Adam and Eve in the Writings of the Mystical Saints and Doctors of the Church

Adam and Eve in the Writings of the Mystical Saints and Doctors of the Church

HUGH OWEN

NOTE: TCK DOES NOT HOLD THE CONCILIAR POPES AS "BLESSED NOR SAINTS"

This article is taken from the proceedings of the symposium ‘The Two Shall Become One’ held in Rome in September 2015, jointly sponsored by Human Life International and the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation.

Adam and Eve in the Writings of the Mystical Saints and Doctors of the Church

by Hugh Owen

Prophets of the Past

A prophet is one who speaks for God.  Thus, the prophets of Holy Scripture and, to a lesser degree, the saints and doctors of the Church whose mystical writings were found free from all error in faith and morals—all are witnesses to the Truth that comes from God—from God, who wants all men “to come to the knowledge of the Truth” that they might be saved.  This paper will examine the writings of Moses, the greatest of the prophets of the past, as well as the writings of other great mystical saints and doctors of the Church on the creation of Adam and Eve, to show that our loving Father has given us a continuous witness to the truth of the sacred history of Genesis and that it is the height of folly and ingratitude to argue as so many do today that God allowed His Church to believe and proclaim a false account of the origins of man and the universe for almost two thousand years, only to “enlighten” her to the truth of their origins through the speculations of godless men who hated the Church and wanted to destroy her. May the testimony of these holy witnesses shock us out of our timid submission to the wild conjectures of evolutionary speculation disguised as “science” and call us back to a proper reverence and submission to God’s revelation of what He did when there were no rational witnesses but the angelic choirs!

Moses: Prophet of the Past

For the Fathers of the Church, Moses was the prophet of the past who described what God showed him regarding the creation of the world. In the words of St. John Chrysostom:

All the other prophets spoke either of what was to occur after a long time or of what was about to happen then; but he, the blessed (Moses), who lived many generations after (the creation of the world), was vouchsafed by the guidance of the right hand of the Most High to utter what had been done by the Lord before his own birth.[1]

The greatest Fathers and Doctors of the Church concurred with St. John Chrysostom. St. Ambrose wrote that:

Moses spoke to God the Most High, not in a vision nor in dreams, but mouth to mouth (Numbers 12:6-8). Plainly and clearly, not by figures nor by riddles, there was bestowed on him the gift of the Divine presence. And so Moses opened his mouth and uttered what the Lord spoke within him, according to the promise He made to him when He directed him to go to King Pharaoh: “Go therefore and I will open thy mouth and instruct thee what thou shouldest speak” (Ex. 4:12). For, if he had already accepted from God what he should say concerning the liberation of the people, how much more should you accept what He should say concerning heaven? Therefore, “not in the persuasive words of wisdom,” not in philosophical fallacies, “but in demonstration of the Spirit and power” (1 Cor. 2:4), he has ventured to say as if he were a witness of the Divine work: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” [2]

St. Basil taught that Moses was:

The man who is made equal to the angels, being considered worthy of the sight of God face to face, [who] reports to us those things which he heard from God.[3]

St. John Chrysostom adds that:

It is for this reason that he begins to speak thus: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” as if calling out to us all with a loud voice: it is not by the instruction of men that I say this; He Who called them (heaven and earth) out of non-being into being – it is He Who has roused my tongue to relate of them. And therefore I entreat you, let us pay heed to these words as if we heard not Moses but the very Lord of the universe Who speaks through the tongue of Moses, and let us take leave for good of our own opinions.[4]

Unfortunately, with the evolution revolution of the nineteenth century, many Catholic scholars began to exalt the “opinions” of men above God’s revelation to Moses on the grounds that the young science of archaeology had proven that Moses could not have written or redacted the first five books of the Bible as the Fathers had believed.
The strongest “proof” that emerged from the excavations of nineteenth century archaeologists was negative. According to Julius Wellhausen, the absence of evidence of writing in the time of Moses contradicted the traditional Christian teaching that Moses had been the writer or redactor of the first five books of the Bible. If there was no writing in the time of Moses, Wellhausen reasoned, Moses could not have written anything. In addition, Wellhausen and his school pointed to other anomalies. The author(s) of the Pentateuch wrote of kings; but there were no kings in the time of Moses. The author(s) of Genesis described domesticated camels in the time of Abraham—but archaeology had not unearthed any evidence of camels having been domesticated in the time of Abraham. Moreover, the author of Exodus referred to Philistines in the time of Moses; but the Philistines were not a great military power in the time of Moses. Thus, it seemed clear to Wellhausen and to most of the intellectual elite of Europe and North America that Moses could not have been the author or editor of the first five books of the Bible.
Tragically, a host of Catholic scholars jumped on the Wellhausen bandwagon, forgetting that “absence of evidence” is not necessarily “evidence of absence.” Pope Leo XIII and Pope St. Pius X refused to abandon the traditional teaching of the Church on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, however; and, in 1906, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, then an arm of the Magisterium, formally upheld the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in an official decree  The wisdom of this decree was vindicated by subsequent archaeological discoveries which proved that writing had existed one thousand years before the time of Moses, that camels were domesticated in the time of Abraham, and that the Philistines truly existed in the time of Moses, though not as the great military power that they would become in the period of the Judges.
Moreover, as scholars studied the text of the Pentateuch more deeply, they discovered linguistic singularities that further confirmed the traditional teaching of the Church on the Mosaic authorship and redaction of these five books. It is now generally recognized that the first five books of the Bible—and only these books—contain what is called the “epicene personal pronoun,” a pronoun without a gender. For example, in the first prediction of the Messiah, in Genesis 3:15, God says to Satan, “I will put enmity between you and the Woman, and between your seed and her seed.” But does the text then say:  “He will crush your head,” “She will crush your head,” or “It will crush your head”? The use of the epicene personal pronoun keeps one from translating the text correctly, outside of the authentic tradition of the Church. And that is why St. Jerome was able to translate the pronoun correctly—“Ipsa conteret”—“She will crush your head,” a translation whose accuracy was later confirmed by the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe standing on the crescent moon, symbol of the serpent god Quetzacoatl, and by Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, who appeared to St. Catherine Laboure’ with the serpent-symbol of Satan beneath her feet. Further study of the Pentateuch also revealed that the text is full of Hebrew words that have been brought into Hebrew from the Egyptian language, words which appear nowhere else in the Old Testament.[5] Thus, the Wellhausen hypothesis which had taken most of academia by storm at the end of the nineteenth century proved to have been based on nothing more than speculation supported by a smattering of inconclusive evidence.

Teaching of the Church Fathers

The Magisterium of the Church responded to the storm of skeptical scientistic speculation at the end of the nineteenth century by reaffirming the importance of the patristic witness to the truth of God’s Word. Pope Leo XIII gave great praise to the early Fathers and Doctors of the Church in his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus:

[St. Irenaeus’s] teaching, and that of other holy fathers, is taken up by the Council of the Vatican [i.e.,Vatican Council 1], which in renewing the decree of Trent declares its “mind” to be this―that “in things of faith and morals, belonging to the building up of Christian doctrine, that is to be considered the true sense of Holy Scripture, which has been held by our Holy Mother the Church, whose place it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Scripture; and therefore, that it is permitted to no one to interpret Holy Scripture against such sense or also against the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.” [6]

From the time of the Fathers until now, God has also seen fit to give certain Fathers, Doctors, and great saints direct mystical knowledge of the first created world and of the early history of mankind. One such mystical doctor was St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) who saw in divine vision the original state of Adam and the first created world. He wrote:

God did not, as some people think, just give Paradise to our ancestors at the beginning, nor did He make only Paradise incorruptible. No! Instead, He did much more. Before Paradise He made the whole earth, the one we inhabit, and everything in it. Nor that alone, but He also in five days brought the heavens and all they contain into being. On the sixth day He made Adam and established him as lord and king of all visible creation. Neither Eve nor Paradise were yet created, but the whole world had been brought into being by God as one thing, as a kind of Paradise, at once incorruptible yet material and perceptible.[7]

According to St. Symeon, the original harmony and incorruptibility of the first created world was destroyed by the Original Sin of Adam which brought death and corruption into the whole universe:

It was . . . altogether fitting that Adam, who had been brought down to corruption and death by his own transgression, should inhabit an earth become in like manner transitory and mortal[8] . . . [But God] wills that creation serve [fallen] man for whom it was made, and like him become corruptible, so that when again man is renewed and becomes spiritual, incorruptible, and immortal, then creation, too, now subjected to the rebel by God’s command and made his slave, will be freed from its slavery and, together with man, be made new, and become incorruptible and wholly spiritual.[9]

Several other saints of the Byzantine tradition added their eyewitness testimony to the testimony of St. Symeon. St. Euphrosynus the Cook met a monk of his monastery in Paradise and allowed him to bring back three apples which were used for healing the sick. In the life of St. Andrew, the Fool for Christ of Constantinople, Nicephorus relates that St. Andrew was actually taken up into Paradise:

Once during a terrible winter when St. Andrew lay in a city street frozen and near death, he suddenly felt a warmth within him and beheld a splendid youth with a face shining like the sun, who conducted him to Paradise and the third heaven. “By God’s will I remained for two weeks in a sweet vision . . . I saw myself in a splendid and marvelous Paradise . . . In mind and heart I was astonished at the unutterable beauty of the Paradise of God, and I took sweet delight walking in it. There were a multitude of gardens there, filled with tall trees which, swaying in their tips, rejoiced my eyes, and from their branches there came forth a great fragrance . . . One cannot compare these trees in their beauty to any earthly tree . . . In these gardens there were innumerable birds with wings golden, snow-white, and of various colors. They sat on the branches of the trees of Paradise and sang so wondrously that from the sweetness of their singing I was beside myself . . .”[10]

In this way, the great mystical doctors and saints of the first millennium bore witness to the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11 and to the enduring existence of the original Paradise from which our first parents had been banished after the Original Sin. In the second millennium, God continued to enrich the Church with private revelations that gave the faithful an even deeper understanding of the sacred history of Genesis.

Prophets of the Second Millennium

St. Hildegard of Bingen

St. Hildegard was a twelfth century German Benedictine Abbess who possessed the gift of miracles and who received many prophetic insights into the Holy Scriptures. At the suggestion of her friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Hildegard’s private revelations were investigated by Pope Eugenius III who vouched for the authenticity of her gift of prophecy. On October 7, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared St. Hildegard a Doctor of the Church.
Many of St. Hildegard’s private revelations concern Creation and the Fall. In visions she was shown the fiat creation of all things exactly as Moses had described it in the book of Genesis:

By His word God commanded that the waters bring forth reptiles and birds with a living soul, like blossoms that sprout from the branches of trees. In the beginning God created the creatures, then He let them come forth from others. For He foresaw what would be necessary for survival for the entire order of creation[11] . . . God created only two of each species of creatures, one male and one female, which were already fertile in seed and later became scattered and reproduced across the earth. Of the trees and herbs He didn’t make two of each species, but several of a kind across the entire earth.[12]

According to St. Hildegard’s visions, as in the Mosaic account in Genesis, fiat creation of the various creatures culminated with the creation of Adam and Eve as the king and queen of the universe.

When God created Adam, divine radiance surrounded the clay substance of which he was formed. That way this lump of clay appeared on the outside as an outline of its parts, after its shape had been given to it, but inside it was hollow. Then, from the same mass of clay God created inside of the figure the heart, the liver, the lung, the stomach, the intestines, and the brain, as well as the eyes and the tongue together with all the remaining organs[13] . . . When he awoke afterward he was a prophet of heavenly things, knowledgeable of all powers of the creature and of all arts . . . God gave over to him all creatures, that he might make them his own by his manly power because he knew of them and about them. For man represents all creatures, and the breath of life, which never ceases to live, is in him.[14]

St. Hildegard’s vision of the creation of Eve confirmed the literal historical truth of the Mosaic account and testified to the distinct roles of man and woman from the beginning of creation:

After God had created Adam, Adam experienced a strong sense of love, when God sent sleep over him. And God created a figure to love for the man out of his rib, and so the woman is the love of man. As soon as the woman was shaped, God gave man the procreative instinct, so that through his love for the woman he would father sons. For when Adam saw Eve, he was completely filled with wisdom, because he saw in front of him the mother through whom he was to father sons. But when Eve saw Adam, she saw him as if she was seeing heaven, and as the soul lifts up desiring the heavenly, for her hope was resting in man. So also only mutual love and no other shall and may be between man and woman.[15]

Like Moses, St. Hildegard was shown that the work of creation was finished with the creation of Adam and Eve, thus making it impossible for natural scientists to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the same natural processes that are going on now. She writes:

The completion of the six different workdays, as described [above] is called the seventh day, since God had brought to completion all that He had prearranged for creation. And so He rested on the seventh day and stopped His work, because He had finished His work in every way. God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, since on it He refrained from every one of His works that He had planned. God blessed the seventh day with glory and sanctified it with the honor of a holy day, for in it lives all of creation which was created in well-rounded abundance .  .  .Therefore all hosts of angels and all hidden mysteries of divinity were praising their God for the completion of the work of God, for with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit He had completed all His work.[16]

The glory of the first created world shown to St. Hildegard in her visions contrasted violently with the darkness that covered the world after the Original Sin. She wrote that after Adam’s fall:

the elements were covered in complete darkness; while this lasted Adam was sent into exile. When he then saw the light of this world, he rejoiced, for he himself belonged to darkness, and in tears he said: I will have to live differently now, than God had bestowed upon me before! So he then began to work in sweat. Previously – before Adam and Eve had transgressed against the divine commandment, they had been shining with splendor like the sun and that light formed their clothing. After the transgression against the divine commandment they were no longer shining like they had been before, but had become dark and have remained in this darkness. When they saw that they were no longer shining in that way, they noticed that they were naked and covered themselves with leaves of a tree, as it is written.[17]

Since man rose up against God, creation which used to be submitted to him, now resisted him. And so all the elements, that had been resting in equilibrium up to then, rose up and became a terrible sight: Creation, which had been created to serve man, had felt no resistance whatsoever; but when man arrogantly fell into disobedience and refused to obey God, it [creation] too lost its equilibrium and fell into unrest. It has brought mankind many and great disadvantages . . .[18]

How perfectly the visions of this Doctor of the Church agree with God’s revelation to Moses! And how completely they contradict the evolutionary mythology that passes for a scientific account of the origins of man and the universe in so many Catholic universities today!

St. Bridget of Sweden

St. Bridget of Sweden was one of the most influential saints of the Middle Ages. Born to members of the Swedish aristocracy in 1302, St. Bridget married a prominent, devout landholder and bore him eight children. After her husband’s death, she consecrated herself to God and founded a religious congregation, the Bridgetines, whose constitutions were approved by the Pope eight years before her death, in 1370. She dedicated the last years of her life to Church reform and to the return of the Papacy to Rome from Avignon.
Throughout her life, St. Bridget was favored with private revelations, many of which were written down by her spiritual advisors. In his letter Spes Aedificandi Pope St. John Paul II wrote that “there is no doubt that the Church, which recognized Bridget’s holiness without ever pronouncing on her individual revelations, has accepted the overall authenticity of her interior experience.”[19] The Council of Basel in 1436 actually confirmed the orthodoxy of her revelations.
In Our Lord’s dialogues with St. Bridget, He reaffirmed and elaborated upon His revelations to Moses about Creation and the Fall, emphasizing the goodness of the original Creation before Original Sin and that the beauty of the first created world was a mere foreshadowing of the beauty of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Since God is eternal and timeless, all things were eternally known to him, before their existence in time. Then, when he willed them to be, they came to be with that exact perfection which suited their purpose. The divine wisdom of God willed all things to be what they are for his own honour and glory. He had no need of them; it was not to make up for any deficiency in himself—something wanting to his goodness or joy—there can be no defect or deficiency in God. It was his love, and his love alone, which led him to create; that there might be beings, apart from himself, whose existence should be an existence of joy, deriving from his own being an joy. All things, then, foreseen by God, and present to him eternally, though as yet uncreated, had already that design and perfection which they would possess when his creating brought them to be. One thing excelled all others, designed and perfected by God with a special joy. This was Mary, the Virgin who was a Mother, the Mother who was ever a Virgin.[20]

Thus did God confirm to his saints the teaching of the Fathers—that He created a perfectly good and beautiful world for us, marred only by our sin.

Venerable Maria of Agreda

The private revelations of the Franciscan Abbess, Venerable Maria of Agreda have been esteemed by many learned and holy souls, including Capuchin Father Venerable Solanus Casey who promoted Venerable Maria’s work, The Mystical City of God, throughout his life.
One of four children of well-to-do parents, Venerable Maria was born in Agreda, Spain, in 1602. When their children had reached a suitable age, Maria’s parents gave their entire estate to the Franciscan Order and founded the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in their family castle. Maria’s father and her two brothers became Franciscan monks, while Maria, her mother, and her only sister became Franciscan nuns. At the age of only 25, Maria was elected Abbess of the new foundation, an office she held for almost forty years, until her death in 1665.
Between 1620 and 1631, Venerable Maria asked Jesus to send her to the “most God-forsaken people on Earth,” and Our Lord answered her prayer by allowing her to bi-locate more than 500 times to the Indians of what is now the southwestern United States. Mother Maria proclaimed the Gospel to them, catechized them, and prepared them to go to the nearest missionaries to receive Holy Baptism. Venerable Maria also received visitations of her own from the Mother of God, at whose behest she wrote down the insights she received concerning the glories of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, her interior life, and her relations with the Most Holy Trinity.
These private revelations were eventually published and were esteemed by a great number of holy and learned men who found in them, among other things, a confirmation of the traditional Catholic interpretation of Genesis. In addition to practicing heroic virtue, out of his intimate union with Jesus, the “Apostle of Texas” Venerable Antonio Margil worked every kind of miracle that Our Lord Jesus Christ had worked when He walked the earth. He healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, bi-located, drove out demons, converted murderous pagans steeped in sorcery, read hearts, and excelled in prophecy—and every day he nourished his soul by reading a few pages of the Mystical City of God by Venerable Maria of Agreda!

The Immaculate Conception: A Second Moses

As noted above, the seventeenth century witnessed the dark dawn of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which Our Lord characterized to Venerable Maria as a time of darkness, ignorance, and guilt:

When the majority of mortals are sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness of their ignorance and guilt … when the wicked least deserve my mercy; in these predestined times, I wish to open a portal for the just ones through which they can find access to my mercy.[21]

It is significant that in addition to the rationalistic attempts of Descartes and other intellectuals to explain the origins of the universe in terms of the material processes they observed in nature, the false prophet Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) offered a mystical “confirmation” of their anti-Biblical ideas. As Fr. Sean Kopcynzki has noted:

The 16th Century German spiritualist Jacob Boehme, a Lutheran by profession, had various visions of the universe and how it came to be . . . Among other things, Boehme saw the world as the product of a gradual process or evolution . . . He also held the heretical notion that God would not be complete without His Creation. God needed to evolve too.[22]

Boehme was not alone in receiving mystical revelations favorable to an evolutionary account of the origins of the universe. In the early 1600’s, the French mathematical genius Rene’ Descartes attracted the attention of the holy Cardinal De Berulle who appealed to Descartes to put his talents at the service of the restoration of the Church in France. After dabbling in the occult, however, Descartes withdrew from the world and had, by his own account, three mystical dreams in which an “angel of truth” revealed a new philosophy that would revolutionize man’s thinking. Central to this new philosophy were Descarte’s “cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am”—which inverted the right metaphysical order of things and made thought prior in importance to being; the rejection of formal and final causes in the study of nature, in favor of exclusively material and efficient causes; and the rejection of fiat creation as the explanation for the origins of the different kinds of creatures in nature, in favor of naturalistic explanations drawn from the consideration of observable material processes in the present order of providence.
In opposition to these errors, Our Lord assured Maria that the heavens, the earth, and our first parents had all been created by fiat during the creation week, just as the Roman Martyrology declared.[23] According to Venerable Maria, the Blessed Virgin was shown the work of creation, as Moses had seen it long before. She saw that:

During the whole first week of the creation of the world and its contents Lucifer and the demons were occupied in machinations and projects of wickedness . . . On the first day, which corresponds to Sunday, were created the angels . . .[24]

Like St. Hildegard, Venerable Maria was shown what the Blessed Mother beheld—a complete and harmonious creation, produced by God’s fiat. According to Venerable Maria, the Mother of God received the same kind of infused knowledge of creatures that Adam and Eve had possessed before the Fall.

Having seen God in this vision She was immediately shown the works on the sixth day of the creation of the world. She witnessed, as if She Herself had been present, how at the command of the Lord the earth brought forth the living beings according to their kinds as Moses says (Gen 1, 24). Holy Scripture here refers to the terrestrial animals, which being more perfect than the fishes and birds in life and activity, are called by a name signifying the more important part of their nature. She saw and understood all the kinds and species of animals, which were created on this sixth day, and by what name they were called; some, beasts of burden, because they serve and assist man, others, wild beasts, as being more fierce and untamed; others, reptiles, because they do not raise themselves or very little from the earth. She knew and comprehended the qualities of all of them; their fury, their strength, the useful purposes which they serve, and all their distinctions and singularities. Over all these She was invested with dominion and they were commanded to obey Her. She could without opposition on their part have trodden upon asps and basilisks, for all would have meekly borne her heel.

As the “New Eve,” the Blessed Virgin possessed the same total dominion over corporeal and spiritual creatures that Adam and Eve had received at their creation. The Blessed Mother bore witness to the exalted character of Adam’s original human nature and told Venerable Maria that:

Adam in regard to the body was so like unto Christ that scarcely any difference existed. According to the soul, Adam was similar to Christ.  From Adam God formed Eve so similar to the Blessed Virgin, that she was like unto her in personal appearance and in figure.  God looked upon these two images of the great Originals with the highest pleasure and benevolence, and on account of the Originals He heaped many blessings upon them, as if He wanted to entertain Himself with them and their descendants until the time should arrive for forming Christ and Mary.[25]

What a scandal that so few Catholic young people are taught this truth today—that God created the world for us, in our first parents; that He placed “all things under our feet”; that Our first parents received the same kind of exalted human nature that Our Lord and the Blessed Mother had (and preserved intact) from the moment of their conception.

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich was born on September 8, 1774, in Flamske, in Westphalia, Germany, as the errors of the so-called Enlightenment began to sweep across the once-Christian countries of Europe, sowing seeds of doubt that soon produced a widespread denial of divine revelation, divine creation, and the reality of the spiritual world. From infancy, Blessed Anne experienced the presence of God, of angels, saints, and disembodied spirits, more vividly than most people experience the every-day world of clouds and trees. By bearing witness to these transcendent realities, she gave the lie to the skeptics, sophists, materialists and naturalists, who sought to reduce everything to matter and to the activity of natural causes.
From the first time she attended Holy Mass as a child, Blessed Anne had an infused understanding of Church Latin and a mystical knowledge of the mysteries that take place during the Holy Sacrifice. Discerning a call to religious life, she consecrated herself to God as a contemplative nun of the Augustinian Order, in Dulmen, Germany. As enlightenment philosophy took hold in the highest echelons of the German government, contemplative religious orders were suppressed—as “useless”!—and Blessed Anne was forced to leave the convent. By the age of 28, she began to bear the wounds of the Crown of Thorns, and spent most of the rest of her life in bed as a victim soul, eventually receiving the stigmata of Jesus, a cross on her heart, and the Lord’s lance-wound in her side. For the last several years of her life, Blessed Anne lived on the Holy Eucharist alone, offering herself as a “living Host” (cf. Romans 12:1-2) in reparation for the sins of the world.
Our Lord once told Blessed Anne that no other prophet had ever been shown a more complete vision of the mysteries of God’s providential action, past, present and future. As a confirmation of this extraordinary gift, Anne’s revelations led directly to the discovery of the ruins of the Blessed Mother’s home in Ephesus, in present-day Turkey. Blessed Anne’s friend and secretary, Clemens Brentano, recorded her descriptions of the home in Ephesus which St. John had built for the Blessed Virgin after they left Jerusalem.  Like all private revelations, those of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich are subject to error, and cannot be placed on anything like the same level as the inspired Word of God.  However, in spite of the human frailty of the author and of her secretary Clemens Brentano, the accuracy of Brentano’s transcription of Blessed Anne’s testimony can be inferred from the way that it was used by skeptical clergymen to discover and authenticate the ruins of Our Lady’s House in Ephesus.  One of them, the Lazarist Vincentian priest Fr. Jung, a teacher at the Sacred Heart College in Izmir in Turkey, initially regarded Blessed Anne’s writings as “girl’s dreams”; and his superior at the college, Fr. Eugene Poulin, shared his skepticism. In response to the persistent pleas of Sister Marie de Mandat-Grancey, Daughter of Charity (1837-1915), however, Fr. Poulin and Fr. Jung used Brentano’s transcription of Blessed Anne’s private revelations as a detailed map to find the exact location of the ruins of Our Lady’s House. The Archbishop of Izmir subsequently verified their findings and officially recognized the site as the home of the Blessed Virgin and St. John the Evangelist. Blessed Pope Paul VI, Pope St. John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI have all made pilgrimages to the shrine, which is one of the places in the Middle East where Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims worship side by side. [26]

Blessed Anne’s Biblical Revelations

During Blessed Anne’s lifetime, Enlightenment thinkers launched an all-out assault on the historical truth of Genesis and the Biblical history of the world. As the skeptics of her day embraced pagan conjectures regarding the origins of man, the Earth, and the universe, Blessed Anne, in her visions, saw Jesus conversing with the Jewish scholars of his time, defending the accuracy of the Mosaic account, and exposing serious errors in the Egyptian chronologies. She told Clemens Brentano:

… I beheld Jesus teaching at Aruma. Jesus, speaking before the Pharisees of the call of Abraham and his sojourn in Egypt, exposed the errors of the Egyptian calendar. He told them that the world had now existed 4028 years. When I heard Jesus say this, he was Himself 31 years old.[27]

As Kant, Lyell, Darwin, and their disciples won most of the European intelligentsia over to their naturalist creed—“things have always been the same from the beginning of creation”—Blessed Anne’s visions of the first created world and of the original holiness of Adam confirmed the radical difference between the original creation and the fallen world. Blessed Anne saw Adam created:

not in Paradise, but in the region in which Jerusalem was subsequently situated. I saw him come forth glittering and white from a mound of yellow earth, as if out of a mold. The sun was shining and I thought (I was only a child when I saw it) that the sunbeams drew Adam out of the hillock. He was, as it were, born of the virgin earth. God blessed the earth, and it became his mother. He did not instantly step forth from the earth. Some time elapsed before his appearance. He lay in the hillock on his left side, his arm thrown over his head, a light vapor covering him as with a veil. I saw a figure in his right side, and I became conscious that it was Eve, and that she would be drawn from him in Paradise by God. God called him. The hillock opened, and Adam stepped gently forth. There were no trees around, only little flowers. I had seen the animals also, coming forth from the earth in pure singleness, the females separate from the males.

And now I saw Adam borne up on high to a garden, to Paradise.  God led all the animals before him in Paradise, and he named them. They followed him and gamboled around him, for all things served him before he sinned. All that he named, afterward followed him to earth. Eve had not yet been formed from him.

I saw Adam in Paradise among the plants and flowers, and not far from the fountain that played in its center. He was awaking, as if from sleep. Although his person was more like to flesh than to spirit, yet he was dazzlingly white. He wondered at nothing, nor was he astonished at his own existence. He went around among the trees and animals, as if he were used to them all, like a man inspecting his fields.

Near the tree by the water arose a hill. On it I saw Adam reclining on his left side, his left hand under his cheek. God sent a deep sleep on him and he was rapt in vision. Then from his right side, from the same place in which the side of Jesus was opened by the lance, God drew Eve. I saw her small and delicate. But she quickly increased in size until full-grown. She was exquisitely beautiful. Were it not for the Fall, all would be born in the same way, in tranquil slumber.  The hill opened, and at Adam’s side arose a crystalline rock, formed apparently of precious stones. At Eve’s, lay a white valley covered with something like a fine white pollen.

When Eve had been formed, I saw that God gave something, or allowed something to flow upon Adam. It was as if there streamed from the Godhead, apparently in human form, currents of light from forehead, mouth, breast, and hands. They united into a globe of light, which entered Adam’s right side whence Eve had been taken. Adam alone received it. It was the germ of God’s blessing, which was threefold . . .

[Adam and Eve] were like two unspeakably noble and beautiful children, perfectly luminous, and clothed with beams of light as with a veil. From Adam’s mouth I saw issuing a broad stream of glittering light, and upon his forehead an expression of great majesty. Around his mouth played a sunbeam, but there was none around Eve’s. I saw Adam’s heart very much the same as in the men of the present day, but his breast was surrounded by rays of light. In the middle of his heart, I saw a sparkling halo of glory. In it was a tiny figure as if holding something in its hand. I think it symbolized the Third Person of the Godhead.[28]

According to Darwin, Lyell and their disciples, not only man but plants and animals of all kinds were the product of an evolutionary process. For them, a struggle for existence provided the impetus for the progressive improvement of living things, an improvement that placed any hope of perfection in the future. Their ignorance of the genetic mechanisms behind biological change kept them from recognizing the harmony between the Mosaic account of the decay of man and all living things from an original perfection and real-world observations in nature and in the laboratory.[29] In her visions, Blessed Anne saw the unspeakable beauty of the first-created world, and bore witness to the immaculate state of nature before the Original Sin:

Creation was not then as it is now. Plants and flowers and trees had other forms. They are wild and misshapen now compared with what they were, for all things are now thoroughly degenerate . . . Vegetation was luxuriant, perfectly green, of a species pure, sound, and exempt from decay. Nothing appeared to receive or to need the attention of an earthly gardener. I thought: How is it that all is so beautiful, since as yet there are no human beings! Ah! Sin has not yet entered. There has been no destruction, no rending asunder. All is sound, all is holy. As yet there has been no healing, no repairing. All is pure, nothing has needed purification . . .[30]

The Fall and Its Aftermath

The children of the Enlightenment based their rejection of Divine Revelation on a new faith in naturalism. It was more “reasonable,” they argued, with Descartes, that the same natural processes occurring today produced the present order of nature than that the creative action of God produced the order of nature in the beginning. It followed from this article of their creed that there had not been an original state of perfection in the beginning of creation. Instead of an exalted human nature, which fell into the present state of corruption through Original Sin, they imagined a primitive state, followed by a long history of progress, not through the assistance of God’s grace, but through man’s unaided efforts to acquire knowledge and to master the material world. From her bed of suffering, Blessed Anne gave the lie to these arrogant speculations by bearing witness to the violent contrast between the world before and after the Fall, as she beheld it in her visions. She told Brentano:

Adam and Eve before sin were very differently constituted from what we, poor, miserable creatures now are. With the reception of the forbidden fruit, they imbibed a material existence. Spirit became matter; flesh, an instrument, a vessel. At first they were one in God, they sought self in God; but afterward they stood apart from God in their own will. And this self-will is self-seeking, a lusting after sin and impurity. By eating the forbidden fruit, man turned away from his Creator. It was as if he drew creation into himself. All creative power, operations, and attributes, their commingling with one another and with all nature, became in man material things of different forms and functions.

Once man was endowed with kingship of nature, but now all in him has become nature. He is now one of its slaves, a master conquered and fettered. He must now struggle and fight with nature—but I cannot clearly express it. It was as if man once possessed all things in God, their Creator and their Center; but now he made himself their center, and they became his master. I saw the interior, the organs of man as if in the flesh, in corporeal, corruptible images of creatures as well as their relations with one another, from the stars down to the tiniest living thing. All exert an influence on man. He is connected with all of them; he must act and struggle against them, and from them suffer. But I cannot express it clearly since, I, too, am a member of the fallen race . . .

The first man was an image of God, he was like Heaven; all was one in him, all was one with him. His form was a reproduction of the Divine Prototype. He was destined to possess and to enjoy earth and all created things, but holding them from God and giving thanks for them. Man was, however, free; therefore was he subjected to trial, therefore was he forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. In the beginning, all was smooth and level. When the little mound, the shining hill upon which Adam stood arose, when the white blooming vale by which I saw Eve standing was hollowed out, the corruptor was near.

After the Fall, all was changed. All forms of creation were produced in self, dissipated in self. What had been one became many, creatures no longer looked to God alone, each was concentrated in self.

Mankind at first numbered two, then three, and at last they became innumerable. They had been images of God; but after the Fall, they became images of self, which images originated in sin. Sin placed them in communication with the fallen angels. They sought all their good in self and the creatures around them with all of whom the fallen angels had connection; and from that interminable blending, that sinking of his noble faculties in self and in fallen nature, sprang manifold wickedness and misery.[31]

While Enlightenment savants spun fantasies about man’s original happiness in a state of nature, Blessed Anne was shown heart-breaking visions of Adam and Eve’s misery in their fallen condition:

After some time, I saw Adam and Eve wandering about in great distress. They were no longer beaming with light, and they went about, one here, the other there, as if seeking something they had lost. They were ashamed of each other. Every step they took led them downward, as if the ground gave way beneath their feet.

They carried gloom wherever they went; the plants lost their bright colors and turned gray, and the animals fled before them. They sought large leaves and wove them into a cincture for their loins. They always wandered about separate.[32]

All God’s Works Are Perfect

Prior to the Original Sin, the Divine Will reigned unopposed in the material universe. Therefore, disorder, disintegration, and death had no place in God’s creation. For this reason, the survival of the fittest and random mutation cannot have been the mechanisms through which the various kinds of living things emerged from a primordial chaos. On the contrary, Jesus told Blessed Anne that the Fiat of Creation ordered everything and that all things emerged directly from his Fiat. If macro-evolutionary theory is true, God used disorder and death over billions of years—in the form of harmful mutations and the survival of the fittest—to instantiate the various forms of living things that He had conceived in his Mind. The faithful owe Blessed Anne a debt of gratitude for reminding us that prior to the Fall death and disorder had no place or point of entry into a world that was in perfect subjection to the Divine Will.
Accustomed as we are to reflecting on man’s relationship to God in the context of human history, we forget that the Divine Will operates very differently in the absence of sin. The Biblical record of man’s history since the Fall shows that God’s respect for human freedom leads Him to permit all kinds of temporary disorders, ugliness, falsehood, and delays in the fulfillment of his infallible plans. But we forget that these disorders and delays result solely and exclusively from the influence of man’s rebellious free will. None of them is directly attributable to the Divine Will. The Genesis account of creation demonstrates that in the absence of a rebellious human will, God’s Fiat acts immediately to produce works of perfect beauty, goodness, and order—such as the humanity of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Thus, the theistic evolutionists’ concept of a Divine Will acting through innumerable mutations and the survival of the fittest over billions of years prior to the creation of man contradicts the Church’s understanding of the perfections and operations of the Divine Will. Such a theory projects our experience of God’s action in a sinful world back into a period when the Divine Fiat acted unopposed.

Creation and Evolution: The Message of Our Lady of Fatima

According to Genesis One, as understood by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, God created a perfectly harmonious universe for man in the beginning, free from human death, and from all deformity and disease. As noted above, many great Doctors testified that the only thing more beautiful than the first created world when it came forth from God’s hands was the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
On October 13, 1917, the second greatest public miracle in history took place in Fatima, Portugal, before 70,000 witnesses. Author John Haffert described the miracle in this way:

A light was seen in the sky which looked like the sun. It was visible within a radius of more than twenty miles, clearly defined (hence not something seen through a fog or mist), whirled in the sky like a wheel of fire, threw off shafts of colored light which colored objects on the ground. After several minutes, it seemed suddenly to loose itself from the sky and to plummet toward the earth, causing the crowd to believe that the world was about to end. It was over in twelve minutes.

What distinguished this miracle from most other public miracles in the history of the Church was the fact that it was predicted months in advance. Three months prior to the Miracle, the Blessed Virgin Mary had made some remarkable statements to three young children—statements which the Miracle was meant to confirm. She told them that if men did not repent of their rebellion against God, a worse war than World War I would break out during the pontificate of a Pope named Pius XI, and Russia would spread her errors throughout the world. What many people do not realize is that the principal error of Russian Bolshevik communism—the main error which has spread from Russia throughout the world—is evolutionism.
The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladmir Lenin had been raised in a Christian home but lost his faith as a teenager and embraced evolutionary materialism. On his desk sat a sculpture of a chimpanzee sitting on a pile of books, including Darwin’s Origin of Species, contemplating a human skull. Lenin sat in the presence of that sculpture, overseeing the murders of millions of innocent people, all in the name of evolutionary progress. Lenin’s successor as communist dictator of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, also lost his faith in God as a seminarian after reading Darwin and Lyell and embracing evolutionism. He oversaw the murder of more than twenty million people—all in the name of evolutionary progress. When communism spread to China, Mao Tse Tung’s forces held compulsory seminars in every town they captured, not on the teachings of Marx, Lenin, or Mao—but in evolutionism—because, in the words of Passionist missionary bishop Cuthbert O’Gara, evolutionary theory could be used to destroy people’s faith in God, in the soul, and in the after-life, and communism could then take root in the minds of the people.
The evolutionary hypothesis provided a rationale for communist movements all over the world. It also provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the eugenics movement in the United States, Germany and elsewhere, leading to large numbers of compulsory sterilizations of “less fit” people. Evolutionary “science” was used to justify the work of the Birth Control League and the dismantling of taboos against any kind of sexual perversion—since evolutionary theory “proved” that humans are descended from sub-human primates and therefore what is natural for sub-human primates is also “natural” for humans. Evolutionary theory was used to justify genocide in the German colony of Namibia in the early twentieth century and to justify the ideology of the Nazi party which took power in Germany in 1933. Within Germany, evolutionary science was used to justify euthanasia of the “less fit” and the cruel medical experiments of Dr. Mengele upon living human beings, all designed to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak. According to Adolf Hitler, “the purpose of the Nazi Party” was to advance evolution.
How sad that so few Christian leaders had the courage and wisdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe who, even as Hitler took power in Germany, exposed the scientific fraud upon which the Fuhrer based his ideology:

I do not believe that the universe was formed by chance, out of just any sort of material, because up to now no machine has ever been able to put itself together by pure chance, not even a simple watch; still less is any machine capable of producing another like itself, while living beings have been reproducing themselves for thousands of years.[33]

I do not believe that chimpanzees or Darwin’s other little pets will ever rival us in building airplanes or producing other inventions, because among them we find no progress. After so many centuries they have not even succeeded in writing the modest history of monkeydom’s progress58 . . . This theory [of evolution] not only does not agree with the results of today’s experimental science, which is in constant progress, but in reality it contradicts these findings, as has been carefully documented.[34]

In 1937, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to four children in the German village of Heede, in the Diocese of Onasbruch. In 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland and the Nazis unleashed a brutal persecution of the Jews. According to Nazi evolutionary theory, Jews were the least highly evolved group of human beings; the Aryans, the highest. Therefore, it was an act of beneficence to humanity to exterminate the less fit so that the fittest could thrive. In his monastery at Niepokalonow, in Poland, St. Maximilian clung to the antiquated belief that all men are descendants of Adam and Eve. When members of his community asked him if they should give food to the Jews, St. Maximilian answered: “Yes, it is necessary to do this because all men are our brothers.'” St. Maximilian’s community sheltered 2000 Jews at Niepokalonow during the war. In 1941, Kolbe was arrested and eventually sent to Auschwitz. A year later, he gave his life in place of another inmate who had been condemned to death and died in a starvation bunker.
In 1945, the war ended and Our Lord Himself began appearing to the four children of Heede. The local bishop sent two very skeptical priests to investigate the apparitions, but to everyone’s surprise the priests became convinced of the authenticity of the apparitions and the text of Our Lord’s warnings was published with the imprimatur of the local bishop. To a nation and a world that had just reaped the consequences of putting evolutionary theory into practice, Jesus minced no words:

Humanity has not heeded My Blessed Mother, who appeared in Fatima . . . Now, I have come, in this last hour, to admonish the world . . . I am near. The earth will tremble and will suffer. It will be terrible. A minor judgment. For those who are not in the state of grace it will be frightful. The angels of my justice are now scattered all over the world. Men do not listen to my calls. They close their ears, resist My graces, and refuse My mercy, My love, and My merits. They will agonize in the blindness of their faults. Hatred and greed fill the hearts of men. All this is the work of Satan. The world sleeps in a dense darkness.

This generation deserves to be annihilated, but I desire to show Myself as merciful. Great and terrible things are being prepared. That which is about to happen is terrible, like nothing ever since the beginning of the world The Mother of God and the angels will intervene. Hell will believe that victory is theirs, but I will seize it from them. Many blaspheme Me and because of this I shall allow all kinds of misfortunes to rain down upon the earth for, through this, many will be saved.[35]

Our Lord said that “many blaspheme Me.” And what could be a greater blasphemy than “theistic evolution”? Denying God’s beautiful finished work of creation in the beginning, “theistic evolution” held Him responsible for millions of years of death, deformity and disease before Original Sin. Thus, evolution in its atheistic form turned men into demons; but “theistic” evolution made a demon out of God.

Our Lady of Fatima and the Prophets of Anti-Christ

“The Lord does nothing without telling His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). Thus did the prophet Amos guarantee that in every generation God would raise up prophets to interpret the “signs of the times” correctly. But St. Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians added that while God’s people should “despise not prophesy,” they should “test everything and hold fast” only to “what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22). To which St. John the Beloved added that we should “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).
The Magisterium of the Church has already ruled that St. Symeon the New Theologian, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bridget of Sweden, Venerable Maria of Agreda, and Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich were true prophets, the last of whom bore witness to the truth of the Mosaic account of creation and the early history of mankind in the face of Enlightenment skepticism that heaped scorn upon Divine Revelation. When the Queen of Prophets appeared at Fatima, she then warned of the errors of Russia which would spread throughout the world, the greatest of which, as shown above, was evolutionism, which in its atheistic form denied God’s existence and in its theistic form denied the perfect beauty, truth, and goodness of His character.

Teilhard de Chardin: A “New Christianity”

To those conversant with spiritual warfare, it is not surprising to learn that at the very moment that Our Lady warned the faithful against the “errors” of Russia, the same errors were being introduced surreptitiously into Catholic academia. Indeed, less than two years after the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, when the three child-seers had had their last public encounter with the Queen of Prophets, Teilhard de Chardin, the future prophet of a “new Christianity” centered on evolution, had a pivotal, life-changing mystical encounter with what he later called “the Thing.” Describing his experience in the third person, Chardin wrote that:

the Thing swooped down. . . Then, suddenly, a breath of scorching air passed his forehead, broke through the barrier of his closed eyelids, and penetrated his soul. The man felt he was ceasing to be merely himself; an irresistible rapture took possession of him as though all the sap of all living things, flowing at one and the same moment into the too narrow confines of his heart, was mightily refashioning the enfeebled fibers of his being . . . And at the same time the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed him, a confused feeling that the force which had swept down up him was equivocal, turbid, the combined essence of evil and goodness . . .

“You called me here: here I am” [said “the Thing”]. “Grown weary of abstractions, of attenuations, of the wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself against Reality entire and untamed . . . I was waiting for you in order to be made holy. And now I am established on you for life, or for death . . . He who has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn himself with me or save me with himself.”[36]

In the light of these revelations, it is not surprising to learn that Teilhard held that even “evil spiritual powers” are the “living instruments” of Christ.[37]  In the decades that followed, in his work as a paleontologist and theologian, Teilhard opposed every tenet of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation with a new tenet of a new evolutionary creed.
The Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching had all distinguished between God’s work of fiat creation and the natural order of providence which only began after the creation was finished with the creation of Adam and Eve. Teilhard asserted that the creation and providence had always been “fused” together.
The Magisterium had always held that the different kinds of creatures had been created by “fiat.” But Teilhard insisted that everything had come into existence through an evolutionary process.
The Magisterium had defined that Adam was created body and soul, and Eve from Adam’s side. But Teilhard asserted that human evolution was “an indubitable fact of modern science.”[38]
The Magisterium had taught that the first created world was complete and harmonious and that Original Sin brought human death, disease and deformity into the universe. But Teilhard protested that “[Original Sin] drags us back inexorably into the overpowering darkness of reparation and expiation.”[39]
In 1962, Cardinal Ottaviani, then head of the Holy Office, issued a monitum, stating that De Chardin’s books were full of “serious errors that offend Catholic doctrine” and warning all bishops and seminary rectors to keep his books out of their libraries and especially out of the hands of the young.[40] But De Chardin’s works exerted a powerful influence on the progressive bishops and their theological advisors throughout the Second Vatican Council. Historian Roberto De Mattei has noted that:

The discussion of schema XIII [Gaudium et Spes] revealed how strong Teilhard de Chardin’s infuence was on the council. The name of the French paleontologist frequently resounded in the hall. On October 22, Archbishop Hurley of Durban, saluted “the illustrious son of the Church, Teilhard de Chardin,” and compared his eschatology with that of St. Paul. On October 26, Bishop Otto Spulbeck, bishop of Meissen, stressed the great influence of Teilhard de Chardin on the modern scientific world . . .[41]

The final text of Gaudium et Spes strongly reflected Teilhard’s influence, going so far as to assert that:

the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic and evolutionary one[42] . . . Man is on the way to a more thorough development of his personality, and to a growing vindication of his own rights[43] . . . We are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility to his brothers and toward history.[44]

Monsignor Brunero Gherardini noted that Gaudium et spes:

(at 24/c) does not hesitate to affirm that man in terris sola creatura est quam Deus propter seipsam voluit [is the only creature on earth that God [willed] for itself]. Man is, then, the only creature created by God for itself. The metaphysical absurdity lies in the fact that, if God creates for someone or something outside himself, either God is, or God becomes himself subject to him or to it. In either case, since he remains conditioned to and by something, to and by someone outside himself, he neither is nor can call himself God: not Absolute, not Supreme Being, not Necessary distinct from anything contingent.

Furthermore, it should be noted that in the case in question we are dealing not only with a metaphysical absurdity, but with an internal contradiction as well: 24/c is in fact contradicted by 41/a, which reads, mysterium Dei, qui est ultimus finis hominis [the mystery of God, who is man’s ultimate end]: the ultimate end, beyond which there is absolutely no other, for God created for Himself everything, including man.. . . the Council Fathers, all of them, should have known the Bible and refrained from writing such and so serious a statement as that of “the only creature created for itself.” Propter seipsam—Proverbs 16 reads—operatus est Dominus (cf. Dt. 26:19) [God worked for Himself], only for Himself and the expansion of his eternal glory.[45]

The Pope had made clear that the Second Vatican Council was a pastoral council and that none of its pronouncements were infallible unless so stated—except for those that reaffirmed doctrines previously defined. A Preliminary Note was inserted before the text of Lumen gentium, which explained that:

In view of the conciliar practice and pastoral purpose of the present Council, the sacred Synod defines matters of faith and morals as binding on the Church only when the Synod itself openly declares so (emphasis added).[46]

No better example could be given of the necessity of this clarification than the Teilhardian propositions from Gaudium et Spes. How could the Catholic Church teach that the human race had “passed” from a “static concept of reality” to a “more . . . evolutionary one,” when the Magisterium had always taught that a natural law exists which flows from an unchanging human nature? How could “rights” be determined in an objective manner, when the “evolutionary concept of reality” rejects the very notion of an unchanging human nature? And how could the Church approve of the perverse notion that man is defined first by his responsibility to his brothers and toward history and not by his responsibility toward God, his Creator and Redeemer? Only by subordinating these statements to the prior infallible teaching of the Church on the nature of man and his relationship with God could these Teilhardian statements in Gaudium et Spes be prevented from sowing seeds of confusion and error in the minds of the faithful.

Theistic Evolution: The Religion of Antichrist

The fundamental difference between Teilhard de Chardin’s theistic evolutionary concept of god and the true Catholic doctrine on the divine nature is that the god of theistic evolution is not the perfect, transcendent, unchanging Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world. Instead, the god of evolution is identified with the world. Thus, the god of evolution did not create a perfectly harmonious world out of nothing for man in the beginning of time—nor did the character of that world change because of the Original Sin of Adam, requiring the transcendent God to assume a human nature and atone for the sins of the world. On the contrary, the god of theistic evolution intentionally uses demons, death, destruction, mutation, struggle for existence and extinctions to evolve his handiwork, providing the energy and intelligence to accomplish the biological “leaps” that undirected material processes cannot achieve. In the evolutionary view, as summarized by popular author Ken Wilber, Jesus is not the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity made man, but a “spiritual guide” who helps all human beings, without exception, to become sons and daughters of God. According to Wilber:

Jesus’ primary religious activity was to incarnate in and as his followers, in the manner, not of the only historical Son of God (a monstrous notion), but of a true spiritual Guide helping all to become sons and daughters of God . . . there are three essential strands as revealed in the Gnostic Gospels: 1) “Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the [highest] self and the divine are identical.” 2) “The ‘living Jesus’ of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance.” 3) “Jesus is presented not as Lord but as spiritual guide.”[47]

Catholic doctrine holds that God created a perfectly harmonious world for man in the beginning. According to theistic evolution, however, perfection has never existed in the past. Perfection lies at the “Omega point” in the future; and the god of evolution uses everything that happens to reach that “Omega point.” Catholic doctrine holds that man was created in the state of grace, sharing in God’s very own life, until sin separated Adam and Eve from God and deprived them of grace. However, in the theistic evolutionist system of Teilhard de Chardin:

grace represents a physical super-creation. It raises us a further rung on the ladder of cosmic evolution. In other words, the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological.[48]

One of Teilhard’s favorite themes was that the evolution of the individual man had come to an end and had given way to a collective evolution of mankind. According to Teilhard, this collective evolution requires the erection of some kind of global government that will guide mankind to its ltimate fulfillment. Both of these themes appear in Gaudium et Spes, which boldly asserted that the eradication of war:

requires the establishment of some universal public authority . . . endowed with the effective power to safeguard, on behalf of all, security, regard for justice and respect for rights.[49]

The traditional teaching of the Church has always been that the tranquility of order is achieved through the social reign of Christ the King, and not through merely human efforts or institutions. However, after Gaudium et Spes, Pope Paul VI hailed the United Nations as a the “last great hope for concord and peace” . . . and exhorted the world to “Let unanimous trust in this institution grow, let its authority increase . . . “[50]  Pope St. John Paul II reinforced this new attitude, expressing the “esteem of the Apostolic See and the Catholic Church for this institution” . . . and hailing the United Nations as “a great instrument for harmonizing and coordinating international life.”[51]
That the “coordination of international life” by the United Nations might not be favorable to the glory of God or to His Church has become increasingly apparent, as the various agencies of the United Nations use their moral authority and financial resources to advance the anti-culture of death, promoting godless sex education, sexual immorality, abortifacient contraception and abortion, while hailing as “rights” sins which cry out to heaven for vengeance and undermining traditional morality throughout the world. To make matters worse, the champions of global government have intensified their efforts to enforce these “rights” through an International Criminal Court which will have authority over the whole world.
Seemingly undeterred by the prospect of having abortion and other unnatural “rights” enforced on Catholic nations by the ICC, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations hailed the establishment of the Court as a substantial contribution to the “rights of all men and women”:

The creation of an International Criminal Court is a very important initiative which will touch upon the rights and lives of nations and communities . . . May almighty God bless our efforts so that future generations will look upon this Court as a substantial contribution to respect for law and for the rights of all men and women throughout the world.[52]

Theistic Evolution and the New World Order

According to Teilhard de Chardin, the evolution of consciousness and global government must be accompanied by a new religion that will bring all prior religions to their fulfillment. Teilhard even waxed poetic over the exciting evolutionary breakthroughs that could be achieved as man—dare we add, through his enlightened global government?—discovers how to manipulate his “biological” make-up to assist in his own evolution. Enraptured by the possibilities opened up by atomic fission and the detonation of the first atomic bomb, Teilhard asked:

Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in a series of fantastic events which, having afforded us access to the heart of the atom, would lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the many other strongholds which science is already besieging? The vitalization of matter by the creation of super-molecules. The remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones. Control of heredity and sex by manipulation of genes and chromosomes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psychoanalysis. The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable intellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass.[53]

In the fifty years since The Future of Mankind was published, the world has seen plenty of “remodeling of the human organism by means of hormones” in the form of birth control pills—resulting in the deaths of half a billion tiny children each year by conservative estimates, ten times the number of children murdered in surgical abortions. During the same period, the world has witnesses an orgy of “control of heredity and sex” not so much by the manipulation of genes as by the destruction of tens of millions of little girls (for the crime of being girls) and of children of both sexes for the crime of having some real or imagined genetic defect. And as to the “liberation of our souls” through “psychoanalysis,” there is no doubt that the psychologist and psychiatrist have replaced the priest and confessor as the liberators of souls, offering secular humanist counseling and drugs in place of Catholic teaching and the life-giving sacraments. Moreover, the fulfillment of Teilhard’s vision has been accomplished in large part through the work of that “last great hope for concord and peace,” the United Nations.

Towards the Omega Point

Since “the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological,” in Teilhard’s system, it is not a gift of participation in the divine nature, conferred upon our first parents at creation or restored to souls through baptism. It is a by-product of evolution. Even Christ is “saved by evolution” since His incarnation is a product of the same evolutionary process by which He, according to Teilhard, evolves the entire universe to its cosmic fulfillment. Indeed, in this system, even atheists participate in the evolutionary process which propels them along with adherents of the Catholic religion towards the “Omega point.” Of Marxism and Christianity, Teilhard wrote:

The two extremes confronting us at the moment, the Marxist and the Christian, each a convinced believer in his own particular doctrine . . . [must be] we must suppose, fundamentally inspired with an equal faith in Man . . . Is it not incontestable that despite all ideological differences they will eventually, in some manner, come together on the same summit? . . . for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge.[54]

This brand of Teilhardian theistic evolutionism has become the predominant religious belief of the champions of global government and a New World Order. Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber, a favorite of such globalist luminaries as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, has become one of the most widely translated academic authors in the United States by peddling an elaborated version of Teilhard’s theistic evolutionary religion. Wilber rejoices that Teilhard’s vision of the Omega point:

as a future attractor for present evolution—a notion borrowed from Schelling and Hegel—freed many Christians from the impossible mythic belief in a literal Garden of Eden and a morbid fixation (a Romantic death wish) to the long-deceased past.[55]

Wilber credits Teilhard with hastening the Western world’s acceptance of the most important shift in modern thought—from:

The idea of history as devolution (or Fall from God) . . . [to the idea] of history as evolution (or a growth toward God) . . . Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action, God in the making, and that making is destined to carry all of us straight to the Divine.[56]

The appeal of this way of thinking to powerful individuals and groups seeking a justification for harsh measures deemed necessary to hasten mankind’s “growth toward God” appears starkly in the statements of Adolf Eichmann at the end of his life. As Hitler’s choice to implement the “final solution” and eliminate as many Jews as possible, Eichmann was kidnapped from South America after the Second World War and taken to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity. As he awaited execution, he was interviewed several times by a Lutheran pastor who sought to reconcile him with God before his death. Eichman repeatedly dismissed the pastor’s call to faith and repentance, arguing that he believed in the god of evolution who had used millions of years of struggle for existence to evolve the first human beings. Rather than take responsibility for his part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Eichmann insisted that such actions were an inevitable part of the evolutionary process which would be overcome, not through repentance and conversion to a new life in Christ, but through evolution, which would gradually transform human nature, willy-nilly, over aeons of time.[57]
Reading the works of Wilber and his fellow travelers brings home how much the architects of the New World Order resemble Eichman and his Nazi colleagues in their willingness to use whatever means will achieve their evolutionary ends. The cooperation of Church leaders in the establishment of a godless global government supported by a Teilhardian one-world religion is suicidal; it shockingly demonstrates what Sister Lucia of Fatima referred to as the “diabolical disorientation” of our times.  To compare the sacred history of Genesis as viewed by the prophets of the past with the evolutionary fantasies of Teilhard de Chardin is to recognize that many Catholics have traded their birthright of Genesis truth for a mess of evolutionary pottage.
Having exchanged the truth for a lie, many of us have transferred our faith from God who cannot deceive or be deceived to fallible men who frequently deceive themselves even when they are not trying to deceive others.  In the process we have destroyed the faith of many of our young people.  Indeed, in many cases, their own Catholic teachers exhort them by word and example to put more trust in the speculations of godless men than in God’s Word as understood in His Church from the beginning, thus destroying their faith in the authority of God’s Word and of His Church.
Today, most of the Catholic communities in the West are in steep decline, convinced that “science” has “falsified” God’s revelation about how He created the universe, as it was understood in His Church from the beginning.  In most Catholic schools and universities Catholic young people are taught to scoff at the quaint myth that God created a perfectly complete, beautiful and harmonious world for our first parents, Adam and Eve, free from human death, deformity and disease—a world that was only marred by Original Sin and the subsequent sins of mankind.  Instead, they are taught that God used a process of hundreds of millions of years of death and destruction to evolve the bodies of the first human beings and then allowed His Church to teach a false account of the origins of man and the universe for almost two thousand years, finally enlightening her as to how He actually created the universe not by raising up Catholic saints and scholars to do the job, but by raising up godless men for that purpose who hated the Church and wanted to destroy her.
In light of this truly “diabolical disorientation,” it is hardly surprising that most of the Catholic communities in the West are now headed for extinction.  However, as the proceedings of this symposium amply demonstrate, God in His mercy has now given us the means to vindicate the sacred history of Genesis as never before and so to restore the foundations of the faith for the next generation.  The question is not, “How can we restore the foundations of the Faith?”—the question is, “Are we willing to die to human respect, forfeit the good opinion of the world, and use the means that God has given us to rebuild the ruined foundations of the Faith for our children and grandchildren?”
Through the prayers of Our Lady of Fatima, may God grant us the grace to say with Her:

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to Thy Word!”

[1] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, 2:2.
[2] St. Ambrose, Hexaemeron, 1:2.
[3] St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, 1:1.
[4] St. John Chysostom, Homilies on Genesis, 2:2.
[5] Cf. “Old Testament Studies: Reliability and Chronology: Egyptian Loan Words in the Pentateuch” http://oldtestamentstudies.datascenesdev.com/languages/loanwords.asp?item=8&variant=0 (accessed 1-31-15)
[6] Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus.
[7] St. Symeon the New Theologian, On the Mystical Life, Vol. 1, the Church and the Last Things (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladmir’s Seminary Press, 1995.
[8] Ibid, p. 28.
[9] Ibid, p. 29.
[10] Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, CA: St. Herman Brotherhood, 2000), p. 167.
[11] St. Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in an unpublished translation of Helmut Posch, Das wahre Weltbild nach Hildegard von Bingen (The Creation of the World According to Hildegard of Bingen) Deutsche Bibliothek (CIP – Einheitsaufnahme, Aufl. – A-4880 St. Georgen, 1998), translated by Gina O’Brien for the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation (Mt. Jackson, VA: 2009), p. 21/55.
[12] Ibid, 25/55.
[13] Ibid, 31/55.
[14] Ibid, 32/55.
[15] Ibid, 32/55.
[16] Ibid, 33/55.
[17] Ibid, 39/55.
[18] Ibid, 40/55.
[19] Pope St. John Paul II, Saint Bridget of Sweden, General Audience, October 27, 2010.
[20] Syon Abbey, Sunday, Week One, http://www.umilta.net/syon1.html, accessed 9/8/2015.
[21] Venerable Maria of Agreda, City of God, Volume I (Washington, NJ: AMI Press, 1996), pp. 32-33.
[22] Sean Kopczynski, C.P.M., Homily, Third Sunday after Epiphany, 2014.
[23] Theologians identify two forms of fiat creation, immediate and mediate. In immediate creation, God brings forth something from nothing without making use of any pre-existing material, as when He created the light on the first day of creation week. In mediate creation, God creates something by His divine power using some pre-existing material, as when He created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth on the sixth day of creation. God alone can produce something by mediate creation, because the matter that is used is entirely passive to the divine action; for example, there was nothing in the dust of the earth that had the potential to become the body of the first man without God’s divine creative action.
[24] Venerable Maria of Agreda, City of God, Volume I, “The Conception,” (Washington, NJ: Blue Army), p. 117.
[25] Venerable Maria of Agreda, City of God, Volume I, p. 127.
[26] Cf. Lorraine Fusaro, “Mary’s House and Sister Marie” with a foreword by Reverend Carl G. Schulte, C.M.  http://www.ephesustoursguide.com/ephesus/house-of-the-virgin-mary-ephesus  (accessed 9-14-15)
[27] Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, as recorded in the Journals of Clemens Brentano, arranged and edited by Carl E Schmoger CSSR, Vol 1 of 4, p.64.
[28] Ibid, Vol. 1, pp. 6-8.
[29] As demonstrated in Dr. John Sanford’s masterpiece, Genetic Entropy, genetic mutations destroy genetic information and build up relentlessly in the genomes of all complex organisms. This observation falsifies the evolutionist claim that mutation plus natural selection can produce new organs and functions in plants and animals and confirms the Biblical revelation that all things in nature have been subject to “bondage to decay” since the Original Sin of Adam (cf. Romans 8). Indeed, the evidence from genetics confirms that all complex organisms, including human beings, are not evolving to a higher level of function but degenerating through genetic mutation from an original state of genetic perfection. (Cf. J.C. Sanford, Genetic Entropy (FMS Publications, 2014).
[30] Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, op. cit., p. 5.
[31] Ibid, pp. 16-18.
[32] Ibid, pp. 24-25.
[33] St. Maximilian Kolbe, Mugenzai no Seibo no Kishi (October 1933), pp. 313-315.
[34] St. Maximilian Kolbe, Mugenzai no Seibo no Kishi (July 1934), pp. 194-197.
[35] Quoted in Desmond Birch, Trial, Tribulation, and Triumph (Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 388-389.
[36] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis Creation and Early Man (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), p. 580.
[37] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in Teilhardism and the New Religion, Wolfgang Smith (Rockford: TAN, 1988), p. 185.
[38] Ibid, p. 9.
[39] Ibid, p. 138.
[40] “Warning regarding the writings of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin,” Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, June 30, 1962.
[41] Roberto de Mattei. The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, p. 387.
[42] Gaudium et spes, 5.
[43] Gaudium et spes, 41.
[44] Gaudium et spes, 55.
[45] Brunero Gherardini, “The Anthropocentrism of Gaudium et spes” (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), translated and excerpted by Leonard Boyle from Il Vaticano II. Alle radici d’un equivoco [Vatican II: At the Roots of an Equivoque] (Torino: Lindau 2012), pp. 185-195.
[46] Walter M. Abbott, SJ, The Documents of Vatican II, p. 98.
[47] Ken Wilber, quoted in Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, CA: St. Herman Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 571-572.
[48] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, quoted in Teilhardism and the New Religion, Wolfgang Smith, p. 217.
[49] Gaudium et spes, 82.
[50] Blessed Pope Paul VI, Address to the United Nations, October 4, 1965.
[51] Pope St. John Paul II, Address to the United Nations, October 5, 1995.
[52] Renato Martino, Osservatore Romano, June 17, 1998.
[53] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 149.
[54] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pp. 198-199.
[55] K. Wilber, quoted in Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, CA: St. Herman Brotherhood, 2000), p. 565.
[56] K. Wilber, quoted in Seraphim Rose, op. cit., p. 562.
[57] William Hull, The Struggle for a Soul (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963).  Before his execution for implementing the “final solution,” Eichmann met fourteen times with Pastor William Hull and repeatedly professed his faith in evolution and in the natural evolution of man to a higher stage of development without supernatural grace or redemption.