“A little error in the beginning becomes a great error in the end”— St. Thomas Aquinas.

Against Polygenism.
By: Dr. Kevin Mark, Kolbe Center
April 22, 20230

“Would that We had not learned by experience how many ‘false apostles’ the present age has spawned! These are ‘deceitful workmen who transform themselves into apostles of Christ.’ Unless we are on our guard ‘they will destroy the understanding of the faithful as the serpent seduced Eve by his cleverness, and they will fall away from their simplicity which is in Christ’” (Diu Satis, On a Return to Gospel Principles, Pope Pius VII – 1800).

In a recent interview apologist Jimmy Akin defends polygenism as a permissible doctrine for Catholics.  Polygenism is the concept that mankind did not descend from only two original people, Adam and Eve, but from a larger group. Evolutionists generally suggest that humanity descended from at least 10,000 individuals. Of course, the doctrine of polygenism goes completely against the doctrine of monogenism, which teaches that all of mankind are descended from Adam and Eve. Monogenism has always been the teaching of the Catholic Church.

St. Pius X

In reality, the only way that one could abandon monogenism and embrace polygenism is if one throws Catholicity itself out the window. If we abandon the principle of St. Vincent of Lerins, that we must believe those Catholic doctrines which have “been believed everywhere, always, by all,” then we are free to allow Catholic doctrine to evolve into that which it never was, or even into the exact opposite of what it once was. This is what we are dealing with when one argues that a Catholic can switch from believing monogenism to polygenism. This is modernism, the synthesis of all heresies, a system of belief, or rather, disbelief, which Pope St. Pius X outlines in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, “On the Doctrine of the Modernists” (1907). He clarifies the modernist mentality:

“Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles…. Blind that they are, and leaders of the blind, inflated with a boastful science, they have reached that pitch of folly where they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true nature of the religious sentiment; with that new system of theirs they are seen to be under the sway of a blind and unchecked passion for novelty, thinking not at all of finding some solid foundation of truth, but despising the holy and apostolic traditions, they embrace other vain, futile, uncertain doctrines, condemned by the Church, on which, in the height of their vanity, they think they can rest and maintain truth itself. […] 26. To finish with this whole question of faith and its shoots, it remains to be seen, Venerable Brethren, what the Modernists have to say about their development. First of all they lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must change, and in this way they pass to what may be said to be, among the chief of their doctrines, that of Evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject – dogma, Church, worship, the Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself, and the penalty of disobedience is death.”

Now to be charitable, I am not suggesting that Jimmy Akin is intentionally promoting modernism.  I suspect that Jimmy Akin believes he is acting in accordance with modern Catholic principles and he would bristle at being compared to a modernist. It is hard to deny, however, that Jimmy Akin is an evolutionist and essentially believes that the Catholic faith and its doctrines should evolve with time.

… Continue