The Fruits of Evolutionism

by Thomas A. Droleskey

[This essay was published in Christ or Chaos in 2001. It was the basis of a talk I had given at the Kolbe Center for Catholic Creationism Conference in June of that year. The essay is an effort to discuss the effects of a belief in evolutionism upon our culture and upon the Church herself. It was not an effort to discuss all of the scientific evidence that has been amassed against evolutionism; there are great pieces of scholarship out there that do that very well, including Gerard J. Keane’s Creation Rediscovered. The essay sought to explain that false ideas lead to bad consequences, and the fruits of evolutionism are nothing but evil. This essay is being published on this site now in light of the Vatican announcement that a conference will be held later this year to discuss “how” evolution works, thereby accepting the premise that the theory of evolution, which has been rejected by many secular scientists, is a given and that we need to “discover” how it works. No wonder we face the problems we do in the Church today.]

A gentleman who attended my “Living in the Shadow of the Cross” lectures at Holy Child Parish in Tijeras, New Mexico, in 2001 was a little aghast when I stated that even secular science is proving the accounts of Special Creation in the Book of Genesis. I said quite emphatically that evolutionism is not only an unproven scientific theory but it is a thoroughly disproved ideology. The man responded quite quizzically, as do many Catholics when they are confronted with statements that do not reinforce the propaganda that has been advanced in the past 160 years. He asked, “What difference does it made as to how the world was created? Why should it matter to us if evolution is true or not?” I replied quite matter of factly: “Therein lies on of the principal casualties of evolutionism: the understanding that statements are either true or false of their nature. It matters quite a bit how the world was created, especially as it related to the Nature of God and the nature of the zenith of God’s creative work, human beings. If evolutionism is untrue, the assertion that it could be true matters quite a lot. For what we are facing as a result of society’s almost unquestioned acceptance of a disproved ideology is a dual assault upon the nature of truth and on the Socratic principle of non-contradiction.”

Indeed, evolutionism represents an assault upon the nature of God’s Truth which has had a variety of deleterious repercussions upon man and society. To be sure, evolutionism was able to receive such widespread acceptance as the penultimate assault upon truth as a direct result of a series of forces which were let loose on the world during the Renaissance, quickened during the Protestant Revolt, hardened during the so-called Age of Reason and the rise of Freemasonry and the subsequent triumph of various political ideologies as the sterile substitute for the true Faith founded by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope.

That is, the Renaissance featured a slow but stead process of undermining the Christocentric foundation of Europe which had under girded life and culture during the Middle Ages. Individuals desiring quite consciously to divorce culture and daily life from the faith sought to advance secularism and relativism as the new foundations of a “sophisticated” civilization, one that was not reliant upon the “superstitions” of an allegedly revealed religion. The human being has to make a decisive break with a view of the world in which it was believed that a living, personal God created man out of nothing. For to believe in Special Creation and the Fall of Man from Grace in the Garden of Eden meant that God Himself has to have an unchanging nature, which is reflected in the unchanging nature of the physical laws which govern the universe as well as the natural laws which govern the conduct of the human soul. And to believe in the Fall of Man from Grace in the Garden of Eden meant that it was necessary to believe in the veracity of Our Lord’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Cross, which made it possible for fallen creatures to live lives of personal sanctity by cooperating with the graces won for them by the shedding of the Theandric Person’s Most Precious Blood on Good Friday and administered to them by the working of the Holy Ghost through Holy Mother Church. Obviously, one who accepted these truths and submitted in a spirit of humility and docility to all that Holy Mother Church taught in the Holy Name of her Divine Bridegroom, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, came to understand the necessity of conforming everything in one’s personal life and in the life of society to the standard of the Holy Cross, something that was repulsive to those intent on “liberating” man from the shackles of personal self-denial, mortification, and the embrace of redemptive suffering as the means by which we could know an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise if we persisted until the point of our dying breaths in states of sanctifying grace.

The Middle Ages were characterized by what I refer to as the “language of faith.” Sure, people remained weak and frequently gave bad examples. There were eras of great decadence and scandal within the highest quarters of the Church. However, the principal difference between the Middle Ages and our own relativistic and positivistic era, so shaped by the embrace of the evolutionist ideology, is quite simple: the people of the Middle Ages knew that it was their sins which caused all of the problems of the world, both personally and social. They knew that there was only one way to ameliorate those problems, and that was by a daily, earnest effort to cooperate with the graces administered to them by the working of the Holy Ghost in the Sacraments. This is in direct contrast to the views of modernity– which have great currency among most contemporary Catholics– wherein the very thing that caused our Lord to suffer once on the wood of the Cross and which wounds His Mystical Body today, sin, is exalted and glorified in all aspects of our law, our government, our politics, our education, our so-called entertainment. Everything that is perverse and immoral has been embraced as a legally guaranteed right and/or a result of a set of biological forces beyond the control of human beings, who are believed to be nothing more than a higher form of animal.

The efforts of Renaissance thinkers to divorce culture from the faith and statecraft from morality, to say nothing of the State from the Social Kinship of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, found allies in those who fomented the Protestant Revolution in the Sixteenth Century. Martin Luther embraced the false notion that one is “saved” by making a profession of faith in the Lord Jesus in his heart and on his lips, thereby eschewing the truth that one needs to work out his salvation in fear and in trembling, that it is possible by one unrepented mortal sin to lose one’s salvation for all eternity. Luther further helped to advance the agenda of the secular relativists by his promotion of the heretical view that there is but one source of Divine Revelation–Sacred Scripture–and that said source is subject to the individual interpretation of believers, rejecting entirely the magisterium of the Church established by the God-Man Himself. This belief in individual interpretation was to render Scripture into meaninglessness, as the rejection of any ultimate authority in the Church meant that the “opinion” of each individual believer was a good as another’s. Thus, the way was left wide open for the demythologizing of Sacred Scripture, a process begun in earnest by the German Protestant “scripture scholars” in the immediate wake of Charles Darwin’s theory of the natural selection of the species in the late-Nineteenth Century. Protestantism of its very nature, therefore, opened way for those alleging themselves to be Christians to cite their own individual authority and expertise to place into question the very truths contained in that which was said to be the sole source of Divine Revelation, and resulted in the ultimate triumph of the secular evolutionists and positivists and relativists and naturalists in the midst of the world-at-large. Pope Saint Pius X critiqued the falsity of such scriptural exegesis in great detain in his encyclical letter on Modernism, issued September 8, 1907.

Indeed, Luther and John Calvin consciously sought to privatize the expression of Christian Faith. After all, if one is “saved” either as a result of an expression of faith in the Lord Jesus (for Luther) or by the fact of one’s predestination (for Calvin), then what sense does it make to do anything about that faith in the midst of the world. Rulers were thus left free to govern their people in a Machiavellian way, unconcerned about their responsibility to subordinate human law to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law, unconcerned about having their unjust decisions temporized by the temporal authority of the Vicar of Christ, unconcerned about the prospect of losing their immortal souls. Luther himself noted the following in this regard:

Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion.

As Father Denis Fahey noted in his great work, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

This teaching had its economic repercussions in the current that led to the doctrine laid down in Daniel Defoe’s The Complete Tradesman, according to which a man must keep his religious convictions and his business life apart and not allow one to interfere with the other. “There is some difference between an honest man and a honest tradesman . . . There are some latitudes, like poetical license in other cases, which a tradesman must be and is allowed, and which by the custom and usage of a trade he may give himself a liberty in, which cannot be allowed in other cases to any men, no, nor to the tradesman himself out of his business. ”

In other words, you see, Protestantism had given birth to the individualistic, relativistic foundation of Modernity in which even people who say they believe in the Sacred Divinity of Jesus Christ can be assured of their salvation while they conduct themselves as pagans and as beasts in the midst of their daily lives. This provided a fertile seed-bed for the evolutionist once they had arrived on the scene with a fury in the Nineteenth Century.

Freemasonry played its own pernicious role in all of this. Brought to birth in its contemporary form (although it has roots in the mystery cults of the ancient world). Freemasonry sought to find a mythical “common ground” by which men of “good will” could disagree about matter of faith and truth, reducing all of human existence to a matter of “opinion.” We see this influence quite plainly in our new President, a shallow, hollow man who has contended over and over again that abortion is a matter of “opinion” about which men of good will can disagree quite legitimately something he would never say about racism or anti-Semitism. The slicing and dicing of little babies in their mothers’ wombs is thus denied as a matter of fundamental justice founded in the splendor of Truth Incarnate and reduced to but a matter of opinion which unnecessarily divides “good” people, who should, obviously, concentrate their efforts on issues that “unite” people, such as the increase of one’s material wealth as the first priority of public policy and of personal existence.

As Pope Leo XIII noted in Humanum Genus in 1884:

When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality, We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak not of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth; these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality. If these be taken away, as the Naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. or wherever, by removing Christian education, the sect has begun more completely to rule there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony.

Freemasonry leads to the triumph of religious indifferentism, one of the principal fruits of the Protestant Revolt. It is this religious indifferentism which made it possible in part for evolutionists to have such success in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. After all, if everything is a matter of individual opinion, if there is no such thing as absolute truth nor any ultimate authority given us by God to guide us in the apprehension and acceptance of such truth, if all religions are indeed equal to each other, then, ultimately, men will come to the conclusion that no religion is as good as any religion, paving the way for the triumph of utilitarianism, which is nothing other than practical atheism. Consider, for example, the words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Immortale Dei in 1885:

To hold therefore that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. nd this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points, cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.

Evolutionism appeared on the scene at a time when all of these phenomena had taken deep root in the psyches of modern man, especially here in the United States, which was the first nation to be founded quite specifically in the framework of religious indifferentism and the absolute rejection of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ and the authority of His true Church to guide all men everywhere to all times on matters of fundamental justice. The belief that human beings are descended from beasts–who are unable to restrain their natural urges and passions, which are biologically driven– helped to undermine the concept of the indissolubility of marriage, the sanctity of marital relations, the innocence and the purity of the young by means of the rot of sex-instruction, and, ultimately, the sanctity and inviolability of all innocent human life from the moment of fertilization through all subsequent stages until natural death. If we are nothing but the product of blind biological forces, then why should we restrain ourselves in the indulgence of the primordial urges which come to us as a result of such forces and are thus outside of our ability to control. Indeed, as modern psychology teaches, the repression of such forces is actually an evil thing as it makes it less possible for human beings to enjoy themselves in the only realm of existence they will ever know: the life of the body here on earth.

Many, many other forces helped to pave the way for the triumph of the ideology of evolutionism. John Locke played his own role in this process, as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writing helped to expedite the process of the deification of man, a natural but intended result of the Protestant Revolt (but an all too natural result of Freemasonry). As Father Fahey pointed out in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World:

Rousseau carries on the revolution against the order of the world begun by Luther. Luther’s revolt was that of our individuality and sense-life against the exigencies of the supernatural order instituted by God. It was an attempt to remain attached to Christ, while rejecting the order established by Christ for our return to God. Rousseau’s revolt was against the order of natural morality, by the exaltation of the primacy of our sense-life.

The little world of each one of us, our individuality, is a divine person, supremely free and sovereignly independent of all order, natural and supernatural. he state of Liberty or of sovereign independence is the primitive state of man, and the nature of man demands the restoration of that state of liberty. It is to satisfy this-called exigency that ‘Father of modern thought’ invented the famous myth of the Social Contract.

The Social Contract gives birth to a form of association in which each one, while forming a union with all the others, obeys only himself and remains as free as before. Each one is subject to the whole, but he is not subject to any man, there is no man above him. He is absorbed in the common Ego begotten in the pact, so that obeying the law, he obeys only himself. Each citizen votes in order, that by the addition of the number of votes, the general will, expressed by the vote of the majority, is, so to say, a manifestation of the ‘deity’ immanent in the multitude. The People are God (no wonder we have gotten used to writing the word with a capital letter). The law imposed by this ‘deity’ does not need to be just in order to exact obedience. In fact, the majority vote makes or creates right and justice. An adverse majority vote can not only overthrow the directions and commands of the Heads of the Mystical Body on earth, the Pope and the Bishops, but can even deprive the Ten Commandments of all binding force.

To the triumph of those ideals in the modern world, the Masonic denial of original sin and the Rousseauist dogma of the natural goodness of man have contributed not a little. The dogma of natural goodness signifies that man lived originally in a purely natural paradise of happiness and goodness and that, even in our present degraded state, all our instinctive movements are good. We do not need grace, for nature can do for what grace does. In addition, Rousseau holds that this state of happiness and goodness, of perfect justice and innocence, of exemption from servile work and suffering, is natural to man, that is, essentially demanded by our nature. Not only then is original sin nonexistent, not only do we not come into the world as fallen sons of the first Adam, bearing in us the wounds of our fallen nature, is radically anti-natural. Suffering and pain have been introduced by society, civilization and private property. Hence we must get rid of all these and set up a new form of society. We can bet back the state of the Garden of Eden by the efforts of our own nature, without the help of grace. For Rousseau, the introduction of the present form of society, and of private property constitute the real Fall. The setting up of a republic based on his principles will act as a sort of democratic grace which will restore in its entirety our lost heritage. In a world where the clear teaching of the faith of Christ about the supernatural order of the Life of Grace has become obscured, but were men are still vaguely conscious that human nature was once happy, Rousseau’s appeal acts like an urge of homesickness. We need not be astonished, then, apart from the question of Masonic-Revolutionary organization and propaganda, at the sort of delirious enthusiasm which takes possession of men at the thought of a renewal of society. Nor need we wonder that men work for the overthrow of existing government and existing order, in the belief that they are not legitimate forms of society. A State not constructed according to Rosseauist-Masonic principles is not a State ruled by laws. It is a monstrous tyranny, and must be overthrown in the name of "Progress" and of the "onward march of democracy.’ All these influences must be borne in mind as we behold, since 1789, the triumph in one country after another or Rousseauist-Masonic democracy.

Indeed, the triumph of the totalitarian state in which we find ourselves right now here in the United States of America is the result of all of the forces that have been at work in the world proximately from the time of the Renaissance to our own day. The belief that human beings evolved randomly from a set of molecules has reinforced the false philosophies and heretical theologies that have been proposed in the past 700 years, being propagated within the true Church herself under the guises of Modernism, existentialism, Process Theology, and Chardinianism, among other things (most of are variations on the Modernist theme). Even though the path for the acceptance of evolutionism–and its vast consequences on the devolution of human behavior and hence human society—was paved by the variety of forces noted herein, it arrived on the scene while evolutionary ideologies and philosophies were gaining acceptance in intellectual circles. Thus, Georg Hegel’s concept of a dialectical process responsible for the inevitable evolution of ideas in history became the foundation for Karl Marx’s belief that human history was nothing other than the clash of competing economic classes according to the principle of dialectical materialism, a process which would result inevitably in the evolutionary triumph of communism. Darwin’s evolutionism and Marx’s evolutionary notion of history merged to have their diabolical appeal on philosophers and theologians alike.

As one who denied the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul, Marx was a materialist. Matter is the only thing that exists. Marx can thus be called an historical materialist. All human beings make decisions, he contended, on the basis of their economic self-interest. The palpably false nature of this proposition is evident to anyone who understands true history. Millions upon millions of people have sacrificed their lives in behalf of the true Faith. Millions of others have laid down their lives to defend the lives of their family members and friends. Marx’s contention that everyone makes decisions solely on the basis of economics is simply false. However, it is something he believed, and it is the cornerstone of his belief in economic reductionism, the view that all of history is determined by economics.

The clash of competing economic classes, Marx wrote, occurred according to the dialectical principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Borrowing from (and turning “right side up,” to use Marx’s terminology) the dialectical process of Georg Hegel, Marx believed that one economic system (the thesis) gave rise automatically to its exact opposite (the antithesis). The clash between the first economic system and its opposite would produce eventually an entirely new system, the synthesis. This new system would then become the new thesis–and it would produce its own antithesis, with the clash between the new thesis and the new antithesis resulting in yet another synthesis. This would go on and on until such time as the stage of Ideal Communism was realized, that staged in which all of the world’s wealth had been distributed justly and the last capitalist liquidated. It would be a that point that the need for government would be eliminated, as everyone would live peacefully with each other. There would be no envy, no war, no injustice, no conflict among human beings whatsoever.

Essential to Marx’s belief system was his insistence that wealth is static, not dynamic. Unlike Adam Smith, the theoretical father of contemporary capitalism, Marx did not believe that wealth could be expanded. Thus, as capitalists had a disproportionate share of the wealth generated by the sweat of the workers, it would be necessary for the workers to expedite the evolutionary process by which the stage of Ideal Communism would be realized. Capitalists were not going to hand over their ill-gotten goods and their unjust hold on political power voluntarily. There needed to be a violent, blood revolution to expedite the process by which the workers could rule triumphantly, ushering in the “end of history” and the “beginning of man” as capitalism and capitalists disappeared from the world forever.

Ironically, even though there are great differences between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, there are some similarities. Smith believed in the inevitable, evolutionary progress of man as wealth was expanded by the investment and reinvestment of profits. The availability of “capital” for investment and reinvestment had been made possible by the unjust seizure of the Catholic Church’s monastery and convent lands by King Henry VIII, the most massive land grab in history prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. At work in Smith’s theory was his belief in the “invisible hand” that would correct the free market without government interference. Smith’s belief in invisible forces is really the other side of the same coin on which one can find Marx’s belief in the principle of dialectical materialism. Indeed, Marx himself knew that one had to make what is called a “leap of faith” to accept that (a) history was actually based on the principle of dialectical materialism, and that (b) the dialectical process would indeed end at some point in time in the stage of Ideal Communism. Smith could not prove the existence of the invisible hand; Marx could not prove the existence of the principle of dialectical materialism. Both systems are founded on the acceptance of forces that are illusory. Both are destined to reduce man to the material level as neither accepts the Deposit of Faith as entrusted by Our Lord to His true Church as defining everything about human existence, yes, including economics.

Thus, both communism and capitalism–and their various ideological allies in the United States–have been the means by which evolutionism has been triumphant in convincing us that we are little more than beasts who can be made happy by the satisfaction derived from the acquisition and retention of material goods and of the indulgence of sensual pleasure. The only essential difference between Marx and Smith is the way in which we are to realize this pleasure; the former believed it will be done by the revolutionary forces of a natural evolutionary process while the latter believed in market forces to improve the lot of man on earth without regard to his First Cause and Last End.

Many heretical Catholics have been careful not to deny the existence of God outright (see Chardin) but have done their best to claim that God and any of His teachings are subject to evolutionary change. This is the essence of Freemasonry. It is also the essence of process theology and process philosophy, which are at the heart of Modernism. It is this Modernist, evolutionist spirit which has triumphed within the liturgy of the Novus Ordo Missae, convincing Catholics that if the liturgy is subject to rapid, radical, continuous, unremitting changes, then our understanding of the “development” of doctrine is itself subject to change and evolution as the years progress. This is especially so in light of our “more sophisticated” understanding of Scripture as a result of the historical-critical method, reducing the Book of Genesis to little more than a fairy tale which has no real meaning for our lives. Thus, all elements of the Faith are subject to review and analysis. If God and the human being are in the process of becoming, then the same is true of His Church and any doctrine taught in His Name (as well as being true for the offering of Holy Mass).

The widespread belief in evolution, however, had led rather inexorably to devolution of human behavior. The belief that we are descended from apes has prompted people to act like apes. The law of the jungle rules in our schools, on our streets, in our homes and in our government. Mothers can kill the natural fruit of their wombs under cover of law. The elderly and the chronically ill can be put to “sleep” much like my late father, a veterinarian, would euthanize a sick dog at the behest of its owners. Children feel free to massacre each other in schools. The most vile forms of insults are hurled by young toughs in their twenties and thirties as they attend sporting events, drinking so much alcohol that it may very well be the case that their bodies will need nothing to be preserved for their wakes after their deaths. If we do not believe that we are redeemed creatures who are made in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity, then we devolve to the level of barbarism over time, giving vent to every primordial urge after another solely because we are living on the material and the sensual levels alone. Wild animals spend their waking hours on the prowl for food. The human beasts shaped by a world which teaches that we are descended from beasts work in order to eat, drink, and be merry, not to give honor and glory to God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church.

As I have noted on many other occasions in the past few years, the social revolutionaries could not have been as successful in their efforts had there not been a concomitant revolution within the Church. The revolution did not begin with the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. Oh, no. It had begun in the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Freemasonry and the spirit of the French Revolution. The influences of Modernity and Modernism on the Church were expressed differently in different parts of the world. Americanism was how it manifested itself in the life of the Church in the United States of America. Protestant German Scripture “scholars” made their influence felt upon their like number in Catholic colleges and universities and seminaries in Europe. Modernists proposed ideas that had to be condemned by Blessed Pope Pius IX and Pope Saint Pius X (and which were addressed under the guise of Modernism’s multifaceted manifestations by Pope Leo XIII). And the Modernist Revolution within the Church began to express itself in a desire for “liturgical reform” as early as the 1920s as various “liturgists” sought to “discover the roots” of the liturgy in order to discover the alleged simplicity of earlier forms, a move condemned by Pope Pius XII as the worship of antiquarianism.

There is a direct connection between liturgical reverence and social order. The liturgy teaches the faithful. The Traditional Latin Mass is offered in an ambiance of sobriety, of reverence, of solemnity. It signifies the transcendent, the eternal. Its fixed nature–and its offering in a dead language–communicates to the faithful that the truths of the Faith are fixed. They have been revealed by God Himself, entrusted by Him to the Church He created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. The unchanging nature of the essence of the liturgy tells the faithful that God Himself is unchanging. Their need for Him is unchanging. His Church is unchanging. People need that sense of stability in this fallen, fractured world, where the Devil seeks to convince people that change for the sake of change is good–and that the “diversity” produced by chaos is merely an expression of individuality and inculturation.

The revolt against the Traditional Latin Mass has begotten all manner of confusion within the faithful. Belief in the Real Presence has waned. Reverence of Our Lord’s Real Presence is almost nonexistent. Banality of music is common, resulting in immodest and inappropriate attire being worn by the faithful when they attend Mass (why dress reverently and behave solemnly when one is attending a local hootenanny?) A steady dose of this is actually harmful to souls. The Novus Ordo Missae is not a refuge from the profane but a celebration of it. Why should one conduct himself with circumspection in the midst of the world when the spirit of the world is expressed in full throat at one’s local parish? What’s wrong with supporting abortion as a public official when the universality of certitude itself has been overthrown by a de facto congregational approach to the worship of God?

The effect of both evolutionism and a belief in Theistic evolutionism has contributed mightily to the undermining of Faith on the part of Catholics. For, as noted before, if God is in the process of becoming, then so is man, so is all concept of truth, so is doctrine, so is the liturgy. If nothing is static, then what matters ultimately is the indulgence of self, whether by means of drug addiction, alcohol, violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, materialism, a slavish attachment to the mythical, “salvific” power of political ideology, bread and circuses in the forms of entertainment and sports, and the belief that life is one gigantic exercise in personal privilege and entitlement, not the earnest effort to please God through His true Church by adhering to His unchanging truths and scaling the heights of personal sanctity by cooperating with sanctifying and actual grace.

Consider, for example, the effects of evolutionism and its allied ideologies (especially Modenrism) on the observance of the Ten Commandments:

1) When we do not love God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church–especially when we come to believe that “God” is merely a concept reflective of an evolutionary process in the world, then we make gods out of ourselves and our desires. Superstitions and the occult, political ideologies and the exigencies of electoral politics, bread and circuses become the “‘gods” which are worshiped. This erodes a knowledge of the human being as an adopted child of the Living God by virtue of Our Lord’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross. People who lack an understanding of who they are in light of Who has created and redeemed them fall quite easily into lives of self-seeking and pleasure. Evolutionism feeds into this worshiping of false gods by its contention that everything in the world is subject to a continuous process of growth and development, culminating in the realization of the false promises of some political ideology and/or in the ever delusional realization of the sort of “progress” which will make human suffering impossible. This is of the essence of the various manifestations of the New Age movement.

2) A lack of belief in God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church leads inexorably to all manner of blasphemies being committed against the Holy Name, all of which are accepted as a matter of routine and just an ordinary part of human existence. Indeed, one is thought to be sophisticated and avant-garde if one participates actively in entertainment fare which degrades holy things, puts into question the Deposit of Faith, and helps to destroy reverence for all things that pertain to the salvation of souls. Sadly, priests and theologians and religious brothers and sisters participate in this spirit of irreverence, especially as it relates to the revolutionary deconstruction of the Faith into meaninglessness and of convincing the laity that our living liturgical tradition in the Latin Rite has to be subject to evolutionary forces of change which need the same sort of “revolutionary” push Marx believed had to be applied to the inevitable triumph of the worldwide spread of communism. Our liturgy has to evolve to the point where the Mass is no longer considered to be the unbloody re-presentation of the Son’s Sacrifice to the Father in Spirit and in Truth. It is, as we have discovered, merely an exercise in community togetherness in which we “recall” the events of the past. Church architecture must “evolve” to reflect this new consciousness, especially by the removal of the tabernacle from the center of our churches and from their naves altogether. And there are some in the highest quarters of the Church who believe that even the Petrine office must “evolve” in a manner conducive to the very sort of pan-Christianity specifically condemned by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos in 1928: the creation of a “federation” of Christian sects, conferring upon those who dissent from the Deposit of Faith a status of equality and unity with the entirety of Apostolic Tradition and Succession.

3) Disrespect for the sacredness of the Lord’s Day, Sunday, is the natural result of evolutionism’s attack upon Special Creation. If the Blessed Trinity is not honored as our First Cause and Last End because we are simply the descendants of beasts who themselves were the result of random biological forces at work in the world, then why should we pay any heed to the sacredness of the day upon which Our Lord’s Easter victory over the power of sin and eternal death was made manifest as He burst forth from the tomb where He had lain for forty hours? As we live only on the natural level to satisfy our natural desires and urges, why should not Sunday be a day of commerce and business? Once again, the Church has fed into this notion, especially here in the United States, by making it easy for those Catholics interested in attending Mass on Sunday evening, thus “liberating” Sundays for those things that really matter (football, basketball, baseball, shopping, swimming, boating, picnicking, sleeping, working around the house).

4) Evolutionism helped to expedite the deliberate, planned destruction of the stability of the family, desired by Freemasonry as the means to create whole categories of people who were dependent upon the beneficence of the state for their daily sustenance. The arrogation unto the state of the natural law right of parents to educate their children as they see fit helped to produce graduates of public high schools and universities and colleges who were conditioned to accept relativism and positivism and utilitarianism and religious indifferentism as givens in the life of man and his society which were beyond question. Why, then, should, children honor their mother and their father when we owe our first allegiance to the state? Why shown grown children bear the economic burden of caring for those who brought them into this world when the state has an entitlement program to obviate the Fourth Commandment’s teaching about the necessity of grown children supporting their parents when the latter become incapable of supporting themselves? If the only thing that matters if our personal self-indulgence–and that there is no ultimate authority over us (Christ the King as He rules through His true Church), then there is no reason for children to obey their parents, for students to obey teachers, for workers to obey the just orders of their superiors, for citizens to conform their lives to civil laws that are in full conformity with the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law.

5) There is little which needs to be said of evolutionism’s impact upon the inviolability of all innocent human life from the moment of fertilization through all subsequent stages until natural death. People who believe they are the product of blind forces will treat other human beings with little or no respect whatsoever. Indeed, the soulless basis of modern life leads people into dehumanizing anyone and everyone who poses a threat to one’s standard of living and/or poses an inconvenience to one’s daily routine. Thus, abortion, random killings, acts of mass murder, euthanasia, suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, gluttony, body piercing, tattooing, and other forms of bodily mutilation, road rage, fits of uncontrolled anger, and physical and verbal assaults upon those who happen to be in in the path of one’s “line of fire” become a normal part of human society. However, the illogic of this schizophrenic world leads people who think they are nothing more than beasts into expressing outrage over some incidents of violence, which must be blamed on the objects used to inflict the violence on others (guns, for example) or an evolutionary social forces which need to be understood by the insights gained form psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other pseudo-scientific disciplines. An unconcern with living in the Divine Presence as children of the true Church leads ultimately to the triumph of sloth, where students and workers care not one whit about pursing excellence as befits redeemed creatures. This is what accounts for the surliness and incompetence we find in practically every aspect of our society. A belief in evolutionism leads naturally to devolution of personal behavior.

6) One of the most insidious influences of evolutionism upon human beings is its alliance with Freudianism and other ideologies which undermine the sanctity of marriage and the indissolubility of a ratified and consummated sacramental marriage. If we are beasts incapable of controlling urges and who must be concerned principally about personal pleasure, then it is only natural for people to seek to engage in acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that are illicit. Indeed, children, in particular, must be encouraged in the evil known as “sex-education” to violate all of the precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments as an expression of their individuality. Contraception thus becomes something that is beyond question. Perversity must be propagandized in all of the means of mass communication (which means of mass communications themselves are in control of the evolutionists and relativists and positivists and statists and collectivists). Divorce and feminism, both of which undermine the stability of the family and thus that of society, also become vitally important constituent elements of the false world created as a result of the forces which have been evolving from the time of the Renaissance, including that of evolutionism itself.

7) Respect for private property is also undermined by evolutionism. It is really quite simple: if we arose as a result of forces which emerged from some primordial “soup,” then we have no right to own anything. The “earth” owns us, and it is therefore our obligation to worship it as the source of our lives rather than to use it as the good stewards God exhorts us to be in the Book of Genesis. The way is thus paved wide open for the triumph of collectivism and statism. If, as Marx contended, the human being lacks a soul and is only a higher form of animal, then he lacks an individual personality. He is thus part of the collectivity from which he receives his consciousness of being. His own individuality must therefore be subordinated to the demands of the collectivity. Rather than serve God by means of employing the good He has permitted us to enjoy as the fruits of our own labor offered up to Him for His greater honor and glory and for the sanctification of our own immortal souls, we work for the greater good of the collective consciousness, to confiscate our private property to use as its leaders see fit for the achievement of an evolutionary concept of progress and human development. Too, evolutionism helps individualism in their own private lives to disregard the property rights of others as well as to exculpate themselves from having to fulfill conscientiously the duties they have to fulfill the demands of simple justice in their daily work (whether they work for themselves or for others). Human beings thus become the slaves of the government and of large multi-national corporations, entities that treat their slaves with contempt and indignity heaped upon indignity. A natural result of stealing the legitimate property of human beings is that the “rights” of irrational beasts are exalted over those of God’s rational creatures.

8) Truth is a fundamental casualty of evolutionism. Evolutionism is a lie. It bears false witness concerning the creation of the human being by God in the Garden of Eden and thus the necessity of Our Lord’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross. If we do not believe that we are to be held accountable by God for what we say and how we act, then there is no whatsoever to restrain ourselves from lying–even in the smallest of matters–to accomplish that which we desire for our own gain. Perjury, calumny, and detraction thus become standard fare in a world wherein most people believe in a lie about their origins. Obviously, words themselves can “evolve,” as noted before with respect to Protestantism, to such an extent that their plain meaning is subject to the interpretation and rationalization of those who have a vested interest in creating their own individual worlds, their own “alternative realities.” It all depends on what the meaning of “is, is,” right?

9) People who are unconcerned about living in such a way as to die in a state of sanctifying grace busy themselves by envying the goods and the lives and the talents of others. A Catholic is supposed to understand that each of us is given a distinctive set of gifts. No other human being has ever had, has now, or will ever have the distinctive set of gifts given to us at the moment of our creation in our mothers’ wombs. The Holy Ghost helps to build up the Mystical Body of Christ by the inherently unequal distribution of gifts, both spiritual and temporal, in order to help us rely upon each other for the accomplishment of our Last End, as well as for the fulfillment of the obligations of our state-in-life in this vale of tears. We must never be envious of the gifts or the lives or the good of others.

However, fallen human nature is ever ready to engage in envy, one of the seven deadly or capital sins, even more so if it is given encouragement to do so by those who insist that the very purpose of human existence is to have a lavish lifestyle as the first end of life and that we are entitled therefore to have what others have in order to be “happier” than we are at present. This stands in direct contrast to a Catholic’s understanding that everything we have is meant to direct us toward the things of eternity, and that we are to be detached from the things, people and places of this passing world, striving always to understand that true happiness here comes from perduring in a state of sanctifying grace, the necessary precondition for eternal happiness in the glory of the Beatific Vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Thus, it is plain to see that evolutionism feeds into fallen man’s desire to consider himself in charge of the universe. However, it is simply pat of man’s nature to seek to worship something that is above himself. And if man is not going to worship the true God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church, then he will be led by false belief systems, including evolutionism, to revert back to the sort of barbarism which was conquered by the Catholic missionaries of the First Millennium in Europe and of the Second Millennium in the Americas.

Could it not be the case that God created the world exactly as is recorded in the Book of Genesis, that is to say in six days before resting on the seventh? Think about it. We believe in a God Who deigned to be conceived as a helpless embryo in the womb of a virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost. We believe in a God-Man Who resurrected from the dead and has ascended to the Father’s right hand in glory. We believe that a mere man, a priest, has the power to make the God-Man incarnate under the appearance of bread and wine. If it is possible for God to do all of these things, why is it not possible for Him to have created the world and everything in it exactly as the Book of Genesis tell us that He did?

The irony here is inescapable: many believing Catholics, including the Vicar of Christ and many of those who advise him on these matters, prefer to believe in the disproved suppositions and hypotheses of scientists about evolution than to believe in the plain words of Holy Writ, thereby denying the omnipotence of God, Who is pure intelligence and pure act. Why cannot we simply marvel at the simple fact (and yes God is simple, no parts outside of parts) that God willed each creature on earth to come into being to their most minute detail. I love to state in a loud voice in zoos when explaining the features of some multi-colored fish or bird to our daughter: “You see, Lucy, God willed every single detail of this fish.” People around us just stare in disbelief. It is sad to see that those who disbelieve in such a simple truth include the Pope and those who advise him.

Alas, the modern world needs to believe in the theory of evolution to sustain its own devolution in barbarism and its concomitant rejection of the true Faith. Father Peter Damien Fehlner, as quoted by Gerard J. Keane in his masterful Creation Rediscovered, notes:

“Good arguments can actually be adduced in fact to show that evolution is simply not a scientific hypothesis. It is a dogma providing the context for all scientific endeavors. And it is just this assumption of evolutionism as the universal paradigm that directly conflicts with the teaching of the Church. . . . The doctrine of creation, in general and in all its detail, is intimately bound up with the mystery of salvation. That is why the Catholic may not call into question any aspect of the doctrine of creation which in fact the Church believes is related to the mystery of salvation without also doubting that latter mystery.”

Let the Vatican scientists and advisers waste their time and send all of the wrong signals on trying to discover “how” evolution works. There is simply no evidence to support anything other than the truths we learned as children: that God carefully created each thing in the world, culminating His work of creation in man, whom He re-created on the wood of the Holy Cross.

May Our Lady, the New Eve who gave birth to us in great pain as she stood valiantly by the foot of the Cross of her Divine Son, pray for us to believe in the Word of God, not in fables propagated by people who have a vested interest in convincing us that we are descendants of beasts, not adopted children of God by virtue of her Divine Son’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross.