“Once
the Kolbe Center embraces the idea that God Himself—through His Bible and His
Church—teaches that He created the universe fully formed in six, 24 hour days,
6000 years ago, with the Earth at the center of that universe, it becomes for
them
a
matter of Catholic orthodoxy to defend these positions. They insist that
Catholics must be convinced that they are falling into a Modernist trap if they
abandon
these
positions”.
St. Maximilian Kolbe’s
Disagreement with the Kolbe Center
St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Disagreement with
the Kolbe Center
August 29, 2018|Book review, Religion article
Introduction
The Kolbe Center designates itself as “a Catholic
apostolate dedicated to proclaiming the truth about the origins of man &
the universe”. That ‘truth’ amounts to a purportedly Catholic version of what
is really just modern Protestant creationism, the idea—more properly referred
to as ‘biblicism’—that God intended for the Bible to teach science through a
strictly literal interpretation of the Biblical text. This idea leads the Kolbe
Center to conclude that the Bible teaches geocentrism, a 6000 year age of the
universe, and a Deluge that covered the entire Earth, instead of a limited part
of it.
Since they insist that this is what the Bible teaches,
and the Bible is inerrant (as we all agree), they also conclude that this is
what the Church teaches.
This is where they go astray.
Since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus
Deus (1893), Catholic exegetes have abandoned the idea that the Bible
is meant to teach science, adding this principle to the age old Catholic
principle that the Bible must be reconciled with science, at least with settled
science. Pope Leo explicitly states that:
- Sacred
Scripture speaks in a popular language that describes physical things as
they appear to the senses, and so does not describe them with scientific
exactitude.
- The
Fathers of the Church were mistaken in some of their opinions about
questions of science.
- Catholics
are only obliged to follow the opinion of the Fathers when they were
unanimous on questions of faith and morals, where they did not err, and
not on questions of science, where they sometimes erred.
Notwithstanding the authority of this encyclical and
succeeding pre-Vatican II encyclicals on Scripture; notwithstanding the fact
that biblicism has never been a position of the Catholic Church, but rather has
its origins in Protestantism; notwithstanding the clear evidence that
pre-Vatican II Catholic exegetes, including those fully orthodox, did not
countenance the creationist position in their Scripture manuals and scholarly
Biblical journals—despite all this, the Kolbe Center claims that creationist
biblicism is the ‘traditional Catholic doctrine of creation’.
Defending Orthodoxy
Once the Kolbe Center embraces the idea that God
Himself—through His Bible and His Church—teaches that He created the universe
fully formed in six, 24 hour days, 6000 years ago, with the Earth at the center
of that universe, it becomes for them a matter of Catholic orthodoxy to defend
these positions. They insist that Catholics must be convinced that they are
falling into a Modernist trap if they abandon these positions.
This is why the Kolbe Center warns, in an article on
their website:
The argument is sometimes made that abusing
the literal meaning of Scripture has little effect on moral perspectives.
Whether creation or evolution is true, we are told, is a question to be
resolved by science, as it marches on, every day, in steady progress toward
improving the general welfare and standard of living. This modernist attitude
is refuted by the progressive and degenerative moral effect produced by
rejection of, first, geocentrism in the 17th century, then special creation in
the 19th century, and now the very existence of human life in the womb in the
20th. The theistic evolutionists and Scriptural revisionists have twisted the
literal meaning of Genesis to accept both biotic and cosmic evolution.
In this way, the acceptance of geocentrism and young
Earth creation is placed on the same level as the acceptance of life beginning
at the moment of conception.
Moreover, according to the Kolbe
Center, one capitulates to a plot of atheists when
one rejects geocentrism and young Earth creation:
Atheists understand that in order to replace
the Bible-based Christian worldview and system of morality, they need to
discredit the Church and the Bible. They do this by questioning the Genesis
account of Creation and the Fall, and the global Flood. One can even argue that
the effort to replace geocentrism with heliocentrism was more an attack on the
Church and the Bible than it was a scientific endeavor.
Additionally, the Kolbe Center strongly promotes the
book The Doctrines of Genesis 1-11 by Fr. Victor Warkluwiz. It
includes as doctrines of Genesis the following:
- God
created each thing in the world immediately.
- God
created the world in six natural days.
- God
created the world several thousand years ago.
- God
destroyed the world that was with a worldwide flood.
In this book, Fr. Warkluwiz also espouses geocentrism as
the “clear” teaching of the Bible.
The Realist Guide Review
The Church holds that the questions of the age and
development of the universe are not settled by the Bible, thus leaving these
questions to the investigations of science and leaving Catholics free to hold
their own opinions on those questions. In my own book, I demonstrate that the
Church binds her members to believe that God created the universe, that He
created our first parents directly, and that all human beings descend from Adam
and Eve.
It is my own opinion, expressed in The Realist
Guide to Religion and Science, that there is strong scientific
evidence for the Big Bang Theory and so for an ancient
universe, while there is strong scientific evidence against Darwinian
evolution, whether it be the development of life from non-life by purely
natural processes, or whether it be the development of more complex species
from less complex species by purely natural processes, what is known as
macroevolution.
In the terminology, this makes me a ‘progressive
creationist’, one who holds that there was a chemical and galactic development
of the universe over billions of years by means of the fine tuning that God
built into the universe, but that God Himself directly intervened, on multiple
occasions, to create biological life.
Because I hold this position, I came under fire in the
review of my book that appeared on the Kolbe Center
website in May. The reviewer was naturally
pleased at my strong criticism of Darwinian evolution, but was not surprisingly
displeased at other aspects of the book and attacked my orthodoxy, as follows:
“To deny the global Flood is essentially to
call Our Lord Jesus Christ a liar or mistaken about a fact of history.”
“The Bible explicitly says three times that
the earth does not move (Psalms 92:1, 95:10, and 103:5 DRB). It also
states three times that the world was created in six days (Gen. 1, Exodus 20:11
and 31:17) and the Genesis genealogies are given in exact years.”
“Fr. Robinson gives far too much credit to fallible human hypotheses in natural
science in thinking that geocentrism, a young earth, and a global Flood have
been disproven, contrary to the Bible.”
By making these statements, the reviewer is not only
calling into question my own orthodoxy as a Catholic priest, but also that of
many perfectly orthodox and much more illustrious figures of our Catholic past.
For the fact is that the standard pre-Vatican II and post-Providentissimus Deus
position of Catholics was to consider themselves completely free on these
questions. For instance, one example of a pre-Vatican II progressive
creationist can be provided in the figure of St. Maximilian Kolbe.
St. Maximilian & cosmic evolution
The Kolbe Center provides seven reasons for choosing St. Maximilian Kolbe as its patron saint, one of them
being that he “did not subscribe to theistic evolutionism or to long ages”. It
is important to note that they count ‘progressive creationism’ as a form of
‘theistic evolutionism’, as may be seen in the review of The Realist
Guide:
Fr. Robinson takes the position of
progressive creation, which is a form of theistic evolution.
To discover St. Maximilian’s views on subjects of natural
science, one may profitably consult the two volume The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, released in
English in 2016. While I did not find anything in these volumes that refers to
his position on the extent of the Flood, his position on the other matters are
made quite clear.
The helpful index at the conclusion of the second volume
has four entries for the topic “Evolutionism/Evolution”, of which n.1186
perhaps contains St. Maximilian’s clearest statement on that topic:
I am not able to believe that man is a
perfected ape. We are dealing here with the problem of evolutionism. One
hundred and twenty years ago, there was no theory more diffused among the
people than evolution. A whole mountain of critical essays has been published
in this regard, but the more books are written, the more the problem persists.
This theory not only does not accord with the findings of contemporary
experimental sciences, which are in continuous development, but they even
contradict them, as has been accurately ascertained.
What is notable about this passage is not just that St.
Maximilian rejects Darwinian evolution, as I do, on the basis of scientific
evidence, but also that he does not have recourse to Scripture or theology in
refuting it, knowing that it is not a question for theology. In n.1124, he even
states that, if evolution were true, it would still have to come from God:
Even if we amuse ourselves by being
evolutionists and proclaim that all of this has developed from a certain
primitive material, the same question would still apply. Who gave life to this
matter? And who, with such wisdom, has endowed it with movement, so that after
so many years, during which several changes have taken place, could implement
the intended purpose? Well, this mind, which is guided by such intelligence, we
call God.
On the questions of heliocentrism and the age of the
universe, there
is a text by St. Maximilian, n.1201, that could not make
his position clearer: he accepted the standard scientific position on these
questions, namely, that
- The
earth revolves around the sun.
- The
solar system itself is moving.
- The
earth and the moon developed from nebular matter over very long periods of
time.
Here, then, is his position on heliocentrism and the
movement of the solar system:
My chair, rotating together with the earth,
moves at a speed of 300 m a second, while our earth revolves around the sun at
30 km/s. The earth, together with the sun, is moving toward the constellation
of Hercules.
He likewise holds that the stars are millions of years
old:
To reach the furthest star [in the Milky
Way], 140 million years would be necessary. It is therefore easy to understand
that the position of the stars, which we now see with our eyes, is not the
actual one, but the position they had 140 million years ago.
Finally, Fr. Maximilian does not believe that the earth,
moon, and sun were created directly by God, but rather that they formed over
long periods of time from a nebula:
[Science] teaches that the moon was detached
from the earth after the latter came into existence. The earth itself was
detached from the sun, while the sun originated from a nebula. Besides, it
seems probable that an enormous number of stars, together with the Milky Way,
have been detached from a nebula. This is what science teaches. It could be
observed that the history and evolution of the earth take place just as they
used to happen in the past, in very remote eras, in some nebula.
St. Maximilian did not find these positions to be
injurious to the faith; on the contrary, he expressed them in an issue of his
Japanese version of The Knight of the Immaculata and concluded
them with an argument for the existence of God. If we couple his stance on
cosmic evolution with his rejection of Darwinian evolution, we have the
position of progressive creationism.
Conclusion
I did not realize, when I wrote my book, that my own
position was so close to that of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Though I am obviously
gratified to find that such is the case, it is nevertheless disconcerting to
find that St. Maximilian Kolbe should fall under the same condemnations under
which I fell by the Kolbe Center of which he is the patron. If his Knight of
the Immaculata article from above were submitted anonymously to the Kolbe
Center, it would certainly receive a negative review.
….
The fact is that St. Maximilian did not agree with the
central tenets of the Biblicist creationism on which the Kolbe Center is
founded. The Kolbe Center professes to have chosen him as its patron, because
“he was an expert in theology, philosophy, and natural science”, but it does
not follow him in questions of natural science nor those of exegetical science.
In light of this fact, it would seem that the Kolbe
Center should either choose a different patron for its endeavors or, please
God, adopt the position of its patron.
Damien F.
Mackey’s comment:
The
Australian Marian Academy of the Immaculate Conception (AMAIC), to which I belong, takes
a lot of its inspiration from St. Maximilian Kolbe, including his desire for “a
Marian Academy”. A wheelchair-bound Polish Cardinal at the Vatican, Andrzej
Maria Deskur (d.
2011) – a very good friend of Polish pope-Saint John Paul II – insisted that we
add to our name, Australian Marian Academy, the phrase “of the Immaculate
Conception”. That would have pleased Maximillian Kolbe.
I knew that
Saint Maximilian was interested in science, and that he had hoped to write a
significant book on science. That is all that I knew until yesterday (8th
November, 2026). In common with him is our rejection of evolution. However, the
rest surprised me, an old earth; expanding universe; origin of the earth with
the Big Bang.
But that does
not matter, because it is primarily from the saint’s Mariology - not his
science - that the AMAIC would derive its connections with him.
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