Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In this newsletter I would like to take note of the way that the sacred history of Genesis foreshadows the celibate priesthood, underscore the importance of the Eucharistic Sacrifice for the living and the dead in the light of God’s Genesis Revelation, and appeal to our readers for additional prayer and financial support—especially to readers who have benefitted from our work but who have not yet contributed financially to our mission.
The Sacrifice of St. Abel
In Cornelius a Lapide’s Commentary on Genesis, Chapter 4, which we hope to publish in English before Christmas along with the rest of his commentary on Chapters 4-10, Lapide explains that the celibate priesthood originated with St. Abel, the son of St. Adam and St. Eve. He writes:
That Abel remained and died a virgin, the Fathers commonly teach against Calvin: and they gather this from the fact that Scripture does not mention his wife and children, as it mentions the wife and children of Cain. Thus Saint Jerome, Basil, Ambrose, and others . . . Abel’s gifts pleased God because Abel himself pleased; for the old sacrifices did not please God ex opere operato, as the sacrifice of the new law pleases, but only ex opere operantis. [In other words, the sacrifices of the Old Law pleased God according to the holiness of the priest, whereas the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is pleasing God so long as the priest merely intends to do what the Church intends.] Hence Rupertus book 4, On Genesis, chapter 2, says thus: The Apostle says (Hebrews 11) that by faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, etc. By faith, he says, more excellent; for both offered equally in faith, or religion, and therefore both offered rightly, but not both divided rightly. For Cain when he offered his things to God, had kept himself for himself, having his heart placed in earthly desire. God does not accept such a portion, but says for himself (Proverbs 23) Son, give me your heart. Moreover Abel offering his heart first, then his possession, offered a more excellent victim through faith. This faith he explains chapter 4, where he teaches that Abel by this his sacrifice prefigured and preforeshadowed the sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist. Because truly, he says, the sacrifice which our Pontiff Jesus Christ instituted that night, although in outward appearance it is bread and wine, in truth it is the Lamb of God, the firstborn of all lambs or sheep, which pertain to the folds of heaven, to the pastures of paradise. Truly Saint Augustine (or whoever is the author, for this does not seem to be the work of Saint Augustine) book 1, On the Wonders of Sacred Scripture, chapter 3: Justice, he says, was threefold in Abel: First, virginity, by not generating; second, priesthood, by offering pleasing gifts to God; third; martyrdom, by shedding his own blood: to which the first figure of the Savior is granted to bear, who appears to be virgin, martyr and priest. And a little before: Abel, he says, prince of all human justice, at the very beginning of the world crowned with the triumph of his blood was snatched away by martyrdom. And immediately: To this Abel the Lord Jesus Christ committed the first-fruits of human justice, saying thus: From the blood of Abel the just unto the blood of Zacharias, Matthew 23. 35.
Faith and Sacrifice
A few months ago, our second largest benefactor, a resident of a faraway country, lost a loved one and seems to have fallen into a depression, discontinuing his substantial monthly donations to the Kolbe mission. In addition to recommending that he arrange the 30 Gregorian Masses for the repose of the soul of his beloved, I also urged him to continue his regular donations to the Kolbe Center on her behalf, as the propagation of the true doctrine of creation offers one of the best ways to lay the groundwork for a new evangelization of the modern world, duped and deceived by evolution-based secular humanism into embracing the diabolical anti-culture of death. In his Letter to the Hebrews, St. Paul teaches that:
Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not. For by this the ancients obtained a testimony. By faith we understand that the world was framed by the Word of God; that from invisible things visible things might be made. By faith Abel offered to God a sacrifice exceeding that of Cain, by which he obtained a testimony that he was just (Hebrews 11:1-4)
Is it not remarkable that the touchstone of faith offered by St. Paul in this passage is NOT faith in the Resurrection, as essential as that is to our Faith, but rather faith in the fiat creation of all things by the Word of God! Please join me in praying that our heartbroken benefactor will realize that by, first, having Gregorian Masses offered for his deceased beloved and, then, by fulfilling his pledge of support to the Kolbe Center in her honor, he will give great glory to God and do good to a great multitude of souls. Indeed, please join me in praying for a host of new benefactors who will help us to use the tools and talents that God has given us to rescue the current generation of young adults from the quicksand of evolution-based secular humanism and to set them of the Rock of God’s Revelation in the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
Martyrdom of the Seven Maccabees
In previous newsletters we have demonstrated that collective amnesia in regard to God’s creation revelation has been a problem for God’s people from the beginning. That is why God Himself wrote with “the finger of God” on tablets of stone that we must “remember” to keep the Sabbath holy because He created the heavens, the earth, the seas and all they contain in six days and consecrated the seventh day to Himself from the foundation of the world. We must “remember” because there is no obvious rhythm in nature that will remind us of what God revealed about when and over what period of time He created the world.
We have seen that one of the worst periods of collective amnesia took place during the several centuries between the reign of King Solomon and the reign of King Josiah by which time the civil and religious leaders of the Hebrew nation had actually “forgotten” Genesis so completely that the priest Hilkiah had to “rediscover” the original scrolls of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch by stumbling upon them in the process of cleaning up the Temple in Jerusalem. In spite of Josiah’s efforts to reform his kingdom and restore the memory of the sacred history of Genesis, however, the Scriptures indicate that the collective amnesia of the religious leadership in regard to Genesis continued unabated during the Exile in Babylon.
Living in exile in Babylon with her husband after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, Susanna was a chaste wife of spotless character who was falsely accused of committing adultery by corrupt judges after she refused to sin with them. Because the judges confirmed each other’s testimony, the people believed their accusations and they were preparing to stone Susanna to death when a teenager, St. Daniel, intervened and demanded an examination. As soon as the corrupt elders were forced to present their case against Susanna, their lies were exposed, and Susanna’s immaculate purity was vindicated before all the people.
Daniel Exposes the Wicked Elders
In a similar way, for the past 50 or 60 years, many of the leaders of the Church – whose job it is to preserve the Deposit of Faith in all of its purity as it was handed down from the Apostles – have allowed the wild conjectures of evolutionary pseudo-science to be used as a pretext to impugn the goodness of God’s original creation, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the infallibility of the Church’s authoritative teaching. In this crisis, it is mostly young men who have been blessed to receive a traditional Catholic formation from childhood who are now playing the part of St Daniel and examining the claims of their elders who have used the alleged “fact” of molecules to man evolution to mock and mythologize the sacred history of Genesis and to distort many doctrines derived from the first chapters of Genesis—especially those that pertain to Holy Marriage and sexual morality. These new “Daniels” do this in everyday interactions with fellow Catholics, by writing excellent articles in defense of the traditional doctrine of creation, and by producing the video series “Darwin’s Documentaries” to highlight the absurdity of the “scientific” claims of evolutionary apologists.
That collective amnesia in regard to Genesis continued for the entire period of the Exile finds confirmation in the fact that when the Persian King Cyrus gave Ezra and Nehemiah permission to return to Judah and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, their public reading of the Law—Genesis and the rest of the first five books of the Bible—was met with the same shock of unfamiliarity as the reading of the Law by King Josiah more than a hundred years before. It is also significant that the primary sin for which the people of Judah were moved to repentance by the reading of the Law was the sin of mixed marriage, a reminder that the forgetfulness of the sacred history of Genesis always leads to sins against marriage, sexual morality, and right religious worship as prescribed in the Third Commandment.
Two hundred years after the return of Ezra and Nehemiah, the restoration of right worship in the Temple continued under the holy High Priest Onias, but it is significant that the enemies of God’s People once again targeted the sabbath with their campaign to substitute the pagan cult of sports for the worship of God. The violation of the Sabbath led directly to the forced introduction of idolatrous worship in the Temple and throughout the Holy Land under Antiochus Epiphanes, which inspired the father of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers to rise up against the forces of Antiochus, to cleanse the Temple, and to restore the observance of the Law and the Sabbath throughout the land.
Judas Maccabeus Prays for the Dead who Compromised with Idolatry
Just as the righteous Susanna received instruction in Genesis and the Law from her righteous parents, so the Hebrews who participated in the Maccabean rising against the forerunners of Antichrist handed on the sacred history of Genesis and the Law to their children. The Holy Spirit saw fit to highlight this fact by preserving the account of the holy mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs in the Second Book of Maccabees in which the sacred history of Genesis figures prominently in the mother’s preparation of her son for martyrdom. She tells him:
I know not how you were formed in my womb; for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, He will restore to you again, in His mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of His laws. . . I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them, and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also (2 Maccabees 7:22-23 and 28).
With this testimony, the mother of the seven Maccabean martyrs confirmed that she had handed on the testimony of Genesis, as confirmed in the third Commandment of the Law, that God is the Creator of all things and that He has created them all from nothing, either immediately, like the angels and the light of the First Day of Creation, or mediately, like the body of Adam from the slime of the Earth, but in every case by His own divine power and not through any kind of natural process.
By contrast, by this time, throughout the Greek-speaking world whose boundaries had been so far extended by Alexander the Great, the evolutionary ideas of Greek philosophers, like Anaximander and Epicurus, had already conditioned many Greek intellectuals to believe in the evolution of all things from primitive matter, through millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that they could observe in the natural world. In the face of such pagan beliefs, the defenders of the true Faith of Abraham and Moses stood firm on the foundation of the sacred history of Genesis.
It is significant that one of the most important Scriptural testimonies to the practice of intercession for the dead in the Old Testament documents the severe consequences of abandoning God’s Genesis Creation Revelation for some kind of compromise with pagan idolatry. We read in 2 Maccabees that after Judas Maccabeus had been victorious over Gorgias and the Greek idolators, when Judas and his men went to bury the bodies of their comrades who had fallen in battle:
They found under the coats of the slain some of the donaries of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbiddeth to the Jews: so that all plainly saw, that for this cause they were slain. Then they all blessed the just judgment of the Lord, who had discovered the things that were hidden. And so betaking themselves to prayers, they besought him, that the sin which had been committed might be forgotten…And making a gathering, he [Judas] sent twelve [al. two] drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection (for if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead), and because he considered that they who had fallen asleep in godliness, had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins (2 Maccabees 12:40-46).
It is sobering to realize that by trying to mix their faith in the Law of God and His Genesis Revelation with a form of idolatry that assigned supernatural powers to creatures that belongs exclusively to our Creator God, the fallen soldiers merited the punishment of death—yet not without hope that, in the words of the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, “the sinners had nevertheless died in godliness” because “an opportunity for penance had intervened.”
“Memento Mori”
Not long ago, I became acquainted with members of an apostolate called My Catholic Will. From them I learned that one-half of all adults in the United States do not have a will in place. That is a frightening statistic, because without a will, we risk having our money and property go to the godless state rather than to our families and to the building up of the Kingdom of God.
To help our American readers to avoid this dangerous situation, we have partnered with My Catholic Will to make it easy for you to create a legally binding will at no cost to you. It is free, it is legal, and it is simple. And you can update your will at any time, should your plans change. Just go to this link to create your will for free in as little as 15 minutes. The traditional Catholics who established this apostolate have designed the website so that it takes into account the legal requirements of each and every one of the fifty states and makes it easy to request requiem Masses.
In view of the widespread abomination of “brain death” being used as the criterion for human death even in Catholic hospitals, My Catholic Will is working on providing legal safeguards in our wills so that we can be protected from being murdered for the sake of our organs. Until the appropriate language has been formulated, I encourage all of you to visit Dr. Paul Byrne’s Life Guardian Foundation website to learn how you can protect yourselves and your loved ones from this real and present danger.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost guide us all into all the Truth!
Yours in Christ through the Holy Theotokos, in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
Could you provide the link for the my Catholic will?