Coincidentally, Kolbe Center posted this on Sunday;This photograph has been used to indoctrinate generations of Catholics into the false notion that Fr. Georges Lemaitre was a great Catholic scientist who exemplified the way that Catholic intellectuals can reconcile the legitimate discoveries of modern science, like the origins of the cosmos in terms of the Big Bang hypothesis, with the essential elements of Catholic doctrine.
Pope Pius XII and Monsignor Georges Lemaitre
Christopher De Vos, a member of our leadership team, and the director of the Mary Michael Machabee Institute, has almost completed a video production which will explode the myth of Monsignor Lemaitre as an exemplary Catholic scientist. In the meantime, he has given me permission to quote from the first part of the video script which will hopefully help to destroy this false icon of evolution once and for all.
The Myth of Fr. Lemaitre, the Peacemaker between Religion and Science
Fr. Georges Lemaître is widely respected in both Catholic and secular circles. Born in 1894 and educated at the Catholic University of Louvain and later at Harvard, Lemaître engaged with some of the most prominent scientists of his time, including Einstein and Hubble. He has become a symbol of the idea that "religion and science are never in conflict." Many Catholics today see the "Big Bang"—a model developed by Lemaître—as evidence of Creation, offering a natural proof of a beginning and affirming the existence of a Creator. However, Lemaître himself firmly opposed this interpretation, emphasizing in his writings that the Big Bang was never intended to demonstrate Creation.
As we uncover these lesser-known aspects of Fr. Lemaître’s work, it becomes clear that assuming his conclusions align with the Catholic faith simply because he was a priest is a significant mistake. One should not presume that his theories are compatible with the Church’s perennial doctrines, as his continual violations of admonitions given in papal encyclicals and elsewhere will make clear.
Like the ancient atomists and the deists of recent centuries, Lemaître proposed ideas grounded in a naturalistic view of the universe.
Lemaître wrote:
'In Laplace’s determinism [that a solar-system evolved], everything is written, evolution is similar to the implacable rotation of a recorded magnetic tape or the engraved spiral of a phonograph disc. Everything that would be heard would have been read from the tape or the disc. It is quite another story with the advent of modern physics and, according to the present theory these concepts should also apply to the universe, at least to the beginning of its evolution. This beginning is perfectly simple, indivisible, undifferentiated, “atomic” in the Greek sense of this world. The world differentiates as it evolves; it does not consist in the spinning out, the decoding of a recording. Rather it consists in a song, each note of which is new and unpredictable. The world made itself and made itself randomly.'
Scientistically- liberated Catholics like Fr. Lemaître, often seek to shield their research from any intrusion by Church doctrine, avoiding alleged ecclesiastical interference hindering their false philosophies from posing as natural science. However, this liberal approach has led to ideas that subtly undermine Catholic doctrine and the Church’s interpretation of Revelation.
These dangerous ideas are promoted by modern media and educational institutions, which claim to base their philosophic positions in a natural scientific or empirically based reality. These influences often pressure the Church and her theology to conform to their errors. St. Pius X warned of this in his first encyclical:
We will use the greatest diligence to prevent members of the clergy from being drawn into the snares of a certain new and fallacious science, which savors not of Christ but, with masked and cunning arguments, seeks to open the door to rationalism and semi-rationalism.Fr. Lemaitre Denies the Dogma of Scriptural InerrancyOur examination of Fr. Lemaître as a modernist thinker will challenge many, but it is vital for Catholics to understand why his writings and novel ideas conflict with traditional Church teachings. For example, in 1934, Lemaître stated:The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less — some more than others — on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors in historic and scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if the errors related to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them . . . The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects, is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.How does this compare to Pope St. Pius X’s critique of modernist interpretations in Pascendi Dominici Gregis?In the Sacred Books there are many passages referring to science or history where, according to them, manifest errors are to be found. But, they say, the subject of these books is not science or history, but only religion and morals. In them history and science serve only as a species of covering to enable the religious and moral experiences wrapped up in them to penetrate more readily among the masses.Pope Benedict XV also addressed these errors in his 1920 encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus:Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest - things concerning "profane knowledge," the garments in which Divine truth is presented - God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author's greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science!
Decades earlier, Pope Leo XIII firmly condemned such errors, stating that they are “absolutely wrong and forbidden” and “cannot be tolerated.”
It is a lamentable fact that there are many who with great labour carry out and publish investigations on the monuments of antiquity [archaeology]… whose chief purpose in all this is too often to find mistakes in the sacred writings and so to shake and weaken their authority. Some of these writers display not only extreme hostility, but the greatest unfairness; in their eyes a profane book or ancient docuмent is accepted without hesitation, whilst the Scripture, if they only find in it a suspicion of error, is set down with the slightest possible discussion as quite untrustworthy… But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond… this system cannot be tolerated.The father of the modernists, Fr. Loisy, before being excommunicated, ridiculed the historical reality of Genesis. Fr. Lemaitre, a staunch modernist, filled the void left by Fr. Loisy. Let Catholics today avoid the love of novelty and not overlook these papal condemnations regarding the interpretation of Holy Writ for the good of souls.We will notify you as soon as Christopher’s video on Fr. Lemaitre is available for viewing on his website. In the meantime, please use the information in this newsletter to disabuse your Catholic friends and family of the notion that Fr. Lemaitre exemplified the ideal of a great Catholic scientist. Indeed, it would show much more charity to Fr. Lemaitre if we were to ask our fellow Catholics to enter into eternity in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and beg Our Lord to grant him the grace of true repentance and conversion in his last moments. Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost guide us into all the Truth!Yours in Christ through the Holy Theotokos in union with St. Joseph,Hugh Owen
Topic: The Big Bang Heresy (Read 661 times)