Did Fr. Robinson skip the classes on Lamentabili, Pascendi?

Here is a link to an informative letter written by Andrew Senior, a professor from St. Mary's KS:
                        thecatacombs.org/thread/682/andrew-senior-emerging-anesthesia
     Fr. Asher: thecatacombs.org/thread/810/sspx-updates-deeper-vatican-ii

    Fr. Vachon: thecatacombs.org/thread/611/another-concelebrated-sspx-novus-marriage

I feel bad for the unsuspecting young men who have entered or are thinking of entering the conciliar neo-sspx seminary and unsuspecting parents of young men who allow their sons to enter that are unaware of the changes thinking they are entering the seminary of the teachings of Abp. Lefebvre when the truth is,  it is now a seminary of a  refined version of modernism.


"I warn you if you don't read about this warfare and on liberalism, on Vat. II and the new Mass and the fight for the faith, you will also go with the revolution.   You will.
I've already seen it happen.   I've already seen many families going with the revolution of the new Soc. of St. Pius X and it's steps with modernist Rome.  They're already going with it and they want to be recognized by modernist Rome.   want this peace with modernist Rome.   There can be no peace with the enemies of Christ.    Zero, zero.
So you're at war boys till the day you die.    And if you don't read you will also be traitors, cause you will not have understood this fight.   You're bound like I am to read and study and know this fight."

After Kolbe advisor Eric Bermingham wrote a critique of Fr. Paul Robinson’s book The Realist Guide to Religion and Science, Fr. Robinson wrote a critique of the Kolbe Center which he posted on his website. We are grateful to him for the time that he took to offer the critique and we welcome the opportunity to respond. We are hopeful that, through the intercession of the Immaculate Conception, our principal patroness, Fr. Robinson will use his great talents to join us in defending the traditional Catholic understanding of Genesis 1-11, the foundation of our Holy Catholic Faith.

The Kolbe Center provides a forum for Catholic theologians, philosophers and natural scientists all over the world who defend the Church’s traditional understanding of the sacred history of Genesis, as believed and taught by all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching, that God created a perfectly beautiful, complete and harmonious universe—and all of the different kinds of angelic and corporeal creatures—for man, by fiat, less than ten thousand years ago. In one of the most remarkable prophetic passages in the entire Bible, St. Peter our first Pope, was inspired to warn us against an all-out satanic assault on this fundamental doctrine of creation “in the last days” when “scoffers” would come into the Church of God saying,

With this prediction, St. Peter miraculously summed up the precise error that undergirds all of the modern deviations from the traditional doctrine of creation—atheistic evolution, theistic evolution and so-called “progressive creation.” Before going further, let us define each of these ideas in turn.

According to the hypothesis of atheistic evolution, molecules spontaneously turned into human bodies over hundreds of millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that are going on now. The hypothesis of so-called “theistic evolution” takes a variety of forms. At one end of the spectrum of theistic evolutionary belief is the popular view of Dr. Ken Miller and many others who hold that God created some matter and natural laws at the moment of the alleged Big Bang and then allowed everything to evolve over hundreds of millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that are going on now until two (or more) sub-human primates conceived creatures capable of receiving a human soul who became the first human beings. At the other end of the spectrum of theistic evolutionist conjecture is the pantheistic fantasy of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin who identified god completely with the process of evolution, making it responsible for the evolution of the first humans through a process of hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity, extinction and disease. Finally, the most seductive deviation from the traditional doctrine for faithful Catholics, is “progressive creation,” the creation by God of the universe and of the natural order ex nihilo, followed by periodic creative interventions by the Creator over hundreds of millions of years, culminating in the special creation of Adam and Eve.

All of these deviations from the traditional doctrine of creation rest, to differing degrees, upon the false assumption that “things have always been the same from the beginning of creation” and that natural scientists can thus legitimately extrapolate from the present order of nature all the way back to the beginning of the universe to explain how and over what period of time all things came to be. But St. Peter goes on to explain in his second epistle why this is impossible when he writes that these “scoffers” will have to be “willfully ignorant” of the fact that:


Progressive Creation: A Building Without a Foundation

Perhaps the most glaring weakness in Fr. Robinson’s critique of the Kolbe Center is its almost total failure to find support in the Sacred Tradition and authoritative Magisterial teaching of the Church. The strongest support Fr. Robinson can cite for his acceptance of long ages are a few statements from Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus in which the Pope allows for the possibility that the authors of Sacred Scripture sometimes used popular rather than scientific language to describe certain phenomena, thus, in Fr. Robinson’s opinion, opening the way for exegetes to reconcile long ages with the Holy Scriptures.

It should give any Catholic reader pause that Fr. Robinson is not able to cite a single Church Father, Doctor, Ecumenical Council or authoritative Magisterial statement in support of his position and must rest his case on a papal permission to interpret certain passages of Holy Scripture in a sense other than the literal and obvious sense. This is not the modus operandi of the Church Fathers and Doctors, nor of the Council Fathers and Popes when they define doctrine. Their modus operandi is to cite the literal and obvious sense of Scripture and the common teaching of the Fathers when interpreting Scripture. Indeed, Pope Leo XIII in the same encyclical cited by Fr. Robinson exhorts Catholic exegetes not to depart from the literal and obvious sense of Scripture, save when reason dictates or necessity requires that they depart from that sense.

As Kolbe advisor Eric Bermingham pointed out in his original critique of Fr. Robinson’s The Realist Guide, Pope Leo XIII demonstrated in various ways that he himself held fast to the traditional interpretation of Genesis 1 as an inspired account of the fiat creation of all things in six days, as when he wrote in Arcanum divinae in 1880:


Eric Bermingham went on to observe that no one has ever come close to proving that “reason dictates” or that “necessity requires” that Catholics abandon the literal and obvious sense of what the Roman Catechism calls the “sacred history of Genesis.” Thus, the very text cited by Fr. Robinson as his mandate to reconcile the traditional teaching of the Church on creation with the long ages of uniformitarian natural science argues against his position, since, as we shall see, the uniformitarian natural science on which Fr. Robinson bases his faith in Big Bang cosmology and long ages is based on assumptions derived not from the traditional theology and philosophy of the Church but from the false philosophy of Rene’ Descartes, Immanuel Kant and other so-called “Enlightenment” philosophers.

Pope Leo XIII founded the Pontifical Biblical Commission to combat modernism in the realm of Scriptural exegesis, and Pope St. Pius X made the PBC an arm of the Magisterium and declared dissent from its decrees a serious sin. In 1909, the PBC replied to eight questions about Genesis 1-3 and declared that no Catholic could deny three “facts” contained in Genesis 1-3 that pertain to the foundations of the Christian Faith. These were the creation of all things by God at the beginning of time; the special creation of Adam, body and soul; and the creation of Eve from Adam’s side. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how the creation of “all things” at “the beginning of time” can be reconciled with Fr. Robinson’s Big Bang cosmology in which the only things created at the “beginning of time” are some hydrogen, helium and lithium.

Moreover, in its other answers, the PBC ruled that all of Genesis 1-3 is historical and that exegetes must adhere to the proper, or literal and obvious, sense of the text of Genesis 1-3, unless reason dictates or necessity requires. Indeed, while allowing scholars to discuss whether “day” in Genesis 1 refers to a 24-day or an indefinite space of time, the PBC insisted that the only acceptable interpretation of “day” in Genesis 1 was one in which “the Church and the Fathers” “lead the way.” But the Fathers held that the days of Genesis were either 24-hour days—the overwhelming majority view—or an instant—the Augustinian minority view. Hence, rightly expounded, the PBC decrees of 1909 leave exegetes without any choice for the length of the creation period except for “six 24-hour days” or an instantaneous creation.

Fr. Robinson cites Fr. Vigouroux approvingly as a theologian of recent times worthy of emulation, but this commendation will not bear close examination. Just 13 years after the anathema of Vatican I cited above and only two years after Pope Leo XIII wrote in Arcanum that the creation of Eve from Adam’s side on the sixth day of creation was “known to all” and impossible for anyone to deny, Fr. Vigouroux dared to assert that “geology” had “established” that God did not create the entire material universe in six days or in an instant but over long ages of time. Intoxicated with his confidence in the truth of the wild speculations of Lyellian geology, Vigouroux went on to boast that “it was reserved” to his time “to discover the true meaning of the cosmogonic days”—the days of Genesis 1. It is apparent from the content of the PBC decrees cited above that they do not support the claims of Fr. Vigouroux, and Fr. Robinson has not offered a single sound reason from theology or natural science why Catholics should not remain obedient to those authoritative decrees.


Long Ages: Fact of Science or Science Fiction?

As demonstrated in many books and articles posted or advertised on the Kolbe website, the fiat creation of the entire material universe and of all of the different kinds of creatures for man at the beginning of time less than ten thousand years ago constitutes the common doctrine of all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers from the time of the Apostles in their authoritative teaching. Moreover, while Fr. Robinson scoffs at the notion that the length of the period of creation could be a matter of great importance for Catholics, here again he disregards the mind of the Church Fathers who held that the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time less than ten thousand years ago was an indisputable fact contained in Divine Revelation and one that had to be maintained in the face of the scorn of the Graeco-Roman intellectual elite, most of whom believed in some form of evolution over long ages and who heaped scorn on the Church Fathers for placing their trust in a book produced by Hebrew barbarians who lacked the culture of the philosophers of Greece or Rome.

Indeed, the Church Fathers had to contend regularly with the ideas of philosophers like Lucretius who believed in molecules-to-man evolution through natural selection over long ages of time. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes of the wonders that natural selection can accomplish in “a vast time”:


Far from making peace with these long ages of “vast time,” the Fathers of the Church rejected these long-age evolutionary phantasies as illogical, absurd, and totally contradictory to God’s revelation to Moses in the sacred history of Genesis. Of these early advocates of long ages of evolution, St. Basil wrote that:


St. Basil added elsewhere that so complete is the information contained in the sacred history of Genesis that those who rightly interpret the Sacred Scriptures can even know “the day on which the universe was made,” a conviction grounded in the certainty that the chronological information in the Sacred history of Genesis was inspired, inerrant, and sufficient to establish a chronology from creation to the later periods of human history. Moreover, the belief in long ages so dominated the pagan world that the Church Fathers repeatedly rejected this erroneous belief and firmly upheld the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis and of the chronology of the world derived from the genealogies contained in the Pentateuch. Hence, we read in the City of God of St. Augustine:


Julius Africanus observes that not only the Greek and Roman pagan intellectuals embraced these mythical long ages but also the Egyptians before them:


St. Theophilus of Antioch, occupying the see founded by St. Peter, at the end of the second century expounded upon:


In his capacity as tutor of the imperial household after the conversion of Constantine, the Church Father Lactantius lent his voice to the chorus of patristic witnesses to the truth of the Biblical chronology of the world:


In light of the evidence we have presented here, and before leaving this topic, we would like to ask the progressive creationists of our day to please show us a single statement from a Church Father who taught that God used long periods of time in the creation of the material universe or that it does not matter if one believes in these mythical long ages, as did most of the pagan philosophers of the patristic era.

When the testimony of the Church Fathers and Doctors is taken seriously, it becomes apparent that the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time is absolutely integral to the true Catholic doctrine of creation and that the insertion of long ages of time into the creation period involves a denial of the goodness of God and of the goodness of the first created world before the Original Sin and calls into question the inerrancy of the chronological information contained in the sacred history of Genesis.

The Ecumenical Councils of Trent and Vatican I defined that when all of the Church Fathers agree on any interpretation of Scripture that pertains to a doctrine of faith or morals that is the truth and we must believe it. Unfortunately, progressive creationists have forgotten or overlooked one of the fundamental tenets of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which was believed and taught by all of the Church Fathers in their interpretation of Genesis 1-3. St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica calls this doctrine “the first perfection of the universe,” which he defines as “the completeness of the universe at its first founding” and which is what, according to the Angelic Doctor, is “ascribed to the seventh day.”

All of the Fathers without exception held that God created all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures for man in six days or an instant much less than ten thousand years ago and that when He had finished creating Adam, body and soul, and Eve from Adam’s side, He stopped creating new kinds of creatures, at which point all of the different kinds of creatures, angelic and corporeal, each one perfect according to its nature, existed together with man and for man, in perfect harmony, at the same time, in a world that was completely free not only from human death, but from deformity, disease, man-harming natural disasters or any kind of disorder in nature, all of which “natural evils” only came into the world because of the Original Sin of Adam.

Indeed, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church held that the natural order in which we live and which the Fathers and Doctors sometimes refer to as the order of Providence only began to operate with relative autonomy after the work of creation was finished on the sixth day of creation. Hence, summing up the teaching of all of the Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom writes:


With their distinction between the supernatural work of creation and the natural order of providence, the Fathers and Doctors expose the principal error of the progressive creationists—their mixing of the order of the supernatural work of creation and the natural order of providence which are always kept separate in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors. Indeed, the progressive creationist makes a second error in tandem with the first when, by the introduction of long ages, he inserts supernatural creative acts of God into the natural order of providence but also into a fallen world, thus denying the unanimous testimony of the Fathers to the fact that God created a perfectly complete and harmonious universe for our first parents in the beginning of creation.


Scoffers Will Arise

In the Summa Theologica St. Thomas Aquinas summed up the primary assumption that all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church made in regard to the natural order as follows:


In other words, the origin of the different kinds of creatures—stars, plants, animals and men—cannot be explained in terms of the activity of created things—that is, in terms of the same material processes that are going on now. Thus, according to all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers, in their authoritative teaching, it is IMPOSSIBLE to extrapolate from the present order of nature and from the material processes that are going on now—things like genetic mutations and supernova explosions— to explain how these things came to be in the past. This assumption was not based on human reasoning or experience. It was based on God’s revelation to Moses in which He clearly stated that the work of creation was a fiat creation and that it was finished on the sixth day with the creation of Adam and Eve. Therefore, ALL the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers drew the boundary between theology and natural science AFTER the creation of Adam and Eve. From this starting point, they recognized that the work of creation was the proper realm of the theologian. The natural order—which began AFTER creation was finished—was the proper realm of the natural scientist.

Those who defend atheistic or theistic evolution do not accept this premise from Divine Revelation. They believe that the same material processes that are going on now have been operating in the same way since the BEGINNING of creation—in contradiction to all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching. Progressive creationists like Fr. Robinson reject the evolutionist error that one kind of living organism can generate one of a different kind but accept the uniformitarian chronology for the Earth and the universe which is based on assuming that the material processes that are going on now have been operating in more or less the same way since the beginning of creation.

We have seen that St. Peter the first Pope actually predicted this revolution in men’s ideas when he wrote that scoffers would come in the latter days, asserting that “things have always been the same since the BEGINNING of creation.” St. Peter went on to predict that these scoffers—Descartes, Kant, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin and all other theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists and their modern disciples— would have to deliberately ignore the FACT—not the pious belief—that it was the Word of God that brought the heavens and the Earth and all they contain into existence, NOT a material process like what we observe in the world today. And this is, indeed, the fundamental error of all evolutionists, theistic or atheistic. Progressive creationists avoid the most egregious error of the evolutionists but still accept the false uniformitarian framework of the Enlightenment philosophers and deny the fiat creation of all things from the beginning of creation as well as the radical distinction between period of Creation and the period of Providence and between the pre-Fall and post-Fall world.

No one exposed the folly of a uniformitarian approach to the origins and antiquity of man and the universe better than St. Augustine. In The City of God, he reflected on the creation of Eve from Adam’s side and observed that:


In this passage St. Augustine lays bare the error that St. Peter warned us against in 2 Peter 3 and which remains the fatal flaw in all accounts of origins put forward by theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists. Both of them regard the account of creation at least in part as a “fable,” precisely because the “first created works are beyond their experience,” and they “adopt a skeptical attitude” toward the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11 in regard to the chronology of the world.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was the first Catholic thinker of note—i.e., the first Baptized Catholic “scoffer”—to propose that it would be “more reasonable” to explain the origin of stars, galaxies and other kinds of creatures in terms of the same material processes going on now than by fiat creation. In his Discourse on Method (of Rightly Conducting the Reason), Part V, Descartes wrote


In reality, Descartes wittingly or unwittingly distorted the “common opinion” of theologians which identified the creative action of God in creating the universe with His action in maintaining it. Rightly understood, this common opinion held that God created and sustained the universe by His divine omnipotent power, but it distinguished (on the side of the effect) between the exercise of that power to create the corporeal and spiritual creatures ex nihilo and the maintenance of the universe after it was finished and complete.

To appreciate the importance of this conflation of the order of creation with the natural order of providence, consider the following statement by humanist philosopher John Dewey about the pivotal importance of this concept in Descartes’ writing and its link to Darwinism:

When Descartes said:

In light of the fact that John Dewey (1859-1952)—the man most responsible for destroying the moral integrity of public education in the United States—identified Descartes as the one who laid the FOUNDATIONS of modern evolutionary thought, we might ask ourselves: WHY was René Descartes the first Catholic thinker of note to embrace this idea? Was he really so much smarter than St. Augustine, St. Thomas and all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? Is it a coincidence that Descartes dabbled in the occult and then had three “mystical dreams” brought to him by a “spirit of truth” which gave him the key to igniting a revolution in men’s thinking— a revolution that would overturn the traditional teaching that “the past—as revealed in Divine Revelation—is the key to the present” with the new mantra of the evolutionists, “the present is the key to the past”?

Perhaps we need look no further for an answer than to Descartes’ devout Catholic contemporary Blaise Pascal. Pascal was as great a genius as Descartes but, unlike Descartes, he had true piety and he saw the terrible consequences that would result from Descartes’ arrogant denial of the traditional teaching on fiat creation in favor of a naturalistic account of origins. Hence, Pascal wrote in Pensees:


St Thomas followed Aristotle in teaching that a small error in the beginning becomes a huge error later on. But in the case of Descartes, a huge error in the beginning became an unimaginably monstrous error in the end. And this explains why highly intelligent and virtuous people can be completely wrong in their conclusions about origins—because in regard to the origins of man and the universe they have accepted the false premise of Descartes and unwittingly rejected the premise that was held by ALL of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching. Indeed, a man could be the smartest person in the world—and virtuous and well-intentioned to boot—yet if he starts from a false premise, he will always reason (perhaps even sincerely and brilliantly) to a false conclusion—as all evolutionists do.

In the fourth century, one generation after the Council of Nicea defined the divinity of Christ as “of the same substance as the Father,” a still larger council—though not legitimate because its decrees were never ratified by the Pope—approved a watered-down version of the Creed which styled Him only “of like substance with the Father.” Of this dark moment in Church history, St. Jerome wrote that “The whole world groaned and found itself Arian.”[13]

Less than 150 years ago, Vatican Council I reaffirmed the teaching of Lateran IV verbatim—that God created all the different kinds of corporeal and spiritual creatures by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time—but it went further. In response to the errors of Descartes, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin and other evolutionists, already gaining widespread acceptance among intellectuals in Europe and North America, the Council condemned the following proposition:



The Word of God is Perfect

This response would not be complete without a recognition that the progressive creationists’ approach to Sacred Scripture deviates from the approach of all of the Fathers and Doctors and contributes to the erosion of faith in the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. The constant teaching of all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their dogmatic teaching is that Sacred Scripture is inerrant in all that it affirms. Moreover, since all of them also taught that Genesis 1-11 is a sacred history, all Catholics are bound to accept all of the affirmations of Genesis and of all of the other historical books of the Bible as the literal historical truth. The progressive creationist, like the theistic evolutionist, likes to point out that the Magisterium has never defined the literal historical truth of the historical propositions in Genesis 1-11. So, they say, we are free to believe or not to believe that Adam lived to be 930 years old or that the Flood waters covered all of the Earth’s highest mountains. But this approach to determining the truth of historical statements in Holy Scripture would have been anathema to the Fathers and Doctors. Indeed, the Angelic Doctor summed up the mind of the Fathers when he wrote that:


Again and again, the progressive creationists and theistic evolutionists accuse the members of the Kolbe Center of exalting their private opinions above the Magisterium of the Church. But this is a calumny. We are simply maintaining the reverence for the historical books of the Bible that all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers maintained in their authoritative teaching. If Genesis 1-11 is a sacred history, and all historical propositions in historical books of the Bible are free from error, as even Pope Pius XII in Humani generis affirmed, we do not require a Magisterial decree to believe that Adam was 930 years old when he died or that the Flood waters covered all of the Earth’s highest mountains (and was, necessarily, therefore, global in its extent). On the contrary, we are bound to believe these things without any Magisterial decree, because if anyone says that “Adam did not live to be 930 years old” or that “the Flood waters did not actually cover all of the Earth’s highest mountains,” it follows that divine Scripture would be false. The Angelic Doctor reminds us that:



“The World That Then Was Perished in the Flood”

In his second Epistle, St. Peter warns against the uniformitarian error that undergirds the false accounts of the origins of man and the universe promoted by evolutionists and progressive creationists. Moreover, he points out that the authors of these deviations from the sacred history of Genesis will have to ignore the fact that it was the Fiat of the Word of God that brought the heavens and the Earth and all they contain into existence—not a natural process like a supernova explosion—and that there was a divine judgment upon the whole world at the time of the Noachic Flood which completely changed the face of the Earth, so that the “world that then was perished in the Flood.”

In our publications and on-line presentations, the Kolbe Center has demonstrated the overwhelming physical evidence for a global Flood in the time of Noah. In this reply to Fr. Robinson we will just offer five compelling theological arguments for the literal historical truth of the Mosaic account of the global Flood, in the hope that Fr. Robinson and his followers will recognize the compelling force of these arguments and return to the traditional Catholic understanding of Noah’s Flood as a global cataclysm.




St. Maximilian Kolbe: A Suitable Patron for the Kolbe Center?

In Fr. Robinson’s critique of the Kolbe Center, he acknowledges that St. Maximilian Kolbe rejected microbe-to-man evolution but demonstrates that in one of St. Maximilian’s articles he wrote that “science teaches” some kind of natural development of stars and galaxies over long ages of time. Fr. Robinson notes that the Kolbe Center gives seven reasons for having chosen St. Maximilian as its secondary patron after the Immaculate Conception, but he finds it extremely ironic that the Kolbe Center would choose as its secondary patron a man who was willing to entertain the possibility of long ages of cosmic development and something along the lines of Big Bang cosmology.

In reality, far from being an embarrassment to the Kolbe Center, the fact that our secondary patron was mistaken in his acceptance of long ages only underscores the folly of tracing the roots of the current crisis of faith to Vatican II, since the pseudo-scientific assault on the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis appears to have entered the seminaries of Europe during or soon after the pontificate of St. Pius X, and clearly affected St. Maximilian’s understanding of the development of stars, galaxies, and the solar system.

However, this knowledge makes us even more confident of St. Maximilian’s intercession on our behalf, since from Heaven we know that he intercedes all the more fervently on behalf of our efforts to restore the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation as the foundation of our faith and of all effective evangelization. We say this for several reasons, the most important of which revolve around the single most important concept in the theology of St. Maximilian Kolbe—after the Incarnation—the Immaculate Conception.

In his writings on the Immaculate Conception, St. Maximilian predicted that theologians would continually derive new insights from their meditation on this mystery. In the last major piece of writing that he dictated before going to the starvation bunker in Auschwitz, St. Maximilian demonstrated that, with the words “I am the Immaculate Conception,” Our Lady of Lourdes gave the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution. He explained:


With these words, St. Maximilian revealed the consoling truth that in 1858 at Lourdes the Immaculate Conception, our Blessed Mother, gave the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution on the very eve of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Indeed, if theistic evolution is true, then Adam and Eve must have been conceived in the womb of a sub-human primate. And since theistic evolutionists must believe in the dogma of Original Sin as defined at the Council of Trent, they must hold that Adam and Eve were “conceived without sin.” Therefore, if theistic evolution were true, the Blessed Mother would have had to say, “I am AN Immaculate Conception,” or “I am Immaculate Conception Number Three.” But She did not say that—because, as St. Maximilian explained in the passage quoted above, Adam and Eve were created, not conceived.

If St. Maximilian Kolbe had been allowed more time to ponder the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, we have no doubt that his meditation would have led him to the further realization that the long ages of progressive creation, with its conflation of the order of creation with the order of providence, cannot be harmonized with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, rightly understood. We say this for several reasons. In the first place, it is important to recognize the profound connection that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church made between the first created world and the Immaculate Conception. St. Bridget of Sweden, Doctor of the Church, beautifully illuminates this connection in the office that the Bridgettine Sisters have prayed for more than six hundred years and which they pray to this day:



With these words, St. Bridget acknowledged that the only thing more beautiful, more perfect, than the first created world is the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. In light of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, this insight underscores the impossibility of death, deformity, disease, or other natural defects, like harmful genetic mutations, in the first created world before the Original Sin, because the existence of these natural evils in the first created world would render it incapable of serving as a type of the Immaculate Conception. Yet progressive creationists, like Fr. Robinson, teach that God intervened to create the different kinds of plants and animals in a world that he himself (the god of evolution or progressive creation) filled for hundreds of millions of years with death, deformity, extinctions, and disease.

The collapse of Big Bang cosmology and its fantastic and evidence-less conjectures regarding the formation of stars and galaxies, the undisputed reality of genetic entropy within the biosphere, and the overwhelming evidence for the centrality of the Earth in relation to the rest of the universe, would only have confirmed for St. Maximilian the first perfection of the first created world as an essential element of its character as a type and foreshadowing of the Immaculate Conception. Indeed, in light of these considerations, the founder of the Militia Immaculatae who was always quick to defend the immaculacy of the Blessed Virgin against the slightest slander would have been the first to insist on the completeness of the universe at its first founding, meaning that all of the different kinds of creatures, each one perfect according to its nature, necessarily existed together at the same time, with man, and for man, in perfect harmony at the beginning of creation. As St. Maximilian observed in one of his articles:


By accepting the Lyellian-Darwinian uniformitarian chronology of Earth’s history, Fr. Robinson must hold that most of the phyla created by God since the beginning of the world had died out by the time God created Adam and Eve. But this contradicts St. Maximilian’s vision of the centrality of man in God’s plan of creation and his conviction that all of the different kinds of creatures were created for man—not just in view of man’s future appearance on Earth after hundreds of millions of years. Hence, he wrote:



St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Curse of Copernicus

In his book The Realist Guide, and in his critique of the Kolbe Center, Fr. Robinson argues—against our position—that the Church “accepts that the Bible does not teach geocentrism”:


In light of Fr. Robinson’s exaltation of fallible human reason above the literal and obvious sense of Scripture as understood by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, it is interesting that St. Maximilian Kolbe describes the sin of Eve in Paradise as one in which she exalted reason above God’s revelation. He writes:



Our knowledge of the relationship between the Earth and the rest of the solar system is in one respect different and in another respect similar to our knowledge of the how and when of creation. It is different in the sense that the relationship between the Earth and the rest of the solar system can be observed and is thus part of the natural order and, hence, falls within the proper sphere of the natural scientist. On the other hand, since all that a natural scientist can detect from within the universe is relative motion, only someone with a vantage point outside of the universe—a divine vantage point—can actually determine what is moving and what is at rest within the universe. That is why, even though the Earth-Sun relationship falls within the legitimate sphere of the natural scientist, at the end of the day human beings need a revelation from God to know that the Earth is at rest at (or near) the center of the universe.

Growing up in Poland, St. Maximilian Kolbe could not help being caught up in the cult of Copernicus as a national icon. However, anyone who examines the life of Copernicus will soon discover how little he did to demonstrate the superiority of his model of the solar system to the Ptolemaic system. The greatest astronomer of his age was Tycho Brahe, but Tycho never embraced the Copernican model. Instead, he developed the model named after him—the same model of the universe that God showed to St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, in the 12th century—a model which placed the Earth motionless at the center of the universe, while the planets revolved around the Sun, and the Sun and the stars revolved around the Earth.


Farewell to Apologetic Apologetics

Since almost everyone has accepted as a fait accompli the heliocentric system as being the true operating model of cosmology, almost every apologetic issued from either the Catholic hierarchy or its lay scholars in the last hundred years has, in one form or another, been for the sole purpose of finding some rationale why previous popes and their heads of doctrine, if led by the Holy Spirit away from all error, could condemn heliocentrism if it was the true system.

But this type of apologetic has had severe problems from the start. To be Catholic has always meant that what was formally decreed in the past remains formally decreed in the present, since, at the highest levels, the Church, as promised by Christ, will be without error in its doctrinal teaching. As it stands, today’s Catholic must accept that the officials who issued our historic decrees, even those issued in 1616 and 1633 against Galileo, did so under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, Who cannot lie. Even for decrees issued on lower levels of authority, unless a higher authoritative decree modified it, it has been commonly understood that a Catholic was bound to give his full allegiance to the former.

Hence the dilemma for the contemporary Catholic apologist is:

a. if the Holy Spirit was guiding the Church into all truth in the Galileo affair, and
b. if the Earth revolves around the sun,

…then how could the Church have been led to make such a serious blunder, especially since the Church specifically stated in 1616 and 1633 that geocentric doctrine, because it came from divine revelation, was a “matter of faith”[20] and opposition to the Church’s decision constituted “formal heresy”?[21] Catholic apologists have agonized over this question for centuries. Unfortunately, almost all of them have tried to answer the dilemma by denying (a) and accepting (b). As even the secular historian Feyerabend surmises:



Under the strain of appearing entrenched in an archaic medieval mentality and obtuse to the modern world, it was only a matter of time before the Catholic Church would re-address the Galileo affair in hopes of reconciling what were presumed to be the facts of science with the Church’s official declarations about the truths of Scripture. Up to this time, no pope or council had even uttered the word “Galileo.” The first to break the taboo was Paul VI in a passing reference to Galileo (along with Michelangelo and Dante) in a June 10, 1965 speech at Pisa.

Twenty-five years later, Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was having second thoughts on the Galileo issue—serious second thoughts. His rethinking of the Galileo issue came out in a 1990 speech he gave in Parma, Italy, that had all the earmarks of trying to exonerate the Church and reverse course. Instead of seeing a crisis in the Church over Galileo, the title of his speech was, The Crisis of Faith in Science, thus pointing the finger directly at science. As Paul Feyerabend introduces Ratzinger’s speech:


As Ratzinger saw the situation now, it was completely different than it was in 1962 under the ‘Galileo mentality’ of the Vatican II prelature:


Ratzinger’s reasoning follows what most in science know today as the “general principle of relativity,” an offshoot of the former “Galilean relativity,” but which now applies to dynamics (gravity and inertial forces) instead of merely geometrics (Ptolemaic v. Copernican v. Tychonic kinematics). Ratzinger’s mention of the “presuppositions” of the heliocentric system refers, in the first place, to Isaac Newton’s presupposing the universe is “absolute,” that is, always the same, infinite and non-moving, and consequently, static and inert with regard to any effects on our solar system. If the universe was motionless and uninvolved in the mechanics of our solar system, consequently only the dynamic forces contained within the solar system could be employed to determine what body revolved around another. In that confined system, the Earth, being smaller than the sun, would necessarily revolve around the sun, according to Newton’s gravitational equation F = GM1m2/r2 and the force equation F = ma.[26] Since at this stage in history no one knew if or how the rest of the universe might affect our solar system, Newton’s “presupposition” that it was absolute and inert was taken as fact, at least for the next two hundred years until the arrival of Ernst Mach in the late 1800s and Einstein in the early 1900s.

On a lesser level, an absolute universe allowed Newton to define a straight line—a most vital component of his “laws of motion” outlined in his 1687 book, Principia Mathematica. A line could only be straight if the space within which it was drawn or travelling was absolute and did not curve or move. Accordingly, in positing the smaller body had to revolve around the larger, Newton said this difference occurred because the greater gravity of the larger body would pull on the smaller body, and the smaller body would resist, at least partially, by seeking to move away in a straight line, which resistance he called “inertia.” The result of the two vectors (i.e., gravity and inertia) would produce a curved path for the smaller body around the larger (although, more technically, both bodies moved around their mutual center of mass, but since the center of mass was very much closer to the sun, the result is the Earth revolving in a slight elliptical orbit around the sun). As Newton summed it up:


This little system seemed to work quite well and it seemed safe to assume that the universe and its stars had little to say about the solar system’s mechanics. As long as the universe is not included, Newton’s local laws of motion still work today, at least within a comfortable margin of error.

But then doubts about the validity of Newton’s “presupposition” began to haunt modern physics. Was Newton allowed to assume the universe was “absolute” and inert in regard to our solar system? What “law” said it had to be absolute? And what about this mysterious thing called “inertia” that supposedly makes a body move in a straight line? What is it, and where does it come from? Moreover, if space were not absolute but either moved or was curved, could we really say that a body in motion moves in a straight line? And what about all those stars in the universe? If our sun has gravity and pulls the Earth, would not trillions of stars and galaxies (which we were now able to see by powerful telescopes in the 1900s) have proportionately more gravity than our small sun and thus have some effect on our solar system?

All of these questions began to surface by the time of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein. As Ratzinger himself notes: “…an absolute space; that’s an opinion that, in any event, has been cancelled by the Theory of Relativity.” This is a very profound statement, especially coming from the Catholic Church’s prefect of doctrine. If Newton’s “absolute space” has been falsified, that means Newton’s whole system of mechanics has been upset, since all of it depended on space being absolute. This also means that the gravitational equation F = GM1m2/r2 and the force equation F = ma, since they are also dependent on there being an absolute space from which to measure both the forces and straight lines, are either in error or woefully incomplete.

Ernst Mach was the first to discover this conundrum of Newtonian theory. In brief, he said Newton had no right to assume the universe was absolute. Mach began from his insight into the tremendous effect the gravity of all the universe’s stars should have on our solar system. Whatever their combined force—even if it was neutral at the center—Mach said it was like a web surrounding our solar system such that “inertia” was the result of a body trying to move through the web. Essentially, the gravity web of the stars would prohibit a body from accelerating (i.e., prohibit it from gaining more speed than it already had). This was the beginning of the ‘general principle of relativity’ in which no body in the universe can be considered isolated from any other body but all move relative to each other, dynamically and kinematically. Whatever moved locally (e.g. the Earth around the sun; Jupiter’s moons around Jupiter) was also moving in relation to the rest of the universe.

In the final analysis, Mach came to two vital conclusions. The first dealt with the geometrics of the universe; the second with the dynamics:

Although in this treatise Mach does not himself adopt geocentrism, he repeatedly challenges modern science that geocentrism is not only a viable alternative, but it substantially answers the famous 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment—the experiment that forced a choice between a stationary Earth and the Special Theory of Relativity. Albert Michelson, having already been confronted by the 1871 experiment of George Biddell Airy that suggested the Earth was not moving in space, based his 1881 and 1887 experiments on the fact that if the Earth were moving around the sun, then a light beam discharged in the direction of the presumed revolution would necessarily experience resistance from the substance of space, which at that time everyone from Maxwell to Hertz understood as “ether” and which was the basis for both their electromagnetic equations. To his surprise, Michelson did not measure any appreciable resistance on the light beam.[30] If there was no resistance, then a possible interpretation is that the Earth is not revolving around the sun. But since Einstein and the rest of the world were now 400-years deep into Copernicanism, he was more or less forced to interpret Michelson’s results to mean there was no ether to create a resistance; and if there is no resistance, then light speed must be constant, both of which became the basis of his 1905 theory of Special Relativity.[31]

But thirty-eight years later (1925), Michelson did another experiment, but this time he sought to measure the Earth’s rotation rate instead of its revolution around the sun. He used the same scientific principle, namely, that a light beam going through ether should experience resistance against the direction of the Earth’s movement. Michelson could do so because he never accepted Einstein’s postulates nor that ether was non-existent. To his total surprise, and in total contrast to the 1887 results (which were null for a revolving Earth), this time, when measuring for a daily rotation, Michelson found his results were accurate to within 98%, thus confirming the presence of ether as well as a daily rotation, not to mention an apparent nullification of Special Relativity’s insistence on no ether and a constant speed of light.[32]

Using Mach’s relativistic terminology, the 1925 experiment thus confirmed, in terms of relative motion, that either the Earth was daily rotating in a fixed universe or the universe was rotating around a fixed Earth. It also revealed that although the empirical evidence from Michelson’s two interferometers (which was based on the same principle of light interference with ether), showed a relative daily rotation in 1925, it did not show an annual revolution of the Earth around the sun in 1887. The consequences of these two facts were not good for Copernicans. Since heliocentrism requires both an annual revolution and a daily rotation of the Earth; but geocentrism requires only a daily rotation of the universe around a fixed Earth, obviously Michelson’s experiments lent themselves to confirming the geocentric system and nullifying the heliocentric.

Not surprisingly, there is no admission of this fact in the physics literature. Those promoting Einstein excused themselves from Michelson’s 1925 results by claiming Special Relativity does not deal with non-inertial or accelerating frames (a rotating frame). But this excuse exposed the fact that Special Relativity was formerly used to explain Michelson’s 1887 experiment, even though a revolving Earth around the sun is also a non-inertial frame. In this case, what is good for the goose should also be good for the gander. But if Special Relativity was surrendered in the 1887 case, modern science would have no answer to Michelson’s experiment and the only option left would be a non-moving Earth—something no one was ready to accept, which allowed Special Relativity to remain king.

As for General Relativity, although it allows for the non-inertial rotational frame used in the 1925 experiment and does so by using multi-dimensional complex tensors in space-time and non-Euclidean geodesics, it wasn’t much of a physical explanation of the results as it was a mathematical one; and in any case, Occam’s razor favors the much simpler explanation, namely, that ether caused the speed of the light beam to change. But at this time in history, Copernicanism ruled with an iron hand and not even empirical evidence to the contrary would convince anyone the Earth was fixed in space, neither revolving nor rotating.[33] As Feyerabend notes:


In retrospect, after Mach turned the world upside down, both literally and figuratively, Einstein took it to the next step, but he knew there was no way to avoid Mach’s reasoning. If the universe is not absolute, that means it can move; and if it moves, it can rotate; and if it rotates it will do so around a fixed Earth. After all, this duality is precisely the nature of “relativity.” Hence we have either a rotating Earth in a fixed universe (ala Newton) or we must also allow a rotating universe around a fixed Earth (ala Mach, Einstein). The problem with relativity, of course, is that it can’t tell us which one is the reality, only that both systems can work by the laws of physics now known. But at least everyone agreed it was wrong for Newton to assume the universe was absolute and fixed, since his system would not allow the universe to rotate around a fixed Earth—in defiance of the laws of relativity. As such, Einstein said Newton’s system had a “defect.” This defect was spelled out in one of his most famous paragraphs on his theory of General Relativity:


Cardinal Bellarmine, more or less, used the same “relative motion” argument against Fr. Foscarini in 1615:


We see that even at this early time, the “relative motion” argument was in vogue, although neither side knew that relative motion incorporated dynamic forces. They only knew the geometry of relative motion.

Einstein mentions at least one of the dynamic forces as he notes “the existence of such centrifugal forces” in the previous paragraph. In another place, he mentions the Coriolis force in a June 25, 1913 letter to Ernst Mach:


What Einstein is saying is there are two basic forces generated from the angular momentum of a rotating universe, the centrifugal and the Coriolis forces. These two forces, in combination, will cause all the celestial bodies to revolve daily around the universe’s central axis. Although the centrifugal force makes the celestial bodies move outward, the Coriolis force, registering twice the power of the centrifugal, forces the bodies inward, and the result of the two unequal vectors will be a net centripetal force making all the celestial bodies circle the universe’s center of mass at their respective declinations and ascensions.[38] Moreover, a fixed Earth will necessarily share the same center of mass with the universe, and viola! we have Einstein’s alternative universe that is demanded by his General Relativity theory.

The problem with the Newtonians, however, was that they could not engage in a “relative motion” argument, since they had to insist on an absolute universe if their equations (F = GM1m2/r2 and F = ma) were going to pan out. But insisting on an absolute universe as the reality still meant they were required to answer how their equations would fit into a non-absolute world. After all, we see rotations and accelerations almost everywhere we look. What the Newtonians found was that if the system under observation is accelerating (i.e., rotating), the only way Newtonian mechanics could account for the acceleration was by mathematically adding in, by hand, the centrifugal and Coriolis forces. Modern science still does the same today when they send space probes to the planets. F = ma won’t work unless they add in the inertial forces.[39] The equation then becomes F = ma + centrifugal + Coriolis forces. This situation, again, tells us there is a defect in the Newtonian system. If the system claims it is comprehensive and is taking everything into account, then it shouldn’t need to add in foreign figures its original equations don’t include.

To be fair to Newton, he did at one point consider the viability of a system in which the Earth could be fixed and the sun and planets revolve around it. Newton said such a situation would require an “external force” outside the solar system that would offset the gravity of the sun. He writes:


At that time, and in the face of his insistence on an “absolute” universe, this was the best Newton could do. Hence it would never click in his mind that the very forces he relegated as “fictitious” (i.e., centrifugal, Coriolis) would become the very forces that are the essence of his “another force in addition” to gravity that would allow a Tychonic Earth-centered system.

Now that we know the science and its development from Newton to Einstein, we can sympathize with Cardinal Bellarmine in how he determined to deal with the Galileo affair. Since, as we noted, Bellarmine was aware of the “relative motion” argument and, unlike Newton and like Einstein, did not insist on an absolute universe but considered both a universe rotating around a fixed Earth and an Earth rotating within a fixed universe, how was he to choose between the two “relative” possibilities? There was only one solution. Hence Bellarmine would answer today as he did to Fr. Foscarini on April 12, 1615:


Reading between Bellarmine’s lines, Cardinal Ratzinger, as Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was saying the same to the people of Parma in 1990 that the Cardinal Inquisitor, Robert Bellarmine, said to his in 1615. By the “Theory of Relativity,” as Ratzinger put it, Newton’s system was abolished and with it his Copernican universe so that he could thus conclude, “Then as now, one can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile.” Ratzinger’s use of “Then” refers to the debate between Bellarmine and Galileo. Bellarmine knew instinctively the “relativity” issue would never allow Galileo to have proof of a moving Earth, and he also knew that “relativity” had no power over the consensual testimony of Catholic history. In the end, “relativity” was just an illusion, since everyone knew only one system could be the true system, which made the other merely an imposter who preyed on “relativity” to give it equal say.


The 1992 Papal Speech on Galileo

Two years later, John Paul II gave his “apologetic” speech to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1992, an attempt to mollify the Galileo problem that had hampered the Church for the last four centuries. Here a new twist in Galileo apologetics made its first appearance. The speech tried to lay the blame for the controversy on “the error of the theologians” in Galileo’s day. This was a subtle yet obvious attempt to insulate the 17th century popes and their Holy Office’s from blame. Five times the 1992 papal speech refers to these unidentified “theologians” as the cause for the controversy, pretending as if there was a stark difference between what the “theologians” were teaching in the 1600s and what the magisterium believed and defended. As Fr. Coyne puts it:

For example, in 1633 Galileo was told directly by Pope Urban VIII that his idea the Earth moved around the sun was, “an absurd proposition and false in philosophy and formally heretical,” to the point that he sought the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo Medici II, to help him silence Galileo a year before Galileo’s trial. After the trial, Urban sent letters to all the papal nuncios and universities of Europe requiring their acquiescence to the Vatican’s decree against Galileo. Over a period of six months, an intense correspondence took place between Urban VIII and the ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany, Francesco Niccolini. In it Urban details his outright rejection of Galileo’s “assault on Holy Scripture, religion, and Faith,” wherein Urban implored the Grand Duke to help in “shielding Catholicism from any danger” because “this work of his is indeed pernicious, and the matter more serious than his Highness thinks.”[46]


The Manipulation of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum

Of course, much consideration must be given to the fact that the 1992 papal speech was written by Cardinal Paul Poupard of France, a progressive theologian from one of the most liberal schools in Europe. Accordingly, at one point the speech says,

That is, the modern prelature’s belief that the “Copernican system” had long ago been proven correct became the basis for the content, or at least the interpretation of the content, of the Vatican II document, Dei Verbum, which outlined Scripture’s authority regarding our knowledge of the world. What we now know, however, is that discrete wording had been surreptitiously placed into Dei Verbum that would seemingly allow the liberals to claim the right to reject not only Scripture’s testimony against the “Copernican system,” but to reject the tradition and the 1616-1633 magisterium’s decisions as well.[50]

As noted, in 1962 Ratzinger believed one of Vatican II’s presumed responsibilities was to correct the so-called “errors” of the traditional Church. One of the foremost “errors”—the only error that received special mention in his 2013 papal farewell speech—was the Church’s decision against Galileo. Since Fr. Joseph Ratzinger was present at the Council in 1962 and personally knew many of its major participants, his inside knowledge of what we can now call the “Galileo mentality” of Vatican II, must be taken as a reliable testimony. Due to his unique witness, it may be safe to conclude that if the prelature of 1962 had not concluded the Church of 1616 made an “error” in the Galileo case, perhaps Vatican Council II may never have happened. It is an interesting question to ponder. Whatever the case, there is no denying the gauntlet had been thrown down. Either the 1616 Church was in error for condemning Galileo or Vatican II’s liberal prelature was in error for thinking the medieval Church was in error.

Interestingly enough, when it came time for the Vatican II peretti to follow through with their plans to exonerate Galileo and apologize for the Church, the documents of Vatican II presented nothing. Apparently, those who had wished to exonerate Galileo were stymied. The only statement that even touched upon science was a short paragraph in Gaudium et spes saying this:


As it stands, it appears the Holy Spirit played His part in curtailing the Church from going down the wrong path. What Ratzinger realized in 1990, namely, there was no way the Church could exonerate Galileo due to modern science’s advocacy of the ‘general principle of relativity,’ would stand in the way of anyone who desired to reject Scripture’s, tradition’s and the magisterium’s testimony on geocentrism. But the damage had already been done. By inserting ambiguous phrases in Vatican II’s documents, the liberals were ready to challenge every traditional interpretation that had been given to Scripture up to that time, and they would continue to use Galileo as their Poster Boy in the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond.

Adding to these breeches of protocol, six years later (1996) John Paul II made his infamous statement concerning the modern belief in evolution as being “more than a hypothesis.” At this point, popular science was not only in charge, they seemed to have put another nail into the Church’s coffin.

The upshot of this ecclesiastical history is to show that in the liberal revolution spawned after Vatican II, the presumed “defect” of the Church in its handling of the Galileo affair 350 years earlier played a large part in how the prelature and the pope viewed the universal Church overall. It was no longer considered the invincible and impregnable fortress it was in the past. A chink in the armor had been found in the case of Galileo and it seemed at the time there was no way to repair it except to admit defeat, for everyone “knew” the Earth revolved around the sun.

In this light, Archbishop Lefebvre referred frequently to the liberal revolution against Scripture as well. For liberals, Scripture is no longer considered comprehensive in its authority. The liberal byword is that Scripture is only authoritative, if that, when it “speaks about salvation,” which is the bastardized interpretation they forced on the ambiguous phrase, “for the sake of our salvation” in paragraph 11 of Dei Verbum.[52] Lefebvre writes:


And the books of Holy Writ? For the modernists, they are “the record of experiences undergone in a given religion.” God speaks through these books, but He is the God who is within us. The books are inspired rather as one speaks of poetic inspiration; inspiration is likened to the urgent need felt by the believer to communicate his faith in writing. The Bible is human work.

In Pierres Vivantes the children are told that Genesis is “a poem” written once upon a time by believers who “had reflected”. This compilation, imposed on all catechism children by the French episcopate, exhales modernism on nearly every page.[54]

But do not imagine that…they have an unlimited respect for the inspired text. They even dispute that it is inspired in its entirety: “What is there in the Gospel which is inspired? Only the truths that are necessary for our salvation.” In consequence, the miracles, the accounts of the Holy Childhood, the actions and conduct of Our Lord are relegated to the category of more or less legendary biography. We fought in the Council over that phrase: “Only the truths necessary for salvation.” There were some bishops in favour of reducing the historical authenticity of the Gospels, which shows the extent to which the clergy is corrupted by neo-Modernism. Catholics should not allow themselves to be imposed upon: the whole of the Gospel is inspired and those who wrote it had the Holy Spirit guiding their intelligence, so that the whole of it is the Word of God, Verbum Dei. It is not permissible to pick and choose and to say today: “We will take this part but we don’t want that part.” To choose is to be a heretic, according to the Greek derivation of that word.[55]

Lefebvre also spoke about how the liberals disregarded the tradition and philosophy of historic Catholicism:



Conclusion

I hope that this response to Fr. Robinson will help him and his many followers to realize that their progressive creationist position is incoherent, and that the only coherent interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is the one adopted by all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching—one that accepts the literal and obvious sense of all of the statements made by Moses in the “sacred history of Genesis” regarding the fiat creation of all things by God, for man, in the beginning of time, the cosmic catastrophe of the Fall, and the subsequent divine judgment upon the world at the time of the universal Flood. According to this authentic, traditional Catholic understanding of the sacred history of Genesis, the onus probandi, the “burden of proof,” remains on anyone who questions the literal and obvious sense of any of the historical statements made by Moses in Genesis 1-11, whether in regard to the timing of the creation period, the age of the universe, the position of the Earth in relation to the solar system, or anything else. The amazing reality is that at the dawn of the third millennium, there is more scientific evidence than ever before that confirms the literal truth of the sacred history of Genesis.[62] We hope that Fr. Robinson and his followers will acknowledge this and join us in seizing this heaven-sent opportunity to re-evangelize the whole world on the foundation of the Catholic doctrine of creation, the foundation of our Holy Catholic Faith.

Hugh Owen

I have from good source that the superiors of the SSPX asked for Fr. Rusak's review to be removed.