Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s shocking endorsement of Teilhard de Chardin

 

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Damien F. Mackey

“The whole world is ascending towards Christ the King, even the irresistible surge of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon and sun . . . His [Teilhard de Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain heaven through the fulfillment of earth. Christify matter”.

 Fulton J. Sheen

  

For some of my highly unfavourable views concerning père Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955), see e.g. my articles:

 

Teilhard de Charlatan

 

(5) Teilhard de Charlatan

 

Teilhard de Chardin a “giant gnostic snake”

 

(5) Teilhard de Chardin a "giant gnostic snake"

 

Teilhard de Chardin’s genocidal eugenics ideas

 

(5) Teilhard de Chardin's genocidal eugenics ideas

 

Reading Teilhard de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens

 

(5) Reading Teilhard de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens

 

Now, I was aware that Archbishop Fulton Sheen, about to be beatified (today, in fact, 24^th September, 2026) – and whom I have greatly admired for many years – had flirted with Teilhardianism.

 

Here the Kolbe Center recalls just how serious that regrettable situation was (September 19, 2026): Archbishop Sheen and the Teilhardian Deception – Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation

 

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

 

Pax Christi!

 

Our Lord Jesus Christ warned that toward the end of the world, many false prophets would arise and seduce many:

 

And then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come (Matthew 24:10-14).

 

This Thursday, September 24, Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Archbishop Sheen is rightly revered for the many contributions he made to the life of the Church, most especially through his promotion of daily Eucharistic Holy Hours for priests through retreats that he gave all over the world. For the honor and glory of God, however, we believe we are obliged to use this newsletter to show how even a man as gifted and devout as Venerable Archbishop Sheen was deceived by the arch-deceiver Satan through his chosen instrument, the anti-theologian Fr. Teilhard de Chardin—may God have mercy on him! We trust that the Venerable Archbishop would be the first to want us to bring his deception to light, as a warning to all of us to be on our guard against the seductive errors of theistic evolution.

 

The Young Fr. Fulton Sheen Rejects Theistic Evolution

 

Archbishop Sheen’s eventual embrace of Teilhardian errors is all the more astonishing in view of his earlier writings in which he thoroughly rejected them. As a young theologian, he wrote an extensive review of modern philosophy which had seen “the birth of a new notion of God”:

 

It is God in evolution . . . God is born by successive creations. As the world progresses, He progresses; as the world acquires perfection, He acquires perfection. [Moreover,] man is a necessary step in the evolution of God. Just as man came from the beast, God will come from man.

 

In one of his early works, Love One Another, Sheen mocked the notion that one could derive the great commandment of Christ to “Love one another as I have loved you” from an evolutionary struggle for existence over millions of years:

 

“Man came from the beast; therefore, he ought to love his fellowman.”

How silly that sounds! Everyone knows that the law of the survival of the fittest can never evolve into love, nor can the struggle for existence develop into human brotherhood. If we come from the beasts, then we may appropriately be expected to act like beasts.

 

After completing a 300-page survey of modern philosophy, the young Fr. Sheen concluded:

 

The wisdom of the ages and the epitome of our experience is given in the simple truth understood by the simple and forgotten by many a philosopher, that we are not “God-makers but God-made.”

 

Archbishop Sheen and “Evolution’s Greatest Triumph”

 

Archbishop Sheen’s “conversion” to theistic evolutionism must be understood as part of what the German anatomist and Darwinian apologist Ernst Haeckel called “evolution’s greatest triumph,” the conversion of the Catholic intellectual elite to the conviction that they had to reconcile the microbe-to-man evolutionary hypothesis with the Catholic Faith—in spite of the clear condemnation of the thesis that “evolution can be reconciled with Christian doctrine” by the Congregation of the Index in 1878, the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission upholding the special creation of Adam and Eve and the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-3, and the condemnation by Pope St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane in 1907 of the proposition that the condemnations of the Congregation of the Index could be taken lightly.

 

Darwin had argued that similarities in structure among diverse life forms proved that they had all evolved from a common ancestor. According to Haeckel, the existence of similarities in embryos of various kinds of organisms proved that the higher life forms “recapitulated” their evolutionary history before birth and that they had all descended from a common ancestor. To make this “proof” more compelling for his contemporaries, Haeckel doctored drawings of the embryos of fish, salamanders, chickens, turtles, rabbits, pigs, and human beings to exaggerate their similarities and minimize their differences. Although Haeckel’s fraud was discovered and exposed during his lifetime, the evolutionary hypothesis demanded common descent, and the concept of embryonic recapitulation continued to exert a profound influence on the study of embryology for many decades. In the United States, the renowned scholar Fr. John Augustine Zahm at Notre Dame University, devoted more pages of his influential book Evolution and Dogma to “embryonic recapitulation” than to any other “proof” for Darwin’s hypothesis.

 

When, on the centenary of the publication of Origin of Species in 1959, the world’s leading evolutionist scientist Sir Julian Huxley pontificated that “embryology” as displayed in Ernst Haeckel’s drawings provided “the most striking proof of evolution,” his evolution-believing colleagues had enjoyed control of almost all of the universities and research centers in the Western world for more than half a century. Yet “embryonic recapitulation” was, by his own admission, the best proof that they could come up with.

 

In 1950, Pope Pius XII in Humani generis had exhorted Catholic experts to “examine” the evidence for and against the evolutionary hypothesis, but it was apparent that hardly any Catholic scholars subjected Huxley’s pontifications to rigorous examination. For example, in Germany pro-abortion activists:

 

skillfully exploited the disunity of the German Catholic intellectuals to bring their demands for the legalization of abortion to the legislature. … Karl Rahner, who was in the forefront of the fight over [the loosening of] paragraph 218, wrote in Naturwissenschaft und Theologie (brochure 11, page 86, 1970):

 

“I think that there are biological developments which are pre-human, but these developments are still aimed in the direction of man. Why cannot these developments be transferred from phylogeny to ontogeny?” (emphasis added)

 

With these words, the most influential Catholic theologian in the German-speaking world formulated an Haeckelian evolutionary rationale for abortifacient contraception and abortion by affirming that human beings passed through all the stages of evolution in their mothers’ wombs. To this day, biology textbooks all over the world argue that similarities between embryos of fish, amphibians, reptiles, humans and lower mammals constitute evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. Typical of examples too many to cite is the caption that accompanies drawings of embryos of various life-forms from a widely used American biology textbook published in 2002. Entitled “Embryonic development of vertebrates,” it states:

 

Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether these characteristics are retained in the adult.

 

The statement gives the impression that human embryos—as members of the vertebrate phylum—possess gill slits. But this is patently false. The pharyngeal arches in human embryos have no connection with gill slits whatsoever but develop into the outer and middle ear, and into the neck bones, muscles, nerves, and glands. Moreover, after the discovery of DNA, confidence in the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis led many evolutionary biologists to predict that similar body parts in diverse organisms would be controlled by the same genes. This, however, proved to be false, as embryologists have discovered that the realization of the same body plan—such as five digit extremities—in diverse organisms (such as whales and humans) is controlled by different genes and is achieved through totally different embryonic pathways. In spite of the fact that the myth of “embryonic recapitulation” had no scientific basis, however, it would appear that Archbishop Sheen was as badly deceived as Fr. Rahner—because we find him eight years after Humani generis rhapsodizing confidently about Teilhard’s writings on the evolution of life from non-life:

 

For Teilhard there is a continuity between an animal seeking food and a magnet pointing to the north; between a male and a female uniting in the act of generation and two atoms uniting to form a chemical compound. The meaning is not the same in each instance, but there is more than a mere figure of speech in this unification. Atoms are not alive, it is true, but they have what might be called pre-life.

 

The Deadly Deception of Archbishop Sheen

 

Without knowing all the inner workings of Archbishop Sheen’s mind, it is easy to see that his conviction that molecules-to-man evolution was no longer an absurdity but a “fact of science” must have had terrible consequences. His apparent belief that the Church’s traditional doctrine of creation could be replaced by theistic evolution in light of the new “science” of evolution certainly helps to explain his enthusiasm for the ideas of John Courtney Murray at the Second Vatican Council and for the replacement of the traditional vision of a Church-centered Catholic society with the ideal of religious liberty as practiced in the United States.

 

In reality, it is no more possible to “evolve” the ideal of American-style religious liberty with its separation of Church and state from the traditional ideal of the Catholic union of Church and state than it would be to evolve the life of a one-celled organism from the “pre-life” of atomic particles.

 

Writing in 1967, Sheen echoed and embraced the Teilhardian vision of matter evolving to the Omega Point. He wrote:

 

The whole world is ascending towards Christ the King, even the irresistible surge of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon and sun . . . His [Teilhard de Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain heaven through the fulfillment of earth. Christify matter.

 

An elderly priest friend of mine whose life overlapped with Teilhard’s commented on Fr. Teilhard’s reputation for kindness, and it is true that a belief in the Christification of matter might motivate a person to show kindness to all people and to all things because of the divine element within all of them. But this is a false kindness if it fails to acknowledge the divinely-created hierarchy of goods in the universe—the transcendence of God; the creation of man in God’s image and likeness; man’s dominion over creation; the infinite superiority of supernatural goods to natural ones; and the moral imperative to do good and avoid evil.

 

In Teilhard’s system, as revealed in his pivotal spiritual experience as a young man, when he encountered “a presence” he described as “the combined essence of all good and all evil,” the divine energy drives all of the activity in the universe, thus making it impossible to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, the good and the evil, insofar as Teilhard’s divinity manifests through them all.

The conflation of the order of grace with the order of nature occupied so central a place in his “new Christianity” that the kindly Teilhard forgot his manners when Dietrich Von Hildebrand cited the writings of the Doctor of Grace, St. Augustine, against his evolutionary doctrine. “Don’t speak to me of that unfortunate man,” he protested violently. He “spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural.” True to their master, the Teilhardians of today find the “divine element” even in pagan religions and in immoral sexual behavior which objectively separates souls from communion with the living God. Yet Archbishop Sheen was so convinced of the fact of molecules-to-man evolution and of the credibility of Teilhard’s doctrine that he predicted the eventual elevation of Fr. Teilhard to the honors of a Doctor of the Church by 2017:

 

It is very likely that within 50 years when all the trivial, verbose disputes about the meaning of Teilhard’s ‘unfortunate’ vocabulary will have died away or have taken a secondary place, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century.

….

Finding that the Genesis Flood was not global

 

“And so to another question: where did the dove find a thriving olive tree if

“every hill” was covered? If the flood was local, the olive trees on the slopes

of Ararat may have been left undrowned. But if it were global,

would that have been possible?”.

 

Retired Baptist minister and Cambridge scholar, Rev Dr David Instone-Brewer, tells of his awakening to the likelihood that the Genesis Flood could not have been a global phenomenon:

Why Noah's flood may not have been global | Regular Columnists | Premier Christianity

 

Why Noah's flood may not have been global

By Rev Dr David Instone-Brewer 26 November 2021 ….

 

Was it a global flood, or local flood?

David Instone-Brewer explains why he (reluctantly) changed his mind

 

I’ve been getting a lot of heat online for saying something that I used to dismiss as heresy. Years ago, I rejected theories questioning a global flood, and then I became less certain. Lately, as I’ve looked much closer at the text, I can’t escape the evidence for a local flood. And it’s a problem. The worldwide flood in Genesis is so much part of our Church tradition that it’s hard to accept that the Bible may actually say something different.

_____

AMBIGUOUS

 

Some of the difficulty is due to ambiguities in the original Hebrew, which mean you can translate the text either way. But the recent surprise, for me, was discovering that it’s really very difficult to read the details of the text as a narrative about a worldwide flood.

 

Old Testament Hebrew has a vocabulary of only 8,000 words – far fewer than the English language – so words tend to have a wide range of meanings. In Genesis 6, where the story of the flood is told, the word eretz could mean ‘planet’ or ‘earth’, but more often means ‘land’ or ‘country’ – such as the “land of Havilah” near Eden in Genesis 2:11. Similarly, the word for ‘mountain’ (har) is also used for ‘hill’ – such as the hill that David stood on to address his men in 1 Samuel 26:13. So the text is ambiguous: it says either that the waters covered all the mountains of the planet or earth, or all the hills of the land or country.

 

If the flood was local, the ‘land’ would be Mesopotamia, which covered 140,000 square miles of the Tigris and Euphrates delta up to the Ararat mountains in the north.

 

Damien Mackey’s comment: The great Flood, though local, was far more extensive than just the ‘land of Mesopotamia’. See e.g. my article:

 

Genesis, Flood, Ark Mountain

 

(2) Genesis, Flood, Ark Mountain

 

Rev Dr David Instone-Brewer continues:

 

If this low-lying land had a flood 45ft higher than all of its hills (as described in Genesis), it would kill the entire civilisation. And there is evidence for this happening. Ancient Assyrian histories list their earliest kings as reigning “before the flood”, and archaeologists in the 1930s unearthed evidence of flooding in this region dated to about 3,000 BC, though detailed studies remain to be done.

 

Alternatively, the flood could have been worldwide. After all, in Genesis 7:19, it is described as covering all the land “under the entire heavens”. However, this same phrase is also used to describe how far the news of Israel’s invasion spread in Deuteronomy 2:25. Since that news certainly didn’t reach Australia, it must mean something like “beyond the horizon”.

________

FINDING ANSWERS

 

So far, in the narrative alone, we’re left without a definitive answer. But at Genesis 8:9, the ambiguities disappear. It says again that the waters were “over all the surface of the eretz”. But here, the context becomes key: this description is given four months after Noah saw the mountains of Ararat (v5), when the flood waters had been receding for over six months (vv3-6). This means that eretz, here, at least, cannot mean every mountain on the planet was submerged, because Noah had already seen Ararat. Therefore, it must mean “the land”, which stretched for thousands of square miles south of these mountains.

 

Another ambiguity in the Hebrew is whether the ark came to rest ‘among’ the mountains of Ararat or ‘on’ them (Genesis 8:4). However, we can again determine which it is from the details in the text. On its first flight, the dove couldn’t find anywhere to land (unlike the carrion-eating raven who’d have happily perched on a floating corpse).

 

At this point, the water had been receding for months and the ark had either stopped ‘among’ or ‘on’ the mountains (vv4-6). If it had stopped ‘on’ one of the mountains, it would now have been surrounded by dry land. But the dove was unable to reach land, so the ark must have stopped in the surrounding water ‘among’ the mountain range. It had been blown north by the strong wind (v1) and, a week later, it had drifted closer. The dove reached land and came back with a fresh olive leaf.

 

And so to another question: where did the dove find a thriving olive tree if “every hill” was covered? If the flood was local, the olive trees on the slopes of Ararat may have been left undrowned. But if it were global, would that have been possible?

 

________

ADDITONAL MIRACLES REQUIRES

 

The ancient rabbis believed in a worldwide flood, and they knew the Hebrew text. As olive growers, they knew these trees wouldn’t immediately revive after eleven months under water. But they reasoned that God had protected Israel – including the Mount of Olives. It doesn’t appear to have worried them that additional miracles would then have been necessary: a seawall as tall as Everest around Israel and a 2,000-mile flight by the dove. (Doves can fly up to 500 miles with training!) However, their assumptions are the only way I’ve found to successfully interpret the actual Hebrew text as a global flood.

 

The passage in 2 Peter 3:5-7 is often regarded as evidence of a global flood because it says this flood destroyed the ‘world’ (kosmos). But kosmos here cannot mean the whole earth because Peter contrasts it with the ‘earth’ (ge) which God created and will judge by fire. He is using kosmos in the New Testament sense of an evil world civilisation.

THE BIBLE MAKES IT PLAIN THAT THIS WAS A LOCAL FLOOD BUT IT SEEMS WRONG TO CHALLENGE WHAT THE CHURCH HAS TRADITIONALLY TAUGHT

 

So I’m left with a problem: the Bible text makes it plain that this was a local flood but, somehow, it seems wrong to challenge what the Church has traditionally taught simply because we now have more information. The Church has suffered so much incredulity and hostile ridicule about the global flood that backtracking now could leave us looking weak and cowardly.

 

And anyway, we’d have to remove the elephants and giraffes from the Noah’s ark under the Christmas tree! And who wants to do that?

 

The Magi and the Star that Stopped

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

The purpose of this article will be to identify Matthew 2’s “Star”.

 

Some might call it arrogance, while others might recognise it as a personal conviction that one’s well-researched conclusion is most definitely the correct one. Whatever about all that, the entertaining Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Catholic priest, author and lecturer, is utterly convinced that he has, after a long and serious probe into the matter, properly identified the enigmatic Magi of Matthew 2.

 

Fr. Dwight tells all about it in the following articles:

https://dwightlongenecker.com/the-myth-of-the-magi/

 

The Myth of the Magi

 

About this time in 2017 my book The Mystery of the Magi was published. I had high hopes for it. Of all my books it was the one I had spent the most time on. I had actually done something like RESEARCH believe it or not. I mean, the darn thing had footnotes and a bibliography!!!

 

Seriously, I had worked hard on the book and thought I had made some important discoveries about the historical basis of the Magi story in Matthew’s gospel. I hoped New Testament scholars and historians of the period might at least read it and that it might be critiqued and if I was wrong in my speculation, that the book would raise the issues of the possible historicity of the story of the wise men.

 

I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to dislodge centuries of myth about the magi.

 

Whoa! I hear you say, “Myth! Father, are you a liberal after all? You don’t believe the Bible? You think the Magi story is a myth?”

 

Yes and no and not quite so let me explain.

 

First of all, I don’t think Matthew’s account of the magi visiting Bethlehem is fiction.

 

I think the story is based in real events with real historical characters. 

 

However, I’m aware that most Biblical scholars think the whole thing is a fanciful fairy tale. In fact, thinking that the Magi story is a fairy tale is a kind of test of whether you are a serious Bible or scholar or not.

 

Raymond Brown admits it and even jokes about it in his big fat book The Infancy Narratives. 

 

I was told the same thing by several well known conservative Bible scholars–both Evangelical and Catholic.

 

“Whoa!” they said, “Don’t you know that if I even suggest that the Magi story might have some basis in historical truth I’ll be laughed out of my job and relegated to teaching Sunday School in North Dakota!” (no offense intended towards the good people of ND)

 

I had a conversation with one condescending scholar on the phone who said, “But you are beginning from entirely the wrong premise. There is no historical basis for the Magi story.”

 

“Uh. That is what my book is about. The historical basis for the magi story.”

 

“You don’t seem to understand. There is NO historical basis for the magi story.”

 

“No, YOU don’t seem to understand. That is what my book is about.”

 

The conversation ended.

 

So why do the scholars think the magi story has no historical basis? Because, of all the stories from the New Testament, the Magi story actually has become rather mythical, magical and mysterious. I explain in my book how the Magi story began to be elaborated by the Gnostic writers in the third and fourth centuries and beyond.

 

They were very influenced by Manicheanism, and with their emphasis on secret knowledge and magical lore, the magi story was tailor made.

 

The gnostic magi became the heroes of far out and fanciful gnostic apocryphal writings.

 

Soon they had names, they were kings and they followed a magical star and rode on camels on a long trek across the desert.

 

Add a few more centuries and a lot more story tellers and soon they came from India, China and Africa. One was old, one middle ages and one young. Then they represented the three main racial groups – African, Caucasian and Asian.

 

But none of that is in Matthew’s gospel. This mythical version became the received version and it is still the version we tell ourselves at Christmas.

 

In rejecting this elaborated mythical version, (which they were right to do) the scholars threw out the magi with the magic. They decided the magi story was nothing but a fanciful fable made up long after the birth of Christ by Christians who wanted make him seem more special.

 

In rejecting the myth they went ahead and created their own myth–the myth that the magi story can’t possible be historically true, and that myth is even harder to shift than a myth that is fanciful and magical.

 

So I decided to dig past all the myths and explore the culture, history, politics, geography and religion of first century Judea and Arabia. As I did the research I kept asking why nobody had done this before. What I was discovering was truly ground breaking and fascinating.

 

Then I realized, the reason no one had bothered to do the homework was because they all believed the myth.

The traditional folks continued to believe the myth about three wise men named Balthasar, Melchior and Caspar going on a long desert journey on camels following a magical star while the liberals continued to believe the myth that the whole thing was a myth.

 

Consequently neither side bothered to look into the question whether there might have been such characters and where they might have come from and why they might have been motivated to go on a quest to find a newborn King of the Jews

 

The result was The Mystery of the Magi. Most of those who read it thought highly of the book. Unfortunately many did not read it.

 

Why? Because they already figured that they knew about it already. In other words, they were not concerned with the Mystery of the Magi because they believed the Myth of the Magi.

 

….

November 30th, 2019 ….

 

Fr. Dwight will come to the conclusion that the Magi were wise Nabataean Arabs from the fabulous land of Petra:

https://stream.org/mystery-of-the-magi-solved-an-interview-with-fr-dwight-longenecker/

 

…. Matthew says they came “from the East.”

 

He was writing to the Jews in the area of Jerusalem-Judea. For them “the East” was the huge territory controlled by the Nabateans — present day Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, most of Iraq and Lebanon.

 

We know this was “the East” for them not only because that kingdom lies to the East of Judea, but also because in the Old Testament “the people of the East” most often refers to the various tribes of the Arabian peninsula.

 

….

The Stream: So who were the Nabateans? And why would they … or specifically, counselors to the Nabatean king … be interested in some Hebrew prophesy about a Messiah?

 

The Nabateans were a trading nation controlling the trade routes from Yemen across the Arabian desert to the Mediterranean port of Gaza and from Egypt North to Syria and beyond. Their capital of Petra was at the crossroads of these two important routes. They traded in luxury goods from India and China through Yemen and back with goods from across the Roman Empire. Gauze? It came from Gaza. Damask fabric? It came from Damascus.

 

The Nabatean culture at the time of Jesus’ birth was a blend of Abrahamic tribes that had wandered in the Arabian desert, immigrants from Babylon who occupied the Arabian peninsula and the influence of the Greeks. Petra was therefore a very cosmopolitan city with the traders bringing not only goods, but culture influences from the ancient world from China to Greece and Rome and from Africa North to Syria, Persia and present day Turkey.

 

As wise men they would have been astrologers, but also students of the prophecies from the different cultures — including the Jewish prophecies. At the downfall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., many Jews went into exile — not only to Babylon, but into the Babylonian controlled territory of Arabia. Some think the second portion of the book of Isaiah was actually written there, and this includes the important prophecy in chapter 60. ….

 

Were the Magi “enlightened pagans’’?

 

Although Biblical critics claim to find whom they call “enlightened pagans” all through the Bible (Old and New Testaments), I am not so sure that they always get this right.

I took a sample of such characters:

 

Melchizedek;

Rahab;

Ruth;

Achior;

Job;

 

and concluded - in some cases following other researchers - that none of these was in reality a pagan (Gentile). Keeping it very simple by way of summary here:

 

Melchizedek was, according to Jewish tradition, the great Shem, righteous son of Noah. Whilst that does not make him a Hebrew (Israelite/Jew), which tribal concepts did not exist at that early stage, he, truly blessed as he was (cf. Genesis 9:26-27), was not, as is commonly thought, an enlightened Canaanite (hence pagan) king.

 

Melchizedek was the eponymous Semite (Shem-ite), whose “slave” Canaan was (9:26).

 

Rahab the prostitute, in the Book of Judges, was truly enlightened (Hebrews 11:31): “By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient”, but she, actually Rachab, may need to be distinguished from (the differently named) Rahab of Matthew’s Genealogy of Jesus the Messiah (Matthew 1:5).

 

Ruth was a Moabite only geographically, but not ethnically, otherwise she would have encountered this ban from Deuteronomy 23:3-4:

 

No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the Assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor … to pronounce a curse on you.

 

Achior. The same comment would thus apply to Achior ‘the Ammonite’, presuming that he truly was an Ammonite.

He wasn’t. Achior needs some special extra treatment (see further on).

 

Job was, in my firm opinion, Tobias, the son of Tobit, a genuine Israelite from the tribe of Naphtali, in Ninevite captivity.

 

And I suspect, too, that others could be added to the list, as Israelites, not pagans.

The Magi, for one.

 

Delilah, a presumed Philistine. Whilst she may not deserve the epithet, “enlightened”, Delilah most probably was an Israelite - as convincingly explained by George Athas:

https://withmeagrepowers.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/samson-and-delilah-the-israelite-woman/

 

Achior, his conversion and circumcision

 

Various significant misconceptions abound about this important character, Achior. First of all, Achior of the Book of Judith (and the Douay’s Tobit) was not an Ammonite.

 

The Book of Judith, as we now have it, suffers from an unfortunate confusion of names (people and places), making it most difficult to make sense of it.

 

“… Achior, the leader of all the Ammonites” (Judith 5:5), should read, instead, “… Achior, leader of all the Elamites”. Not that Achior was ethnically an Elamite, but because king Esarhaddon had assigned him to govern Elam. For Achior was the same person as the famous Ahikar, governor of Elam, of whom the blind Tobit tells (2:10): “… Ahikar took care of me for two years before he went to Elymaïs [Elam]”.

 

To confuse matters even further, the Book of Judith has a gloss (1:6), in which Achior/ Ahikar is now called “Arioch”: “Rallying to [the king] were all who lived in the hill country, all who lived along the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Hydaspes, as well as Arioch, king of the Elamites …”. 

 

As noted further back, had Ruth been a Moabite, or Achior an Ammonite – as is commonly thought – then the Deuteronomical ban against these two nations (23:3-4) would disallow either from being received into the Assembly of Israel – which, in fact, Achior was, after the triumphant Judith had shown him the head of his Commander-in-chief, “Holofernes” (Judith 14:6-7, 10):

 

When [Achior] came and saw the head of Holofernes … he fell down on his face in a faint. When they raised him up he threw himself at Judith’s feet and did obeisance to her and said, ‘Blessed are you in every tent of Judah! In every nation those who hear your name will be alarmed’. 

….

When Achior saw all that the God of Israel had done, he believed firmly in God. So he was circumcised and joined the House of Israel, remaining so to this day.

 

The unfortunate misconception that Achior was an Ammonite, who would join the Assembly of Israel despite the Deuteronomical ban, is one of the primary reasons why the Jews (Protestants) did not accept the Book of Judith into their scriptural canons.

 

The confusion of names (people and places), as already mentioned, is another reason. But this, too, can be rectified.

 

Tobit himself tells us precisely who was this Ahikar (Achior) (Tobit 1:21-22):

 

But not forty days passed before two of Sennacherib’s sons killed him, and when they fled to the mountains of Ararat, his son Esarhaddon reigned after him. He appointed Ahikar, the son of my brother Hanael, over all the accounts of his kingdom, and he had authority over the entire administration. …. Now Ahikar was chief cupbearer, keeper of the signet, and in charge of administration and accounts under King Sennacherib of Assyria, so Esarhaddon appointed him as second-in-command. He was my nephew and so a close relative.

 

The Magi were genuine Israelites

 

Whilst I greatly enjoyed reading Fr. Dwight Longenecker, and I admire both his infectious enthusiasm and his genuine efforts to identify the Magi, my own tentative estimation is that they were - like those other alleged biblical “enlightened pagans” - true Israelites.

 

{A BIG correction needed: Actually I have had to re-write this article due to a geographical misconception under which I had formerly laboured. I had followed a somewhat thin tradition that the Magi were descendants of the righteous prophet Job – a view to which I still, in fact, adhere. But I, having failed to give full attention to the geography of the Book of Tobit, which - with Tobit’s son, Tobias, being my Job - provides the template for the geography of the Book of Job, had persisted with a strong tradition that Job’s dwelling place, “Uz”, was in the Hauran (Ausitis) region, and that this was “the East” from where I thought that the Magi had come. In the following article I have tried to correct this, having Job’s “Uz” in the Nineveh region where Tobias-Job had lived out nearly all of his life}:

 

Book of Tobit provides template for the geography of Job-Tobias

 

(4) Book of Tobit provides template for the geography of Job-Tobias

 

Previously I had written:

 

Fr. Dwight was right to look for a biblical East, rather than for a more global one, for the home of the Magi. We recall that he wrote:

 

Matthew says they came “from the East.” He was writing to the Jews in the area of Jerusalem-Judea. For them “the East” was the huge territory controlled by the Nabateans — present day Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, most of Iraq and Lebanon. We know this was “the East” for them not only because that kingdom lies to the East of Judea, but also because in the Old Testament “the people of the East” most often refers to the various tribes of the Arabian peninsula. ….

 

That, too, the biblical approach, is the one that I favour. ….

 

A tradition, referred to by the mystic, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, has the Magi descended from the prophet Job – an idea that appeals to me.

However, I have not yet been able to take this any further.

 

There are complications.

 

For one, I have reverted to the new idea that Job’s “land of Uz” could not have been in the Bashan-Hauran region, as previously I had thought, but that it must have been in the Nineveh region.

And I have fixed upon Alqosh, Alquš as Uz.

 

But it is also apparent from the Book of Tobit, that Tobias with his family (Job), lived out the final part of his life in Media, from where tradition has the Magi approximately hailing, anyway (Tobit 14:14): “He died in Ecbatana of Media …”.

 

There is another major complication.

The land of Media is no longer to be sought where we have all imagined it was, to the east of Nineveh. The Book of Tobit makes quite clear that, to reach Media, one must travel westwards, beyond the Tigris River, and beyond even Haran.

 

Royce Erickson has recently (2020) show, quite independently of all of this, that Elam, Media were situated in Anatolia:

 

A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY

 

(8) A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY

 

The holy Naphtalian descendants of Job patiently awaited the return of “His Star” (Matthew 2:2).

But how did they know that it was coming? And how did they know that it was “His”?

….

 

A key to this, and to the identification of the “Star” itself, may be Tobit 13.

Old Tobit (now dying), a possible ancestor of the Magi, proclaimed this to his son, Tobias (i.e. Job) (13:11-18):

 

A bright light will shine to all the remotest parts of the earth;
    many nations will come to you from far away,
the inhabitants of the ends of the earth to your holy name,
    bearing gifts in their hands for the King of heaven.

Generation after generation will give joyful praise in you;
    the name of the chosen city will endure forever.

Cursed are all who reject you
    and all who blaspheme you;
cursed are all who hate you
    and all who speak a harsh word against you;
cursed are all who conquer you
    and pull down your walls,
all who overthrow your towers
    and set your homes on fire.

But blessed forever will be all who build you up.

 

Rejoice, then, and exult over the children of the righteous,
    for they will all be gathered together
    and will bless the Lord of the ages.

Happy will be those who love you,
    and happy are those who will rejoice in your peace.
Happy also all people who grieve with you
    because of your afflictions,
for they will rejoice with you
    and witness all your joy forever.

 

My soul blesses the Lord, the great King,
for Jerusalem will be rebuilt as his House for all ages.

 

How happy I will be if a remnant of my descendants should survive
    to see your glory and acknowledge the King of heaven.

The gates of Jerusalem will be built with sapphire and emerald
    and all your walls with precious stones.
The towers of Jerusalem will be built with gold
    and their battlements with pure gold.
The streets of Jerusalem will be paved
    with ruby and with stones of Ophir.
The gates of Jerusalem will sing hymns of joy,
    and all her houses will cry, ‘Hallelujah!
Blessed be the God of Israel!’—
    and the blessed will bless the holy name forever and ever.”

 

Some time later, as the Temple about which Tobit spoke here was nearing completion, the motivating prophet Haggai will promise the return to the Temple of the Glory of the Lord, commonly known as Shekinah (a name that does not, however, appear in the Bible). Haggai announces (2:6-9):

 

This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this House with glory,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ‘The glory of this present House [Temple] will be greater than the glory of the former House,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘And in this place I will grant peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty.

 

His Star “Stopped”

 

What a contrast in attitudes (personalities?)!

Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s complete certainty that he has identified the Magi, and Matthew Erwin’s almost matter-of-fact right identification (so I think) of the “Star”.

 

Once again, as in the case of Fr. Dwight, the biblical approach is taken.

 

Previously I wrote regarding Matthew Erwin and his identification of the “Star”:

 

At last I have found an article that, for me, makes proper sense of the Nativity Star. Professor Matthew Ervin, in December 2013, explained it as the Glory of the Lord. He uses the word, Shekinah, which word, however, is not found in the Bible.

I would prefer:

 

Glory of the Lord (כְבוֹד יְהוָה), Chevod Yahweh (e.g. 2 Chronicles 7:1).

 

Matthew Ervin writes in a simple blog:

https://appleeye.org/2013/12/15/the-star-of-bethlehem-was-the-shechinah-glory/

 

The Star of Bethlehem Was the Shekinah Glory

….

Theories as to what the Star of Bethlehem was are myriad. The usual answers look to celestial objects ranging from real stars to comets. Indeed, the inquiry has been so wide sweeping that virtually every object appearing in the sky has been posited as the Bethlehem Star. However, when Scripture is examined the identity of the Star is evident. The Greek ἀστέρα or astera simply identifies a shining or gleaming object that is translated as star in Matthew 2:1-10.  

The magi specifically referred to it as, “His star” (v. 2). In addition, the behavior of this Star alone is enough to discount any natural stellar phenomenon. ….

 

If not a regular stellar object then what exactly was the Star of Bethlehem? The synoptic narrative in Luke’s Gospel provides an answer:

 

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 

Luke 2:8-9 (ESV)

 

The glory of the Lord here is a powerful example of the Shekinah Glory. 

 

This type of glory is a visible manifestation of God’s presence come to dwell among men. The Shekinah was often accompanied by a heavenly host (e.g. Ezek. 10:18-19) and so it was at the birth of Christ (Luke 10:13). The Shekinah Glory declared Messiah’s birth to the shepherds (Luke 2:8-11). The Star of Bethlehem likewise declared to the magi that Messiah had arrived (Matt. 2:9-10). No doubt this is because Matthew and Luke were describing the same brilliant light in their respective gospels.

 

Although the Shekinah takes on various appearances in Scripture, it often appears as something very bright. This includes but is not limited to a flaming sword (Gen. 3:24), a burning bush (Ex. 3:1-5; Deut. 33:16), a pillar of cloud and fire (Ex. 13:21-22), a cloud with lightning and fire (Ex. 19:16-20), God’s afterglow (His “back”) (Ex. 33:17-23), the transfiguration of Jesus (e.g. Matt. 17:1-8), fire (Acts 2:1-3), a light from heaven (e.g. Acts 9:3-8) and the lamp of New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:23-24).

 

It was the Shekinah Glory that dwelled in the Holy of Holies. It was last in Solomon’s temple but departed as seen by Ezekiel (Ezek. 9:3; 10:4-19; 11:22-23). Haggai prophesied that the Shekinah Glory would return to the temple in Israel and in a superior way (Hag. 2:3; 2:9). And yet it would seem that this never happened for the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. Perhaps though the Shekinah did return. The Star of Bethlehem was the Shekinah Glory declaring the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ and residing in His person. And why not?

 

The Messiah was prophesied to come as a star (Num. 24:17), and Jesus is called the, “bright morning star” (Rev. 22:16). ….

[End of quote]

 

The family of Job-Tobias knew, from what we now have written in Tobit 13, that the Glory of the Lord was going to return after the Exile.

 

And the prophet Haggai had advised the people, disappointed at the sight of the second Temple, that the Glory of the Lord would return to it.

 

And return again it did, with the Birth of Jesus Christ, the New Temple, who would render obsolete “the old stone Temple” (pope Benedict XVI).

 

In other words, the second Temple was only ever to be temporary, and would be dramatically replaced (destroyed even) by He who is the true Temple of God.

 

The Shepherds saw the Light at close hand and were able to go directly to the stable. For the Magi, the guiding Light conveniently stopped, just as the shining Cloud was wont to do during the Exodus (Numbers 9:17): “When the cloud moved from its place over the Tent, the Israelites moved, and wherever the cloud stopped, the Israelites camped”.

 

The Magi had long been expecting it. Their possible ancestor, Tobit, had foretold its return.

The prophet Haggai, had confirmed it some time later.

 

The Magi, who - as descendants of Job, as I think - were undoubtedly clever and educated, did not really need, though, to be able to read the heavens and constellations (as Job almost certainly could, Job 38:31-33) to identify the Star.

They were expecting it and they simply had to wait until they saw it.

 

This was a manifestation for Israel, to be understood by Israel, which is a solid reason why I think that the Magi must have been Israelites, not Gentiles.

 

The Nativity Star of relevance to Israel determined the ethnicity of Matthew’s Magi.

 

Child Jesus at Pontevedra stands on a luminous cloud

 

The resplendent Christ Child appeared again, with his holy Mother, at Pontevedra, Spain, 10^th December, 1925, likewise “elevated on a luminous cloud”.

We read about it at:

https://fatima.org/news-views/the-apparition-of-our-lady-and-the-child-jesus-at-pontevedra/

 

On July 13, 1917, Our Lady promised at Fatima:

 

“If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved … I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays.”

 

As Fatima scholar Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité tells us, this first secret of Our Lady “is a sure and easy way of tearing souls away from the danger of hell: first our own, then those of our neighbors, and even the souls of the greatest sinners, for the mercy and power of the Immaculate Heart of Mary are without limits.” ….

 

Circumstances of the Apparition ….

 

The promise of Our Lady to return was fulfilled in December 1925, when 18-year-old Lucia was a postulant at the Dorothean convent in Pontevedra, Spain. It was here, during an apparition of the Child Jesus and Our Lady, that She revealed the first part of God’s plan for the salvation of sinners: the reparatory Communion of the First Saturdays of the month. Lucia narrated what happened, speaking of herself in the third person – perhaps, in humility, to divert attention from her role in the event:

 

“On December 10, 1925, the Most Holy Virgin appeared to her [Lucia], and by Her side, elevated on a luminous cloud, was the Child Jesus.

 

The Most Holy Virgin rested Her hand on her shoulder, and as She did so, She showed her a heart encircled by thorns, which She was holding in Her other hand. At the same time, the Child said:

 

“‘Have compassion on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce It at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation to remove them.’

 

“Then the Most Holy Virgin said:

 

“‘Look, My daughter, at My Heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce Me at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude.

You at least try to console Me and announce in My name that I promise to assist at the moment of death, with all the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess … receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep Me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to Me.’”

 

The Great Promise and Its Conditions

As Fatima author, Mark Fellows, noted:

 

“The Blessed Virgin did more than ask for reparatory Communion and devotions on five First Saturdays: She promised Heaven to those who practiced this devotion sincerely and with a spirit of reparation. Those who wonder whether it is Mary’s place to promise eternal salvation to anyone forget one of Her illustrious titles: Mediatrix of all Graces.” ….

 

Our Lady promises the grace of final perseverance – the most sublime of all graces – to all those who devoutly practice this devotion. The disproportion between the little requested and the immense grace promised reveals the great power of intercession granted to the Blessed Virgin Mary for the salvation of souls. Furthermore, this promise also contains a missionary aspect. The devotion of reparation is recommended as a means of converting sinners in the greatest danger of being lost.

….

For more information, see The Magnificent Promise for the Five First Saturdays (Section III, pp. 8-16). ….

https://fatima.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/cr49.pdf