R.I.P. - Paula Haigh

Sad for us, but happy for Paula Haigh, that she passed away very peacefully on October 22, 2015, around 3:00a.m.  A few hours before, Paula announced to the nursing staff that she was going to die and she requested the Last Rites.  Immediately her priests were called and Father Joseph Pfeiffer, her long-time special friend, came to her assistance.  After Fr. Pfeiffer left her, in a very restful state, Paula asked to be put in a wheelchair and she traveled around the nursing home to say good-bye to all the friends she had made in her four-year stay at the Life Care Center.  She informed them that she was going to die very soon, which she did.  They loved and admired Paula, who was so caring and child-like even at the age of 89. 

Paula had pre-planned an immediate burial because she had no family and no money to plan for more.  The Sisters of Charity, at Nazareth, Ky., were special friends of Paula and they were most diligent in carrying out Paula's wishes even though they did not share her Traditional views.  Paula lived at Nazareth Retirement Village for over 20 years before she had to go to the nursing home due to severe congestive heart failure.  Paula is buried in the Sister's cemetery among many hundreds of holy nuns, a few clergy and lay people.  Father Pfeiffer was permitted to offer the Traditional Tridentine Requeim High Mass for her on the grounds near her burial place. 

It was a very beautiful burial day and it appeared that all the Elements which Paula constantly wrote about wanted to participate in her special day.  Paula was seriously ill, even gravely ill many times and we anticipated a very difficult and painful death.  But this was not the case.  God in His Love and Mercy for Paula provided the opposite.  He provided His Best Rewards for her faithfulness to His Truth.  A more detailed account of Paula's life and career will be provided in the future and all of her Creation Research is being recorded and preserved.  Her latest and most comprehensive work on Creation will be published in a few months -- God willing. 

May she rest now because she labored unceasingly, amid great sufferings while she was alive.

Karl Keating - Part 2

Having read carefully all 355 pages of The New Geocentrists, I feel competent enough to answer the question put to me:  What is good about the book?

 

At the end of page 355, I am forced to conclude that there is nothing really positive, i.e., good about the book.  Whenever a compliment or agreement on some truth seems imminent, it is cancelled out with a “not so”, or “it is wrong.”  This amounts to a pattern and can be seen in the title to the third subsection of Part I:  “Convincing but False” (Wow! How can it be?)  This is the stylistic habit of Karl Keating.  Very jolting on the mind.  And its main disadvantage is that it leaves the reader with nothing but negatives, quite hopeless. 

 

Modern science, according to Keating, is essentially agnostic.  I cannot find the page now, but somewhere, you describe the methodology of modern science in such a way that it can never arrive at a truth worthy of absolute certitude.  And this, I would say, is absolutely true:  the incertitude of modern scientific theories is due to their inductive method.  However, and so:  This is the reason why Divine Revelation is absolutely necessary.  And if it is absolutely necessary, then, that Divine Revelation must give us the absolute certitude we require for salvation.  And this certitude is found in Sacra Doctrina.  In the time of St. Thomas, the trio, Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium were not yet separated.  In fact, as an aside, your book is an example of the extreme fragmentation so typical of all things today.  As John Donne said of the Copernican theory, writing his poetry in the 1600’s – “all coherence gone” the center lost…..If he felt it so soon after (1543) , but then he was a poet!

 

Back to the man who was not a poet, but the best example of scientific discourse ever – St. Thomas Aquinas.  For St. Thomas, Sacra Doctrina was the teaching of Divine Revelation gleaned from Scripture and the Fathers and interpreted/endorsed by the teaching Church which was mainly theologians.  Remember the case of Pope John the XXIII, who taught there was no particular judgment, and how he was quickly corrected by the theologians of the Univ. of Paris?  That was Sacra Doctrina in action and so much needed today!  Also, your book seems built on the premise, although you never state it – that Divine Revelation can state or teach one thing, such as an earth-centered cosmos – and all of the natural sciences could hold and teach something quite different, with no consequential effects in the world at large.  I would put it perhaps this way:  you probably would not accept my term Divine Revelation, but substitute whatever.  How can there be a dis-unity in basic doctrine such as cosmology, and not have dire consequences?

 

Grace builds on nature.  And if the nature is full of errors, it is the task of Grace to heal them with Truth.  And the Catholic Faith is a synthesis of truths – both of reason and of faith.  Modernism, as Pope St. Pius X defined it, is a synthesis of all heresies.  It is what I have defined as the Copernican-Darwinian worldview.  Yes, St. Pius X did not include Copernicanism in his synthesis of heresies.  That is a mystery.  The only answer must be that he, too, or the man who wrote Pascendi, was also deceived by the false science stemming from Copernicus.  There is so much that is true in modern science.  I have tried to build a cosmology on it, especially the physics and chemistry of the elements.  I think this is what we must be doing.  We must be building the Catholic , i.e., true synthesis of all truths, both of reason and of faith.  I have been trying to do this during these last 20 or so years. 

 

However, I find more and more difficulty, even though the wonderful principles are and remain clear.  I cannot figure why Sungenis entitled his movie The Principle.  What principle of reason or of faith was it?  You should have told us since he did not! 

 

In conclusion, please let me urge you to read and study the 1^st question of the Summa.  It is absolutely the key to all these problems.  I fault Sungenis for failing to take his stand on St. Thomas’ guidelines for Scripture:  the literal is the basis of all other senses of Scripture.  When Our Lord compared Himself to the Door, it is necessary to know what a door is:  the opening, entrance to a house.  This literal meaning is absolutely necessary for an understanding of His comparison.  The same with all such references.  All figurative significations require an understanding of the literal.  And this literal is always true, it cannot lie.  Because it is based on Reality, the Reality God created in the beginning.  Here go on to Epistemology.  (I once wrote a paper called The Cognitive Loop.)  Very important to be a realist.  Please read my later writings.  I would love to communicate. 

Karl Keating

Dear Mr. Karl Keating:

 

It all comes down to this:

 

Whom do you choose to be the one Father and Head of the human race:

 

1.       A hominid evolved from a population of ape-like creatures; or

2.      The Adam described in Genesis 1-2-3 ?

 

It must be one or the other.

 

It seems to me the basic assumption of all your honorably courteous discussion with us Geocentrists is that you have chosen #1 in the above options.  Because, if you had chosen #2 ….

 

Well, let me take a most obvious consequence, that of language based, also, on the dominion passage (Gen.1:27-28) and Genesis 2:19-20, wherein Adam names all the animals and birds.  In your book, The New Geocentrists, page 174, you ask of Dr. Bouw:  “Does he (Bouw) remove all instrumentality from men, giving them no liberty to form their own language over time?”  You have done a good deal of the necessary homework for this book, Dr. Keating, but you have not done so on this particular point.  It has been experimentally verified that language MUST be LEARNED and that by more than one “teacher”.  Children, for example, learn their native tongue from the family group……..a possible exception was Tarzan who taught himself from books found in his parents’ cabin.  But he had no way to hear the sounds.  And the examples of feral children demonstrate their virtual inability to speak at all given the absence of this teaching group.  I did extensive research on this subject years ago and reported it somewhere. 

 

The conclusion, quite demonstrably proven (excuse the awkward phrasing).  The fact is that language MUST be given to the first man and Scripture implies that Adam (and then Eve) HAD been GIVEN a language.  Adam named all the animals!  That says volumes, not only for Adam’s vocabulary, but also for his infused knowledge of the nature (i.e., substantial form) of each creature created during the first Six Days of the World.  (I have written extensively on these necessary Six literal days.)

 

This may not seem conclusive proof to you that the evidence for language greatly favors the Biblical Adam as our “first parent” – but there are many other considerations also which I haven’t the energy or mental synapses to pursue here.  But all are crucial because the Biblical Adam is a prototype of Christ, Our Lord, in ways that an evolved hominid could never be.  Rather, the hominid choice, as you must see, is a colossal insult to Our Divine Lord and His Immaculate Mother, and this is just what Lucifer, the great counterfeiter and liar, intends!

 

And of course, languages have changed over time, even as all the varieties of dogs, cats, cows and horses also have.  But can you guess what is the analogy with language?  I never could have until I took Father Charles Hart’s course in Thomistic Metaphysics.  While I was studying at Catholic University in the 1950’s, there was a war going on between Father Hart and Fr. McAlister, who taught the course in Logic.  Fr. McAlister believed that Metaphysics was really Logic.  But I have come to see that Metaphysics, the highest of all the sciences, insofar as it descends at all, is much closer to grammar than to the propositions of Aristotelian formal logic of propositions. (Please excuse the redundancy.)

 

In all languages, there is this unchanging contrast:  all languages have nouns and verbs and modifiers.  These realities reflect the substance and accidents of Metaphysics.  And, of course, the nouns presuppose existence.  As do all things presuppose Creation – thus its absolute importance!

 

Thank you for devoting a whole chapter to my work promoting geocentricity.  And perhaps, most of all, for the real honor of linking me with my great friend and mentor, Solange Hertz.  She is, indeed, the Grande Dame of the traditionalist movement – or what remains of it?  Please be assured of my prayers and best wishes that, as St. Thomas More said, “May we merrily meet in Heaven!”  - to his executioner! 

 

PS…I am just on page 174, but if you have not, please look up Redmond O’Hanlon.     

Grammar and Metaphysics - The Catholic Answer to Evolutionary Relativism

History proves that some things never change.  God gave language to Adam.  There are many evidences of this in the second Chapter of Genesis.  But, the most striking of these, is Adam’s naming of the animals. (Gen. 2: 19-20)

 

History has proven that the noun as a part of speech, exists in every language developed since Adam.  All the principles of Metaphysics are found realized in Grammar:  nouns, verbs and all their modifiers are but the names of the things that exist – that have essential natures, that move and that are known to us by their quantities, qualities, relations, time, place, clothing, posture, agency and receptivity.  It is by the nouns, verbs and their modifiers that we record, orally or in writing, the intelligibility of things, and it is by seeking out and describing their causes – Efficient, Final, Material and Formal that we analyze the reality that surrounds us.  Metaphysics is grammar in action.

 

But Logic is something else.  Logic is Reason on the Rational Reflective Mind of man, imposing its own innate or created Order upon the given language.  Not until Aristotle was there even such a thing as the “science”, or better, the art of right reasoning in language.  Aristotle’s” Organon” gave to the world the only true art of reasoning.  And notice that the subject and the verb correspond, not so much to the Metaphysical Substantial Form, but more properly to the subject of the logical proposition or sentence.  It is because Aristotle himself went on to develop the Science of First Principles or the Metaphysics that this latter science of Being, as such, escaped being overwhelmed by the Logic of Propositions or Right Reasoning in and by means of the grammatical, proportional sentence.  The fact remains, however, that the historical record of all languages however much the philologists and linguistic love to emphasize the changes – the historical record clearly demonstrates the absolute stability, the unchanging fact that nouns signify real things in the real world, (unless it is clearly indicated that the references are fictional), that verbs signify actions or motion, and that all modifiers correspond to the nine categories of Accidents, by which the mind knows the Substantial Form or the Genesis kind specified in Genesis One. 

 

All of Reality, in its diverse structures and forms, manifests this stability and immutability of certain forms, not only the bara min., created kinds of Genesis One, but certain natural laws, such as those inscribed in the human conscience and codified in the 10 Commandments;  but also those supernatural laws that are so marvelously spelled out in the Prophecies of the Old Testament. 

 

See The Preparation of the Incarnation by Henry James Coleridge – reprinted 2013 - originally published in 1885, and for the unmistakable distinctions of Grammar from both Logic and Metaphysics.  See Gwynne’s Grammar, by N.M. Gwynne Knopf. 2014