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Pope St. Pius X

Editors note: This is part 3 of a five part series of articles on the topic, by Hugh Owen. Part 1 and Part 2 can be found on LifeSiteNews.

Part III

The Catholic Church: Defender of the oppressed victims of evolutionist zealotry

(LifeSiteNews) — While the intellectual elite of the Western world celebrated the Piltdown fraud as “proof” of their superiority to the rest of mankind, the leaders of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church remained unmoved by the flood of propaganda that flowed out of the organs of the mass media throughout the western world. We might do well to ponder the response of Pope St. Pius X to the news of Piltdown Man, if it reached him—as it probably did—in Rome in 1912. Since he had mandated the teaching of the Roman Catechism as the gold standard for teaching the Faith, we have no doubt that he rejected the bogus claim that Darwin’s theory had been “proven true”—not because he had examined the claim in detail, but because he knew from Divine Revelation that the first human beings had been created supernaturally, body and soul, as Pope Leo XIII, his predecessor, had taught so beautifully in his encyclical Arcanum on Holy Marriage a generation before.

We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep.

For Pope St. Pius X and Pope Leo XIII—as for all of their predecessors back to St. Peter, and for all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church—the question of man’s origin was not a proper subject for natural science but for historical theology. Thus, no forensic evidence, no matter how impressive it might appear to someone operating within a uniformitarian naturalistic framework, could ever prompt them to doubt the truth of man’s supernatural origin by special creation. Yet, to the intellectual elite of the early twentieth century—those who already controlled the secular universities and were gradually taking control of Catholic universities and seminaries—to question Piltdown Man and other fossil evidence for human evolution was most definitely to indulge in “conspiracy theory.” That is why as early as 1922 the American Association for the Advancement of Science passed a resolution that “the evidences in favor of the evolution of man are sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the world.” The claim was false, of course, as there were courageous natural scientists of great stature all over the world who were not afraid to say that the Emperor of Evolution was not wearing any clothes—like Nobel Prize winner for biochemistry Sir Ernst Chain who boldly proclaimed that “evolution was a theory without evidence and against the facts.” But as the peer pressure to profess faith in the evolutionary myth of origins mounted, fewer and fewer scientists had the courage to openly resist the evolutionist propaganda.

As the principal earthly guardian of the supernatural faith of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church, St. Pius X realized that evolutionism attacked the very foundations of the Christian religion. In 1907, in his most important encyclical Pascendi, the Pope warned that the Church was now confronted with the worst heresy She had ever faced—modernism—and that “evolution” was, in his words, “the principal doctrine of the modernists.” In his prophetic encyclical, the Pope warned that if modernists took control of Church institutions, they would destroy everything, as they would insist that the sacred liturgy, canon law, and even the Church’s doctrines would need to be updated to adapt to the new stage of evolution that mankind had reached in the twentieth century.

This saintly Pope who retained his faith in the sacred history of Genesis stood in solidarity with all of the suffering peoples of mankind—from the victims of the Armenian genocide to the victims of the African slave trade. Thus, he exemplified the only true cure for racism—a firm faith in the special creation of man and the universal brotherhood of all human beings as the children of God, on the natural level through their first parents Adam and Eve and on the supernatural level through their incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ through the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. And as the intellectual elite of the once-Christian world abandoned their traditional faith in the special creation of Adam and Eve and the universal brotherhood of mankind in favor of evolution-based modernism, among world leaders the Vicar of Christ on earth stood almost alone against successive waves of abominations perpetrated by the self-identified “more fit” members of humanity against the “less fit.”

‘The principal doctrine of the Modernists’ and the African holocaust

While the successors of St. Peter defended the dignity of all the children of Adam in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of creation, the “principal doctrine” of the modernists which had begun to destroy the Faith from within in Europe and North America began to physically destroy whole peoples in Africa through its true believers. As author Bill Johnson explains:

Germans, many indoctrinated in Social Darwinian ideas, colonized South West Africa (Namibia today) in the 1880s. They generally regarded the [native] Herero people as primitive and frequently referred to them as ‘subhuman’ and ‘baboons.’ According to one missionary living at that time:

The real cause of bitterness among the Hereros toward the Germans is without question the fact that the average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (‘baboon’ being their favorite term for the natives) and treats them like animals. The settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as he is useful to the white man. It follows that the whites value their horses and even their oxen more than they value the natives.

Many Germans also perpetrated inhumane acts toward the Herero: they progressively seized their land and cattle, shot people for no reason at all, sexually abused and raped the women, and because of their interest in evolutionary theory and missing links they dug up the graves of the Herero’s ancestors and stole their skulls. Not surprisingly, localized reactions to this from the Herero led to efforts to drive the Germans out of their land.

Eventually, General Lothar von Trotha was sent to Namibia to quash the rebellion and utterly destroy the Herero. Von Trotha made it abundantly clear that the decision to exterminate was based on a Darwinian worldview, “I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain,” and in a local newspaper von Trotha made the following comment:

At the outset, we cannot do without the natives [i.e., hard labor]. But they finally have to melt away. Where the climate allows the white man to work, philanthropic views cannot banish Darwin’s law ‘survival of the fittest.”

Von Trotha and his troops didn’t even spare the native women and children. The Germans’ most effective method of annihilation was forcing the Herero into the desert and polluting the wells, causing most to die of thirst. German colonial rule succeeded in annihilating 75% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama. Before the war the Herero were 80,000 strong, and after the war only 20,000 remained. The Nama people, a southern tribe that entered the war almost a year later due to similar circumstances, were reduced from 20,000 to 10,000. The remaining Herero, as well as the Nama, were sent to concentration camps (e.g. Shark Island) where many more died due to abuse and hard labor. The body parts of these dead prisoners were used in racial studies trying to prove the inferiority of blacks . . .

Other racial studies performed in Namibia influenced racial policy in Germany for decades to come. Eugen Fischer, a geneticist and avid eugenicist, was sent to Namibia for one main purpose—to evaluate the physical characteristics and intelligence of several hundred inter-racial children and prove that inter-racial relations would be detrimental to European culture. It was Fischer’s work that led to the victimization and sterilization of blacks (and other groups) in the Third Reich.

The African holocaust began in Namibia, but it swiftly spread next door to the Church in Uganda—to Tanzania. As St. Charles Lwanga and his companions gave their lives for the Faith which had taught them that they were descended from the specially-created first parents of all mankind and had become children of God by adoption through the Blood of the Lamb, zealous believers in microbe-to-man evolution scoffed at this “unscientific” faith and subjugated huge swathes of the African continent. Bill Johnson explains:

The prime mover for Germany in East Africa in the 1880s was Carl Peters, a man whose thinking was shaped by Schopenhauer and Darwin. Peters was especially fond of Darwin and made repeated reference to him in his writings. Concerning the ‘struggle for existence’ and the implication of German expansion, Peters wrote:

Steam and electricity have built colossal bridges over which men have been moved into immediate proximity to each other. The planet already looks too small against the background of the restless roving spirit which has totally inflamed the Germanic race … The struggle for existence is more passionate than ever.

In East Africa, Peters acquired land three times the size of Germany—and as was the case in Namibia, the African’s only purpose for existence was to serve the European, “The negro is a born slave who needs his despot as the opium smoker needs his pipe.” And fellow Germans were frequently asked by Peters, “Haven’t you shot a negro yet?” Peters had a reputation as a moral monster. Even the natives called him—“Mkono-wa-damu,” or “man-with-blood-stained-hands.” Peters was known for leaving a trail of destruction wherever he went. One Danish explorer, whose expedition followed the same path as one of Peter’s expeditions, wrote:

On every side I came on traces of war. In the neighborhood of Obangi I found even villages that had been destroyed by fire, and everywhere skeletons of men, women, and children, those of women and children being especially numerous… It was almost impossible for me to procure the necessary rice for my people, for as soon as we approached the whole populace fled panic-stricken. The natives were terrified at my white face, for the last white man they had seen was Dr. Peters.

Despite his disregard for blacks, Peters possessed a harem of black women. In one case, there was suspicion that one of his women had sexual relations with a young native. Peters had the young man hung and the woman was flogged daily until her back looked like a piece of chopped meat. After a failed escape attempt the woman was hung as well. It was this incident that caused the German government to bring charges against Peters. One day after the hearing in the Reichstag, a German newspaper commented on the Peters affair:

[Germany] has found its Menelik in a German—in a ‘truly Teutonic man,’ an enraged ‘Aryan,’ who wishes to destroy all Jews, but, for a lack of Jews over there in Africa, shoots Negroes dead like sparrows and hangs Negro girls for his own pleasure after they have satisfied his desires . . .

Needless to say, such atrocities contributed to a number of uprisings by the natives. The two most significant uprisings occurred in the South—the Wahehe Rebellion (1891–1898) and the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–1907). The Wahehe fought a long and courageous war, but finally surrendered when the leader committed suicide to avoid capture. In the Maji Maji (i.e., sacred water), many native groups were duped by their religious leaders into believing that German bullets would turn into water. The Germans fought ruthlessly. They torched the natives’ villages and food supply, causing a severe famine in the land. It has been estimated that the number of deaths from the Maji Maji Rebellion and its aftermath was 250,000—300,000.  In the midst of these horrors, the principal opponents of “White Supremacy” in Africa and elsewhere were not the evolutionists but the Christians who held fast to the Catholic doctrine of creation and the traditional reading of the sacred history of Genesis.

Hugh Owen is the convert son of Sir David Owen, the first Secretary General of International  Planned Parenthood Federation. He is also the founder and director of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, the producer of the DVD series “Foundations Restored,” which provides a comprehensive defense of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation from the perspective of theology, philosophy and natural science and which exposes the fatal flaws in the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis in its theistic and atheistic forms.  He can be reached through the Kolbe website www.kolbecenter.org or through the Foundations Restored website where the first two episodes of the DVD series can be viewed gratis: www.foundationsrestored.com