Later this month a conference promising to lead Catholics from “diabolical deception to [the] restoration of truth” will be held in Wisconsin. The headline speaker is Fr. Chad Ripperger, predictably leading Where Peter Is founder Mike Lewis to pen another unhinged rant against Fr. Ripperger, this time calling him “wildly heterodox, superstitious, and conspiratorial.” Last week we published an excellent article by Michael Hitchborn demolishing a previous Lewis article attacking the well-known priest.
Though it always feels right to disagree with Lewis, I do have serious reservations about this “Restore Truth Conference.” Other speakers at the conference include Hugh Owen, director of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, and Robert Sungenis, longtime Catholic apologist. The Kolbe Center advocates for a “traditional doctrine of creation”, by which it means it supports the “young earth” hypothesis (i.e., the earth was created only around 6,000 years ago), and Sungenis is a vocal proponent of geocentrism. (Owen and many people associated with the Kolbe Center also support geocentrism, although not as dogmatically as Sungenis does.) This conference, then, promises to push both young earth and geocentrism points of view as Catholic truth. This is as pseudo-scientific as many of the atheist attempts to use scientific findings to push a purely materialistic outlook. But more importantly, it opposes the actual traditional approach of the Church to scientific discoveries.
The conference’s promotional materials promise it will take aim at two evils: Darwinian evolution1 and “alien deception.” I agree that Catholics should have deep concerns about both. Darwinian evolution, specifically biological macroevolution in both its original and its later “neo-Darwinian” forms, has been used for the past 150 years to advance a fundamentally anti-Catholic worldview, one that rejects the role of God in our universe. And as it is popularly understood and taught, Darwinian evolution has little actual scientific evidence to support it.
Likewise, the modern UFO movement has deceived many. Recently on the Crisis Point podcast I spoke with Teresa Yanaros, who was actively involved in this movement before returning to her Catholic Faith. As a result of her firsthand experience, she believes there’s no question that most purported alien encounters are actually encounters with demonic forces.
If the Restore Truth Conference was simply warning against the dangers of Darwinian evolution and the UFO movement, I wouldn’t voice my reservations. But having Owen and Sungenis as speakers tells me that the solution being proposed—teaching that a young earth (Owen) and geocentrism (Sungenis) is “Catholic teaching,” as both Owen and Sungenis do—will also lead people astray, just in a different direction. A faithful Catholic can reject Darwinian evolution while also realizing that both a young earth and geocentrism are not scientifically viable alternatives.
In this article I can’t detail all the arguments that Owen and Sungenis present to expound their views (see Owen’s Kolbe Center and Sungenis’s Catholic Apologetics International for details), but both follow the same basic outline, which contains two main points: first that their view is the only one consistent with a literal interpretation of Sacred Scripture; and second, that their view matches the “consensus of the Church Fathers.” Starting from these two points, they then try to find purportedly “scientific” evidence to support their views. To disagree with them means, apparently, going against both Scripture and the Fathers, which no good Catholic wants to do.
This line of argumentation is particularly attractive to traditional Catholics, because we sincerely lament the jettisoning of both Scripture and the Fathers in recent decades in favor of modern fads. So anyone who argues that the young earth and geocentric views fell at the hands of the same movement that swept away so many traditional teachings finds a receptive audience. There’s just this little problem, however: Owen’s and Sungenis’s arguments aren’t traditional at all. The Church decided centuries ago that their way of approaching Scripture and the Fathers is a faulty methodology.
A recent book reveals this clearly: The Case of Galileo and the Church by Walter Cardinal Brandmüller. In this book Brandmüller details the history of the geocentrism/heliocentrism debate in the Church from its origins in the 16th century to its resolution in the early 19th century. Cardinal Brandmüller is perhaps most known now as one of the four “dubia Cardinals,” who sent questions to Pope Francis about Amoris laetitia that went unanswered. Needless to say, his orthodoxy and love for the Church are unassailable. Beyond the fascinating historical account of the famous Galileo affair, Brandmüller’s book provides a further service: it details how Catholics should approach new scientific discoveries. And spoiler: it’s not how Owen and Sungenis approach them.
As is well known, before the 16th century, the dominant cosmological theory was that of Ptolemy, the 2nd century mathematician who argued that the earth was motionless and that the sun revolved around it. Numerous Scriptural verses reference a motionless earth, and so early Christians, like everyone else, accepted Ptolemy’s geocentric system. It was, in other words, in keeping with a literal interpretation of the Bible and the “consensus of the Fathers.”
In the 16th century, however, the Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus proposed an alternative theory: the earth circles the sun, i.e., heliocentrism. While modern mythology suggests that the immediate reaction of the Church was to reject this theory and burn anyone at the stake who might advance it, the reality is that many Catholics, including members of the hierarchy, were open to it.2 What concerned Church officials was the encroachment of this scientific idea into theological waters, in which an (at that time) unproven scientific theory would be used to contradict a long-held interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
In the early 17th century, Catholic scientist Galileo Galilei ran into trouble with the Church when he promoted the Copernican system, and, most importantly, argued that previous interpretations of Scripture were wrong. In response, the Congregation of the Index in 1616 declared that the new teaching about the movement of the earth was “altogether opposed to Sacred Scripture” and demanded that Galileo stop publicly advocating for it as a proven theory. In 1633 Galileo went on trial before the Holy Office, which condemned him and declared that the theory that “the sun is the center of the earth’s orbit and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the universe [is]…false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scriptures.” Galileo’s book, along with some other books advocating for heliocentrism, were put on the Index.
While this famous trial provided fodder for anti-Catholics for centuries, what is less well-known is its eventual resolution in 1820, a resolution that Cardinal Brandmüller details and which helps modern Catholics approach scientific discoveries with a proper, and dare I say traditional, Catholic outlook.
It’s important to note that the Church’s position in Galileo’s time was sound and was advocated by St. Robert Bellarmine: without real proof, we will stick with what Scripture appears to say and what all the Church Fathers believed. But also note that Bellarmine admitted that if science should prove it otherwise, the Church will need to rethink the common Scriptural interpretation. This is what happened: between Galileo’s trial and the early 19th century, scientific consensus coalesced around a heliocentric cosmology. Even most Catholic scholars accepted it, because, unlike in Galileo’s time, there were now sufficient proofs for it.
So, in 1820, the stage was set for the Church to officially review the Galileo affair and reconsider the geocentric interpretation of Scripture. The spark was a book to be published by Catholic scientist Giuseppe Settele that accepted the Copernican cosmology as proven. Since the middle of the 18th century the ban on such books had been relaxed, but no one had asked for an official imprimatur from Rome for such a book. Settele did. Even though most Catholics at this time accepted heliocentrism, the man in charge of giving out the imprimatur, Fr. Filippo Anfossi, did not. Anfossi still believed that heliocentrism went against a literal interpretation of Scripture and opposed the consensus of the fathers. He didn’t care about any scientific proofs; all that mattered to him was whether he thought it was consistent with Scripture and the Fathers. He refused the imprimatur. Settele challenged this decision with the Holy Office, thus initiating an ecclesial battle that included many high-ranking officials including Pope Pius VII and would eventually resolve the issue definitively.
The case became a media sensation, for even non-Catholics understood its importance in determining how Catholics would approach new scientific discoveries going forward. Would the Church refuse to accept what was now scientifically proven, or would she be willing to recognize that the situation was now different than it was in Galileo’s time? Most bishops and priests involved in the case were on the side of Settele and felt that Anfossi’s refusal was embarrassing for the Church. Since heliocentrism was accepted by almost everyone at this time—and most importantly, had been proven definitively since Galileo’s time—they wanted a way for the Church to leave the Galileo affair behind. After a good deal of back-and-forth (Anfossi was a formidable defender of his beliefs), the Church granted the imprimatur and soon afterwards took all pro-heliocentric books off the Index. Everybody understood this as the Church’s formal acceptance of the heliocentric view as consistent with Sacred Scripture, in spite of her long history of interpreting it geocentrically.
