are one in Christ - (Gal. 3:28) - the grades of natural perfection and imperfection, - the temporal-natural inequalities, are not cancelled out by the elevations of the soul by Divine Grace. St. Benedict Joseph Labre did not lose his natural, physical nastiness, nor did St. Joseph of Cupertino lose his natural stupidity by reason of the elevations of the soul in Grace.

Therefore, the Head of State, be he Emperor, King, Governor, President or Procurator, is a person invested with a certain kind and degree of real power and "nobility" - that no human power can erase - because such kinds and degrees of nobility are based in the Order of Creation, which all else presupposes. Patriarchy, despite all feminist lamentations to the contrary, is based immutably on Adam's Headship of the Human race and his dominion over all creatures below him. (Genesis 1:26). No human power can change this immutable, created establishment of Hierarchy. It is reflected in every human society, from the most backward and primitive, to the most advanced and technologically sophisticated. Hierarchy, as a principle of Reality, will manifest itself for good or for evil. It is for Good in the benign exercise of Monarchical Headship and lineage and for evil in the brutal dictatorship of tyrants. The Reality that Natural Hierarchy represents and reflects is ultimately found in the Degrees and Kinds of Being (existential) of the spiritual and corporeal world.

The beings closest to God in the Hierarchy are also those with the highest kind and degree of existence, (being). These are the Angels. And even within the Angelic Host, there are degrees of Being - from the highest Seraphim and Cherubim to the lowest Arch-Angels and Angels. On the same Day One that He created the Angelic Host, God also created the vast domain of the elements, unified in the entirely physical, inanimate, Substantial Body of the Universe. These elements constitute the very lowest kind and degree of Being - being "farthest" from God in the Hierarchy of Being - reaching from the lowest Earth to the Highest Heaven and from highest to lowest - example Jacobs ladder. And all in between the Orders of Being are beautifully, Hierarchically arranged from fungi, mold and insects - to reptile, to cat, dog, and horse, to crowning Man: Plant, Animal, Man, Vegetative, sensitive, rational. The Hierarchy defines Reality.

Unfortunately, from earliest times in the History of Philosophical thinking, there has been a tendency to disregard the stunning evidences of a Created Universe "out there" - quite apart from the perceiving human mind. (See the works of Etienne Gilson for the best accounts of this fascinating history.) It was the System of Immanuel Kant - (1724-1804) - and his later disciple Georg Hegel, (1770-1831), who definitively set the stage for today's exercise of Authority. The shift is radical. It is from Hierarchy to Dialectic. The concept of hierarchy is retained, but is "transcended" in favor of a radical, equalizing dialectic of the mind. True to Luther's emphasis on the individual, (See the works of Father Denis Fahey) - at the expense of the common good, Hegel pretends to recognize the superiority of the master and the inferiority of the servant, as having a basis in reality, but insists upon a fictional, natural transcendence of this created relationship, in favor of a radical equality of all individuals. This radical equality comes to be in a process of synthesis, wherein all things contribute equally to the perfection of the whole. This is the Utopian Ideal. Is it real? Is it ever really realized - even in heaven?

The Church, supported by the entire natural order, says no. The Kant-Hegel Idealism, stemming ultimately from Plato and his Myth of the Cave - is not a faithful representation of Reality. Therefore, an exercise of Authority, based on a Hegelian dialectic, rather than on real differences in kinds and degrees of Being, simply will not work. It is unreal. It is a fiction. It is a Utopian dream being played out on the stage of the world before the deluded audience in attendance. Such is the entire New World Order, including the Novus Ordo Missae. Is it valid? Does it even exist apart from the Theater of the unreal and the absurd? Not only does such Utopian Judeo-Masonic Planning attack the Truths of Faith - in a most blasphemous manner, it also mocks the real Order of Creation. As such, we can safely predict that its ultimate exposure will be terrible, indeed. Unhappy those who are part of its downfall - by their complicity in its mockery, and their failure to defend the Truths of Faith and of Reason in the Name of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. (Matt. 10:32-33, Luke 12: 8-12)

History and Some Historians

In an early work, THE KINGSHIP OF CHRIST, according to the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, (1931), Father Dennis Fahey, a Holy Ghost father who died in 1955, explored the "real history of the world", and found that this real, true history of the world is the account of the acceptance or rejection, by the world, of God's plan for the restoration of the Divine Life.  In other words, it is the story of God's undoing of the awful consequences of Original Sin, taken in conjunction with man's response to God's overtures...(page 33).  This acceptance or rejection of God's plan for order can be most accurately gauged by the degree to which any particular culture or community not only refuses to hinder, but positively works to favor the attaining of man's final end, -  union with God in His inner supernatural life. (pg.37)

 

 

This does not mean that the world of culture becomes like a monastery.  It does mean, however, that the world's customs and entertainments, it's serious businesses and even it's wars, are characterized more by virtue than by vice, or by the encouragement of what leads to virtue, -  such as prayer, rather than by what leads to vice.  

 

 

Father Fahey cites the world of Medieval Europe as having exemplified, probably, the closest any society could come to being "the best of all possible worlds" -  inasmuch as in Medieval Europe "the State then grasped the formal principle of ordered social life in the actual world -  and in which an institution such as the Inquisition -  or any similar police force for keeping "law and order" - was set up to defend the hold of the world on order against the fomentors of disorder", (page 38)  And, of course, the given principle acccepted by all was that man in society, redeemed by Our Lord, is not able to live as God wants him to live - unless he acccepts the supernatural and supra-national Catholic Church - the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ our Lord.  It is only in and from this one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic church, that people find the sources of the interior life, from which proceed the external forms of a culture.  But the modern world has turned aside from order and is suffering for its apostasy and disorder. (page 39).  This great truth needs to be proclaimed unequivocally.  And today we must begin with the restoration of truth in the natural sciences, because there is no theology, but only an abstract or sentimental fideism, without a true foundation in the natural sciences. 

 

 

 

The medieval world possessed such a sound foundation in its Geocentric Cosmology. Cosmology, which defines the Structure of the Universe and the fixed centrality of earth, is the necessary essential of the entire body of knowledge we know as the Natural Order. It is this natural order upon which Grace builds the entire edifice of the Supernatural Order of Divine Grace -   producing the Elect and those beacons of light for us, the Saints.  Any historian who omits in-depth consideration of the relations between the natural sciences and theology, will not give us true or reliable history.  It was first Copernicus - and then his popularizer, Galileo, who first cut the umbilical cord binding the natural sciences to Theology -  by way of Holy Scripture . Without the guidance of the theologians of the Church, the natural sciences were bound to go astray, and so they did.  The end result is precisely what the encyclical Pascendi describes as the subjugation of faith to science - a science falsely so called, (1 Tim. 6:20).  This is a crime of the greatest magnitude -  the synthesis of all heresies -  overturning in men's minds the very hierarchy of reality. 

 

 

It is true that Father Fahey himself never focused on the relation of science to theology as indicated in Pascendi (1907). His focus was the deep disorder introduced by Luther's erroneous doctrine of Grace, in effect making prayer meaningless -  and his emphasis upon the individual -  making the concept of the common good meaningless.  And so it has been with all historians following Father Fahey.  The emphasis has been upon the social order and its concomitant political and social disorders coming down from the sick heads of state.  It has been left for the secular historians such as Arthur Koestler, Thomas Kuhn and Alexandre Koyre, with a host of others, to focus on the Copernican Revolution  and its far-reaching effects on all aspects of culture and civilization.  I appeal especially to Arnaud de Lassus, Father Paul Kramer,  Dr. John Rao -  and all who write about our current crisis of faith,  to turn their scholarly efforts towards what appears to be a great conspiracy of silence, forbidding the exposure of  "the operation of error" (2 Thess. 2:10) - which has overwhelmed the natural sciences in  all their disciplines.  Pascendi warned us of modernisms "Law of Evolution" -  whereby everything - the Church,  her Dogmas - her Worship - Her Sacred Scriptures,  even her Faith itself - must change or die. (#26).  This is the lie upon which modernism is based. 

 

 

This "synthesis of all heresies" -  can only be confronted and combated and eventually overcome and destroyed beneath Our Lady's heel -  buy a synthesis of all truths -  which is the deposit of faith.  Nothing new is needed in this battle.  On the contrary, it is all there in the First Article of the Creed: 

 

 

The existence of God as Creator of heaven and earth.  We need only to make these truths shine forth in all their real splendor. 

 

Kyrie, eleison. 

The Little Flower as Prophet

Not many people, even those most devoted to her, think of St. Therese of Liseux, the little flower, as a prophet.  This is not surprising when one recalls the many passages in her autobiography THE STORY OF A SOUL, wherein she tells of her love for nature, particularly flowers and birds.  She tells of the day out fishing with her dear Papa, " the beautiful blue sky became suddenly overcast and soon the thunder began to roll and the lightning to flash through the dark clouds. I saw it strike a short distance away and far from being frightened, I was thrilled with delight because God seem to be so close!..."(Pages 37 and 38 in the Autobiography Translation by John Clark, OCD., 1CS,1975).  Even more significant, is the passage wherein Therese tells of her growing love for learning.  She was in her early teens:  "I had always loved the great and the beautiful, but at this epoch in my life, I was taken up with an extreme desire for learning.  Not satisfied with the lessons and work my teacher was giving me, I applied myself to some special studies in history and science, and I did this on my own. The other studies left me indifferent, but these two subjects attracted all my attention -  in a few months, I acquired more knowledge than during my years of study.  Ah! - This was really only vanity and affliction of spirit.  The chapter in THE IMITATION, which speaks of knowledge came frequently to my mind..."  (page 101). 

 

 

Was it not these earlier impressions made by the very emphatically empirical, and materialistic science of her day (1873 through 1897), that prompted and allowed the holy ghost to show her at the end of her life, where that knowledge was to lead the world.   Darwin's ORIGIN, had shocked the cultural milleux - of Europe only some 14 years before she was born in 1859.  And so, during the August before her ecstatic death of love, September 30, Mother Agnes (her sister Pauline) has this entry in her notebook.  "one evening, in the infirmary, she was drawn to confide her troubles to me more than she usually did.  She had not yet opened up in this way - on this subject.  Up until then, I had known her trial of faith only vaguely.  (page 257 in LAST CONVERSATIONS).   I interject here, the comment that mother Agnes apparently relates the following words of St. Therese to Therese's trial of faith, not seeing the broader references to the world at large.  Also, not seeing the importance of these words themselves, she, Mother Agnes, failed to record the entire prophecy - for such it was.  These are the words of St. Therese, recorded by mother Agnes:

 

 

"If you only knew what frightful thoughts obsessed me.  Pray very much for me, in order that I do not listen to the devil, who wants to persuade me about so many lies.  It's the reasoning of the worst materialists, which is imposed upon my mind.  Later, unceasingly making new advances , science will explain everything naturally -  we shall have the absolute reason for everything that exists and that still remains a problem, because there remain very many things to be discovered, etc." - Apparently, Mother Agnes did not record the entire words concerning the discoveries of science, but we, in hindsight, can fill in the events she saw in vision. The words of Therese warn us of the atheism that the false science of evolutionism produces.  It is the fulfillment of what PASCENDI describes as the subjugation of faith to science - to what poses as true science.  St. Therese went on to say, as recorded by Mother Agnes - Finally, I offer up these very great pains to obtain the light of faith for poor unbelievers - for all those who separate themselves from the Church's beliefs.  Mother Agnes interjects,"she added that she never reasoned with these thoughts"  In other words, she did not attempt to argue with the devil, much less to dialogue with him, as Eve had done. Therese concludes,  I undergo them under duress,  but while undergoing them, I never cease making acts of faith."

 

 

So St. Therese, pray for us - who live in the darkness of this false science, that we too, never cease making acts of divine faith in all the truths of faith and of reason.