Two Items -
ARE OTHER PLANETS INHABITED? - from Our Glorious Popes
Saint Boniface (the Apostle of Germany), never failed to keep in close touch with Pope Zachary, and each was to the other a reserve of strength and inspiration. There is among their correspondence a docuмent of especial interest to us in the light of all the conjecture there has been over the past few years on the possibility of “inhabited planets” other than our own.
Saint Boniface complained to the Pope that an Irish priest named Virgilius was disturbing men’s minds by teaching “that there was another world, other men on another planet beneath the earth, another sun, and another moon.”
“If it is well proved that Virgilius has spoken thus,” Saint Zachary wrote, “you must convene a council and expel him from the Church. We are addressing to this same Virgilius letters of evocation, so that he may be minutely questioned in our presence and, if found guilty of holding false doctrine, he may be sentenced to canonical punishment.”
It transpired that in the end it was not necessary for Saint Zachary to condemn Virgilius, for the priest completely yielded to the correction and counsel of his Holy Father and went on, in the light of pure and chaste theology, to sanctify himself. He became bishop of Salzburg, and, glorious to relate, lived a life of such holiness and heroism that he was canonized by Pope Gregory IX.
But Pope Saint Zachary did denounce in this connection, “certain heretics who maintained the existence of a race of men not descended from Adam and not ransomed by Christ.”
It should be added, because of the controversy which later centered around it, that this condemnation of Pope Zachary’s was not intended to mean that he condemned the opinion that the world was round and that men might easily be living on the other side of it – as some have tried to make out – for both Pope Zachary and Saint Boniface were well acquainted with the fact that the earth was round and one of the Doctors of the Church, the Venerable Bede, had expressly taught so. But he did condemn, and we have his words for it, the teaching of the existence of a race of men – on another planet – who were not, and who could not have been, descended from Adam and who were not ransomed by Christ.
AGAINST EVOLUTION – Fr. Leonard Feeney, MICM
No Catholic should believe in the evolution of the human body.
There is no accepted theory of the evolution of the human body from any lower form of life which will allow that only one man evolved, and that the whole human race originated from the body of that one man. Hence, evolution, basically and completely, denies defined Catholic Faith.
There is not a single evolutionist who will allow that the body of the first woman was formed from the body of the first man. But it is of the Faith, from clear Scripture, that this is so. Were the evolution of the human body to be effected from the body of an ape, it would be required of a human soul that it fulfill the double function of “de-aping” the animal and establishing the man. No Catholic thinker of any sanity could possibly explain a substantial form in such a performance.
The theory that the human body might have evolved from the body of an ape vitiates and destroys all true notion of Original Sin. There is no allowance in it for the preternatural gifts of immortality, impassibility, and integrity with which the first man was endowed.
A belief of any kind in the evolution of the human body from a lower animal makes one completely skeptical of the narrative of the first chapter of Genesis. It immediately drives one to speculate on the age of the world in terms of millions and even billions of years.
The theory of evolution gives Our Blessed Lord and Our Blessed Lady, both, a simian ancestry.
Any Catholic who believes in the evolution of the human body does not have the Catholic Faith. His heresy will some day be anathematized by a courageous pope.