History
Catholic Scriptural interpretation in general

If we turn to the true history of the interaction between the Church’s interpretation of the Bible and the profane sciences, we discover the following: apart from the question of monogenism, that the universe has a beginning, and a prudential error in the Galileo case that was later corrected, the Church has always accorded her children complete freedom in questions of science.

The reason for this is clear: science poses no threat to Church teaching. Whether the universe is ancient or young, whether the earth is at the center or the side of the universe, whether the Flood was global or local—either way, Church teaching is not undermined. This is precisely why the Church is willing to be so flexible in her interpretation of the Bible. Science poses no risk to her faith, because her faith in no way depends on a scientific interpretation of the Bible.

This is again one of the reasons why the Catholic spirit has always been careful to balance reason with faith, to use science and philosophy as secondary assistants in the interpretation of the Bible. As Fr Vigouroux remarks, if we want to find a universal principle of exegesis among the Fathers in interpreting Genesis, it is that “it is necessary to make use of reason, of science, in its certain facts, in order to interpret the Mosaic cosmogony”. We would be unfaithful to our Catholic heritage if we did any differently.


Catholic interpretation of Genesis

As it stands, when geology began to develop in the first half of the 1800s, and geologists started to discover accurate methods for dating the earth, Catholics had no difficulty in accepting that the Earth is much older than 6000 years.

We can find Cardinal Wiseman discussing progressive creationism in a positive light back in the 1840s, in his Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion, lecture 5. We can read the back issues of La Revue Biblique and discover that a young age for the Earth was abandoned by the end of the 1800s. This is even before the great breakthroughs of astronomy in the first decades of the 1900s made clear that the universe itself bears clear evidence of being remarkably ancient. Not only was this no stumbling block for Catholics, it was even a Catholic priest, Fr Georges Lemaître, who was the first to form a coherent theory out of that evidence. His theory was not seen as being Modernist, but was embraced by Pope Pius XII as proof of the truth of the Bible.

If the Catholic magisterium, at any time, would have seen fit to warn Catholics that believing in an ancient universe would undermine their faith, it would have been during the pontificate of St Pius X. That fearless scourge of the sewer of heresies was intensely concerned about Scriptural questions, founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute for the training of Catholic exegetes and, as mentioned, endowed the Pontifical Biblical Commission with his own papal magisterial authority. But when we read his encyclical against Modernism and the 65 condemned propositions associated with it in Lamentabili, most of which concern Scripture, we do not find a single proposition dealing with the age of the universe or the universality of the Flood. And this was certainly no oversight on St Pius X’s part, as if he omitted these questions out of ignorance or negligence. No, he omitted them because they are not part of Catholic dogma and holding to an ancient universe or a local Flood in no way commits a Catholic to Modernism.

This is why Fr Vigouroux, other Catholic Scriptural manualists, and the Catholic Encyclopedia are able to present a wide range of acceptable views on the interpretation of Genesis 1. This is why the Kolbe Center and other Catholics biblicists are not able to find any real support for their ‘traditional doctrine’ in the magisterium. This is why even St Maximilian Kolbe himself is not willing to collaborate with the Kolbe Center in dogmatizing young earth creationism.


Reinterpretation of Catholic history

Catholic biblicists, instead of admitting their true heritage by allowing that an ancient universe is not an idea that is in any way unorthodox, rather choose to reinterpret history. As we have seen, they start by claiming that holding to a young Earth/universe is part of Catholic doctrine. They then are able to apply the label Modernism to any who deny that ‘dogma’. This leads them to conclude that the crisis in the Church began during the pontificate of St Pius X, “since the pseudo-scientific assault on the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis appears to have entered the seminaries of Europe during or soon after the pontificate of St. Pius X”! In fact, as we have seen, the acceptance of long ages preceded that pontificate by many decades, and so they must move the crisis back much further.

Regardless, the ‘traditional Catholic dogma’ commits Catholic biblicists to impugning the orthodoxy of Catholics who were the very models of orthodoxy. Thus, Hugh Owen does not hesitate to use his own St Kolbe as an example of someone who was contaminated long before the Second Vatican Council. He even claims that the reason St Kolbe does not agree with him is that St Kolbe did not have sufficient time to reflect on the Immaculate Conception!

If St. Maximilian Kolbe had been allowed more time to ponder the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, we have no doubt that his meditation would have led him to the realization that the long ages of progressive creation, with its conflation of the order of creation with the order of providence, cannot be harmonized with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, rightly understood.

Taking his boldness in critiquing Catholic authority to an even greater level, Mr Owen disparages Fr Vigouroux for accepting long ages and accuses Fr Vigouroux of not adhering to the very documents that Fr Vigouroux signed. The reader will excuse me quoting this passage of Mr Owen at length:

Fr. Robinson cites Fr. Vigouroux approvingly as a theologian of recent times worthy of emulation, but this commendation will not bear close examination. Just 13 years after the anathema of Vatican I cited above and only two years after Pope Leo XIII wrote in Arcanum that the creation of Eve from Adam’s side on the sixth day of creation was “known to all” and impossible for anyone to deny, Fr. Vigouroux dared to assert that “geology” had “established” that God did not create the entire material universe in six days or in an instant but over long ages of time. Intoxicated with his confidence in the truth of the wild speculations of Lyellian geology, Vigouroux went on to boast that “it was reserved” to his time “to discover the true meaning of the cosmogonic days”—the days of Genesis 1. It is apparent from the content of the PBC decrees cited above that they do not support the claims of Fr. Vigouroux, and Fr. Robinson has not offered a single sound reason from theology or natural science why Catholics should not remain obedient to those authoritative decrees.

As mentioned above, one who wants to remain obedient to those authoritative decrees must precisely allow the possibility of long ages and accept the decision of the Catholic Magisterium that Young Earth Creationism is not Catholic dogma. One must also abstain from accusing perfectly orthodox Catholics of being “intoxicated with confidence in … wild speculations” in science because they believe in long ages, especially when they are such formidable authorities as Fr Vigouroux and St Maximilian Kolbe.

If Catholic biblicists want to establish that belief in long ages is somehow a creeping Modernism, then they must cite actual sources from the pre-Vatican II era that identified it as such. If, as I have found, no Catholic writers of the time saw that belief as being contrary to Catholic dogma or a sign of unorthodoxy, then they must stop seeing it as a threat to faith.

Moreover, if they refuse to admit the interpretation of magisterial documents given by the very signatory of those documents, then it should be clear that it is impossible to convince them of their error. Their position becomes unfalsifiable when they will not accept the known meaning of texts of the magisterium.

Protestant interpretation of Genesis

If we want to find the true origin of what is today known as the Young Earth Creationist movement, we must look outside the sacred precincts of the Catholic Church and discover it among American Evangelical Protestants.

The evangelical fundamentalist movement started in the USA at the dawn of the 20th century, and was a response, on the part of American Protestants, to the Protestant Modernist crisis that had its origin with the writings of German rationalists in the late 1700s. That movement in Europe gradually worked to undermine the entire credibility of the Bible, but did not cross over the Atlantic in full force until the late 1800s. This motivated a series of articles to be written by Protestant Evangelicals that were later published under the title The Fundamentals in the 1910s.

To their credit, the fundamentalists began by allowing for an ancient earth and contented themselves with only attacking Darwinian evolution on Biblical grounds. This all changed, however, with the Scopes trial that took place in 1925 in Tennessee. Here is how Barry Hankins describes the fundamentalist response to the trial’s aftermath:

In the three decades after the Scopes trial, the strategy of fundamentalists began to shift from antievolution to pro-Creation Science … John Whitcomb Jr. and Henry Morris developed the theory that came to be known as Creation Science as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Creation Science is part of “flood geology”, which was first developed by a Seventh-day Adventist pop scientist named George McGready Price (1870-1963). Creation Science proponents teach that the Old Testament event known as Noah’s flood is responsible for the earth’s geologic strata, giving the appearance that the earth is ancient when in fact the earth is less than ten thousand years old and was created pretty much as we see it today. (Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism: A Documentary Reader, p. 97)

It is this movement that dogmatizes a strictly literal and scientific reading of Genesis. The Creation Scientist exegetes set an inescapable dilemma before the believer: either accept our literal interpretation of the Bible or reject the Bible. As Whitcomb and Morris say:

When confronted with the consistent Biblical testimony to a universal Flood, the believer must certainly accept it as unquestionably true. … The decision then must be faced: either the Biblical record of the Flood is false and must be rejected or else the system of historical geology which has seemed to discredit it is wrong and must be changed. The latter alternative would seem to be the only one which a Biblically and scientifically instructed Christian could honestly take. (The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications, p. 118)

If we want to discover the real source of the other “dogmas” that Catholic biblicists claim to be taught authoritatively by the Fathers, Popes and Councils, it is not with the Church, but with this fundamentalist Creation Science movement. These dogmas include:

“That God stopped creating new kinds of creatures after He finished creating Adam and Eve and that we cannot extrapolate from the order of providence in which we are living back to the beginning of creation to explain the origins of man and the universe

That [human death], deformity, disease and man-harming natural disasters entered the world because of the Original Sin of Adam

That Noah’s Flood was a global flood which totally destroyed the face of the Earth so that it is impossible to extrapolate from observations of the present-day Earth to understand what the Earth was like before Noah’s Flood, much less what it was like in the first-created world before the Original Sin.”

It also includes novel interpretations of Scripture, not found in Catholic sources, such as interpreting 2 Pet 3:3-4 as being against uniformitarianism, when, in fact, it supports uniformitarianism.

In the dispute over how Genesis should be interpreted in light of the vast scientific developments in the past two centuries, there have been three main schools:

1. Catholic – Genesis should not be interpreted against the findings of science that the earth rotates around the sun, the universe is ancient, and a geographically universal Flood is physically impossible with the laws of nature as we know them.

2. Modernist – Genesis should be classed with the ancient mythologies of the non-Israelite peoples. It is a poetic story without historical or factual value.

3. Protestant fundamentalist – Genesis should be interpreted against the findings of science, especially concerning the age of the earth and universe, and the possibility of a globally universal Flood.

The first opinion may accurately be termed ‘Catholic’ because it is found everywhere in authentic sources of Catholic teaching: statements of the Magisterium, catechisms, seminary manuals, Biblical journals, and imprimatured books. After much searching, I simply cannot find the position of the ‘traditional Catholic doctrine’ of the Kolbe Center in the very sources that provide us that traditional Catholic doctrine. Because of this, it seems clear that the Kolbe Center is simply reinterpreting, against the facts, the third position as being Catholic and the first position as being non-Catholic.