ROME (LifeSiteNews) — Hugh Owen, founder and director of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic organization that seeks to teach the traditional doctrine on creation, said that the culture of death would not be justified if evolution were exposed as the “pseudoscience that it is.” He also encouraged people not to worry about the crises in the Catholic Church, as private revelation says God will remedy them. Owen made his comments at the Rome Life Forum last month.
He began his talk addressing the Modernist heresy, identified and solemnly condemned by St. Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis and in the syllabus Lamentabili sane. Owen notes that the saintly pontiff saw that if the Modernists were to take control of the Church, they would destroy everything because they would claim that the liturgy, the Church’s laws on marriage, and the moral teachings of the Church should change because “we have evolved into a new situation.” Owen stated that Modernism spread everywhere because it claimed a “scientific foundation.”
Indeed, Owen continued, Catholic intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century ignored the ruling of the magisterium by attempting to reconcile Catholicism with evolution, pointing to the thought of German philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who falsely hypothesized that the human embryo “recapitulates all the stages of evolution in his mother’s womb.” Pius XII, meanwhile, taught in the encyclical Humani generis that the Bible’s account is accurate even when discussing historical events, including the events of Genesis, and granted only scholars the permission to “examine the evidence for and against the evolutionary hypothesis.”
And yet when Sir Julian Huxley, the foremost evolutionary scientist at the time, said in 1959 that Haeckel’s work showed that human embryology “gave the best proof” that a single-celled organism evolved to become a man, Catholic intellectuals demurred, Owen explained. As an example he cited Karl Rahner, who said as much in 1970.
“This was the moment when my father, Sir David Owen, retired from the [United Nations (U.N.)] to become the first secretary general of [the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)],” recalled Owen, referring to Rahner’s claims.
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“As IPPF changed its public position on abortion and began its campaign for abortion on demand, Catholic intellectuals like Father Rahner made IPPF’s job easy, as the abortion lobbyists could now say, ‘Your finest theologians recognize that evolution is a fact. How can you be so stupid as to think that something at the fish stage deserves all the rights of a fully developed human being?’”
Haeckel’s claims were discredited when photographs documenting human embryonic development proved the uniqueness of human embryology, as well as the uniqueness of every other species documented, which contradicted the predictions of the leading evolutionists, said Owen. He also asserted that “every element” of the culture of death can claim respectability because of the “so-called science of evolution.”
“There would be no rational justification for contraception, abortion, transgenderism, or homosexuality if evolution were exposed as the pseudoscience that it is,” Owen stated. “But to this day, most Catholic intellectuals ignore Pope Pius XII’s exhortation to examine its claims.”
Owen provided an example by examining the DNA structure of the human being. He recalled that during his time as a student at Princeton University, people thought that 98 percent of the human genome was “junk … left over” from evolution. Infamous atheist Richard Dawkins, he further recalled, made converts to atheism with this claim, and that most Catholic intellectuals either remained silent or agreed. Now, however, we know that these parts of the human genome once thought of as junk play a critical function in the adaptability of humans.
“No human being can create information at this level of density and complexity,” Owen said about DNA.
“And as famous plant geneticist Dr. [John] Sanford has demonstrated, information this dense and complex cannot be improved by mutations; it can only degenerate,” he continued. “Thus, we now know for certain that we are not evolving into supermen. We are devolving from an original state of perfection, just as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis.”
Indeed, Owen reminded the audience, God revealed that He created the world out of love and that when the world fell into sin, He entered the world, suffered, died, rose from the dead, and established the Catholic Church for us. God thereby invites us to become new creatures in Him, to cooperate with Him to restore the original beauty lost in the Fall, and to bring it to a more marvelous perfection at the end of time.
“Understanding that is what gives meaning to every human life, a meaning that the evolutionary account of origins destroys, thus clearing the way for the global anti culture of death,” Owen contended.
“My brothers and sisters, it is time to proclaim that the emperor of evolution has no clothes and to restore the traditional doctrine of creation as the foundation of our faith and the only firm foundation for a culture of life.”
After his talk, Owen directed people to the website for the Kolbe Center and the Foundations Restored documentary so they could learn how to defend the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation. He also noted that the Kolbe Center’s website offers free material and has short videos on the bottom of its home screen so people with little time could learn about the traditional doctrine. Speaking to Foundations Restored, he said that the series could be accessed based on what is affordable for the user.
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“Our experience has been all over the world that young people who receive this knowledge in their formative years, they do not join the mass exodus of young Catholics out of the Catholic Church,” he said. “Their foundation is shored up and they become very good Catholics, whether as priests, religious, mothers, fathers, whatever God calls them to do.”
Owen further directed people to the Christ the King Service Network, which he established to help unite apostolates and Catholic businesses to “work for greater unity and building up the kingdom of God” by giving the faithful a database of Catholic businesses worldwide for them to support.
He ended his remarks by exhorting his listeners to be hopeful, recalling that God told the prophet Amos that He does nothing without telling His prophets about it. With this in mind, he called to his audience’s mind the prophecies of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi and Blessed Elisabeth Canori Mora, who both saw that the Church would have to suffer great calamity before being freed from crises again.
“Both of these women, they were shown that after this terrible crisis in the Church, and all hell breaks loose, and God preserves those who have kept the faith, who have held on to the deposit of faith, they both were shown that St. Peter himself would come down to earth and would choose the Pope who will lead the restoration and also appoint the holy monarch when the Catholic monarchy is restored in France,” he said.
Quoting from the prophecies of Blessed Elisabeth Canori Mora, Owen told his listeners that St. Peter would come down from heaven and make the sign of the cross in the ground, and four trees would grow which the faithful would find shelter under in a time of crisis. In Owen’s view, these trees are the networks and communities in which people would persevere in the faith.
Concluding the reading, Owen recounted how Sts. Peter and Paul would protect the faithful from evil men who, with the devils, would devour each other, and that the angels would lead the faithful to Sts. Peter and Paul afterwards. The Pope appointed by St. Peter, meanwhile, would be recognized in every country as Christ’s Vicar and reorganize the whole Church. In this the Church would “recover Her primitive beauty” and the faithful would be “inflamed with new fervor.”
“That is the testimony of the true prophets,” he concluded. “We have nothing to fear if we remain faithful.”