Now for some instruction from America’s theological journal of record, Popular Mechanics. Its December 1966 issue carried a story about how “Science Solves the Ancient Mysteries of the Bible.” Three examples:
1. Moses didn’t see a burning bush. The bush was just a bush, but behind it was a natural gas seep that had been ignited by lightning. When Moses knelt, the bush was directly in line with the burning gas beyond it and so seemed to be on fire. Popular Mechanics presupposes that Moses, while on Mount Horeb, never moved slightly to the left or right after spotting the bush. If he had, he would have seen the gas seep off to one side. An optical illusion would have been possible only if Moses had been perpetually immobile. In fact, the biblical account (Ex. 3:1–4:17) mentions that he walked around the area.
2. How to explain—or explain away—the Shroud of Turin? Easy. Just look at the image. “The wounds correspond with the biblical accounts of the Crucifixion, with one important exception. The spike marks are in the wrists, rather than in the palms of the hands. This is a particularly telling departure from the biblical text.” Sorry, back to square one. The biblical account doesn’t mention our Lord’s palms. It says the nails went through his hands, which, in those days, included what we differentiate as the wrist.
3. What about Lazarus? Popular Mechanics turns to Gerald A. Larue, professor emeritus of biblical history and archaeology at the University of Southern California and president of the secular humanist Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Larue says Lazarus must have been in a coma. In that state hearing is often the last sense lost. “Assuming Jesus had a loud voice, and he called out ‘Lazarus,’ the man may have heard him and come out of the coma.” Uh-huh. Has Larue had himself sealed in a stone tomb and tested whether, from the inside, he can hear anyone shouting?
The Southwest Radio Church—”Ministering the Prophetic Word Since 1933″—isn’t much better. The December 1996 issue of its newsletter, Prophetic Observer, complained about John Paul II’s recent statement on evolution. (See the article on page 18 of this issue.) The newsletter writer, N. W. Hutchings, says, “We have a copy of the pope’s so-called ‘infallible’ directive,” which is described as “ambiguous and double-tongued.” Oops! The linguistic trouble is with Hutchings. No one in the Catholic Church has said anything about the Pope’s remarks being infallible, and what he said wasn’t a “directive” because it didn’t direct anyone to do anything.
It’s really all a plot, you see. “The Vatican has been waiting for at least forty-five years to replace biblical creationism with theistic evolution. Due to the international popularity of Pope John Paul, the papal hierarchy believes he can get away with it.” It’s an application of papal infallibility, thinks Hutchings, who says that Vatican I “simply issued a decree that in all matters, even Scripture, the pope could make no error—he would always be right.” Apparently Hutchings has not read what Vatican I actually said. It limited papal infallibility to matters of faith and morals; it didn’t say a pope is infallible “in all matters.”
The remainder of the newsletter complains about Evangelicals making nice with the Pope—you can’t trust anyone nowadays—and offers as disproof of evolution the sight of “a thoroughbred running in the Kentucky Derby or an eagle soaring through the sky.” Even the firmest disbelievers in evolution won’t go for Hutchings’ non sequitur. There are sophisticated arguments against evolution (see books by Phillip Johnson, Michael Denton, and Michael Behe, for instance), and pro-evolutionists should take them seriously. But Hutchings seems unable to make use of any of them. He is more comfortable jabbing the Pope.
Ten years ago, in The Southern Partisan, the late Sheldon Vanauken noted that the evolution debate “is often considered, not without a measure of truth, as being between atheistic and arrogant scientists and faithful but ignorant Christians. There are genuine weaknesses in both arguments, and each side has perhaps not only too narrow a view of the other but too narrow a view of itself. The creationists [he was referring to the Fundamentalists who have adopted that name] by their very name suggest, regrettably, that there is no way but theirs to believe in divine creation, and the evolutionists believe that their faith in ‘chance mutations through a mechanistic material selection’ destroys all possibility of God’s action.”
Vanauken had a good point. There is much incivility in the debate. The two sides have become caricatured. A man who plumps for evolution may be wrong, but he isn’t necessarily evil for having come to believe in evolution. Someone who concludes the evidence argues against evolution isn’t necessarily incapable of working through syllogisms.
This controversy may give us an opportunity to practice what we preach: As Catholics we claim to hate the sin and love the sinner. Let’s see if we can so operate that even the sinner thinks well of us.
Last month’s “Up Front” column, warning against doomsayers who say we won’t make it to the millennium, generated a few complaints—proving that some people really want Armageddon to come soon. (These are folks involved in what author Peter Theroux calls “an endless round of Armageddon and Armageddon-outta-here!”) We have come across something that may quench the thirst of those hoping for the end of the world.
The latest issue of Rose Notes, published by Our Lady of the Roses Shrine (yes, the “Bayside” apparition, repeatedly condemned by Church authorities as a fraud), tells us that “the Warning spoken of through the ages will occur in the year 1997.” This Warning—not to be confused with the Three Days of Darkness or the Chastisement—”is the worldwide cataclysm predicted by little Jacinta Marto, the youngest of the three child-seers at Fatima.”
In 1973 the seer of Bayside, the late Veronica Leuken, “received an ominous, disturbing vision of the coming Warning, which was the last communication she was to receive from heaven on this subject. Veronica was looking out her window when she saw all flames and gases, with the sky on fire. ‘It was horrible. The sky black, very dark now.’ . . . Our Lady informed her that many would die of sheer fright and added that there would be a lack of oxygen.” As bad as that sounds, “the Warning will be minor in comparison to the Chastisement that follows. Three-fourths of humanity will perish in the flames of God’s justice.” The Chastisement will begin with World War III and will end “when a fiery comet, the Ball of Redemption, strikes the earth, resulting in the three days of complete darkness over the earth.”
The Warning will be perceptible to everyone, with “every man upon earth hear[ing] the voice of his God speaking to him. The cosmic flash and other observed phenomena of the Warning will be but accessory elements that the Father will create to assist his own noble objective.” The Father “will intervene and communicate directly to each soul on earth,” revealing to each man his own sins.
In a 1994 locution Leuken was told that the Warning would come in 1997. Referring to a “miraculous” Polaroid photograph taken at Bayside—across the photograph is written the words “Jacinta 1972″—Mary is said to have told Leuken to look at the two middle digits, “97,” to learn the year of the Warning. Then she told her to add those digits, getting 16, which is “an added clue that will help us in discerning heaven’s timetable.” That is as specific as the newsletter gets. Here is our considered guess: The outer digits, 1 and 2, are to be juxtaposed to give us the month of the Warning, December. The number 16 will turn out to be the date. Thus the Warning should be expected on December 16, 1997. But don’t retire to the hills just yet.
The newsletter ends with a question-and-answer column. The sixth question provides an “out” for Bayside: “Since all prophecies are conditional to man’s response, is there a chance we might have received a reprieve from the Warning at this time?” The answer: “Hardly so. Given the present state of the Church and the world, there is absolutely no reason to believe that a reprieve has been given, and there is every reason to believe that the Warning has been all the more intensified upon us.” Note the careful language: The question asks whether we already have received a reprieve, and the answer refers to “the present state of the Church and the world.” Mark our words: Before the end of 1997, things will improve just enough to ward off the Warning, allowing Leuken’s successors to go on deceiving gullible Catholics.
For the ninth year in a row no one from Catholic Answers was asked to address the annual conference of the Association of Fundamentalists Evangelizing Catholics. Hosted by two Louisville-based ministries, the event, held at a church in Greenville, Texas, featured as keynote speaker Bill Jackson of Christians Evangelizing Catholics. Among the lectures were “Strategies Regarding Transubstantiation” (Tom Craggs, Jr.), “From Ritualism to Christ” (Homer Martinez), “Historical View of the Sacraments” (Bob Faulkner), and “Development, Deployment, and Doom of Babylon” (Jackson). We keep hoping for an invitation to address an AFEC conference.
If you are as disappointed in missing the AFEC conference as we were, try this as a salve: Young Serra of Dallas is presenting a Catholic evangelization weekend April 11–12. Featured speakers include Scott Hahn, talking on “The Richness, Truth, and Beauty of the Catholic Faith,” and Fr. Mitch Pacwa, discussing “Salvation, Authority, Communion, and Mary.” The main celebrant will be Fr. Benedict Groeschel. For further information, call (972) 307-1384.
The Only Good Catholic Is a Bad Catholic Department: According to Call to Action, one hundred members of CTA, FutureChurch, Pax Christi, and the Catholic Worker staged an Ash Wednesday protest on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. “Three young women in stoles led the service and marked the foreheads of passersby with ashes from a burned copy of the Vatican decree calling the ban on women priests infallible.”
We’re not surprised. Instead of burning blessed palms, they burn papal documents. (What next, books?) This is the level to which the heterodox have fallen. Their histrionics show that they sense that their own ideology soon will end in ashes.
A study week just for priests: “Forward to 2000” will be held June 9–13 at the Cardinal Spellman Retreat House in the Bronx. Featured speakers include Cardinal John O’Connor, Michael Novak, and Fr. Benedict Groeschel. For information call Fr. Peter Pilsner at (718) 356-0294.
The Truth Seeker has been around for 123 years. Despite its longevity, the journal of record for disgruntled atheism still has trouble getting things right. For instance, Sonja Johnson (the blurb about her says “she continues to seek her own truth”) doesn’t seem to have been the right choice to review Christopher Hitchens’ new book, which is critical of Mother Teresa. Johnson refers to the missionary as wearing “her normal Albanian nun suit.” If Johnson doesn’t know the term “habit” and doesn’t know that Mother Teresa’s habit is an Indian sari, how can she write an intelligent review?
The issue that contains Johnson’s piece boasts a bizarre editorial, “Transubstantiation: A Case of Accidental Cannibalism,” which says that “the doctrine of transubstantiation is transcendentally weird.” Equally bad is Catholic belief in the hypostatic union. “The two together make it inescapable that Catholics who take Communion believe that they are eating human flesh, i.e., that they are cannibals.” The writer refers to an exchange of letters appearing some time ago in the New Oxford Review. A reader wrote in saying, “Transubstantiation? I envy anyone who can believe it. But Thomas Aquinas didn’t believe it, so why should I?” In a later issue several correspondents demonstrated that Aquinas did believe in transubstantiation. Okay, I was wrong, answered the original letter writer. It was Bernard of Clairvaux who didn’t believe in transubstantiation. (Wrong again.) “At any rate, we live in an age when matters such as transubstantiation can be settled in the science lab; all we have to do is have a consecrated wafer tested to see if its biochemical makeup is any different from an unconsecrated wafer”—thereby proving that the letter writer doesn’t understand even the basics of the doctrine.
The whole point of transubstantiation is that only the substance (the underlying “whatness”) of the bread and wine is transformed into the actual Body and Blood of Christ. The appearances (what medieval philosophers termed the “accidents”) remain as they were. Scientific investigation will turn up no evidence of change, because science can measure only the outward appearances of things, not their inner substance. The Truth Seeker editorialist is unsatisfied and smirks, “So in substance Catholics are cannibals, but in accidents they are not.”
How does a Catholic respond? First, with a little gratitude, because the Truth Seeker is a fossilized connection to the first-century Romans, who also accused Catholics of being cannibals. The Romans didn’t understand much about the faith, but at least they knew that those pesky Christians believed that in their religious ceremonies they ate their God. Second, don’t be worried about not convincing professional atheists of the truth of the Catholic faith. The people who write for the Truth Seeker, despite their repeated appeals to reason, are not in fact very reasonable. They are old-line and lowbrow atheists, the kind from whom stereotypes are drawn.
Among them you will find no philosophers, only sophists: They seem to have telling arguments, but the arguments are old, weak, and embarrassing to today’s more sophisticated atheists. Only Catholics whose faith is weak and who are ruled by whatever argument they last heard will be influenced by jabs from the Truth Seeker. Still, it is annoying that people should be clinging to the shopworn clichés of barroom atheism.