January 2006
Evolving Into Atheism
THE EDITOR
Last October, to mark the 40th anniversary of Dei Verbum, the Vatican II discourse on Holy Scripture, the British episcopates released a joint offering titled The Gift of Scripture [TGS].
At the press conference launch, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow described it as a “teaching document [which] will both inform and encourage all those who wish to make scripture more central to the faith and devotional life of the Church.”
If only!
Strewn with liberal biblical presumptions, errors and clichés from start to finish, His Grace should rather have depicted this outrageous production as ‘a teaching document on how to deconstruct Holy Scripture according to the textbook tenets of Modernism, which will both misinform the faithful and corrupt the faith and devotional life of the Church.’
However, since the “diabolic disorientation” of our day prevents the Archbishop and his episcopal brethren from seeing this monumental betrayal for what it is, and since we can be sure that the open-and-shut Catholic case against their Modernist exegesis will be studiously ignored by the dilettantes (so-called biblical “experts”) who advise them, we urge readers to utilise the damning critiques which follow to alert unsuspecting Catholics to the truth about TGS at every opportunity. (Our March 2002 edition examining the postconciliar assault against traditional biblical teachings will also prove useful in this regard.)
Meanwhile, reignited by Cardinal Schönborn’s New York Times article last year [see CO Oct. 2005] the evolution controversy remains inseparable from the Modernist gutting of the Holy Bible in general and Genesis in particular. Indeed, as Pope St. Pius explained in Pascendi, evolution is the “general principle” and “chief doctrine” underlying the entire Modernist system: “To the laws of evolution everything is subject - dogma, Church worship, the Books we revere as Sacred, even faith itself.”
In that sense, Peter Wilders’ vital exposition of the capitulation of Catholic scholars to the pseudo-scientific theory of evolution is of a piece with the Sungenis and Grace critiques of TGS. Together they explain the unholy and catastrophic nexus between rejection of the traditional Catholic theology of creation and the universal embrace of rationalist biblical criticism.
Robert Sungenis truly states that the Western hierarchy’s repudiation of the inerrancy of Scripture, epitomised by the British bishops, rivals the hitherto unprecedented Arian crisis of the fourth century. Moreover, neo-conservative icons like Cardinal George Pell of Sydney are as culpable as the rest [see CO March 2002].
At the same time, unshakeable belief in evolution as a fact to be explained but not challenged now dominates the Church, epitomised by the Stalinesque Pontifical Academy of Sciences [PAS] which brooks no dissent on evolution-as-fact yet allows dissident doctrinal positions to be presented at its conferences with impunity. Hardly surprising, given the scandalous fact that most of the 80-90 PAS members are not even Catholics, and include infamous agnostics and atheists like Stephen Hawking!
As Australian author Gerry Keane explained in a devastating critique of the PAS delivered at the October 2004 Kolbe Center International Conference: “The obvious pro-evolution bias of the Academy has not only resulted in the exclusion from membership of Catholic scholars who oppose evolution, but has also brought debilitating doctrinal confusion within the true Church founded by Jesus Christ.” [see Daylight Summer 2005, journal of the Daylight Origins Society, 19 Francis Avenue, St. Albans, AL3 6BL, England]
Admittedly, so-called theistic evolutionists are not necessarily conscious biblical deconstructors. But at the very least they facilitate evolutionary Modernism and are thus complicit in the undermining of Holy Scripture and Divine Revelation. They count among those “unwary” fellow-travellers whose “thoughtlessness and imprudence,” St. Pius X declared, “have combined [with the Modernists] to generate a pestilence in the air which penetrates everywhere and spreads the contagion.” The end result of which liberal plague, the holy pontiff concluded, is not evolutionary ascent to religious perfection, but demonic descent to the denial of all religion:
The first step in this direction was taken by Protestantism; the second is made by Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism.