Publisher's Synopsis
This book updated April 2021. Bishop Robert Barron, the world-famous DVD and YouTube evangelist, is Chairman of the U.S. Bishops' Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis. At the U.S. Bishops' Conference meeting in June 2019 he spoke of the massive apostasy of Catholic youth and cited statistics such as "half the kids we baptized and confirmed in the last 30 years are now ex-Catholics or unaffiliated." To put that into perspective, he said that "one out of six millennials in the U.S. is now a former Catholic." He claimed that they simply no longer believe the Church's teachings and called that "the bitter fruit of the dumbing down of our faith" as it has been presented in catechesis and apologetics.This book shows that it is the Catholic scholars and education leaders such as Bishop Barron who are worthy of blame for that situation. Such leaders have adopted the secular Humanist paradigm regarding cosmic and biological origins in contrast to the Genesis account that Barron calls "very naive mythological cosmology." He asks: "Who can take it seriously?" Whether it is fear of being considered "anti-science" or just because of the evolutionary propaganda they learned in school and believe, scholars have attempted to shore up Catholicism as a credible belief by accepting the evolutionary hypothesis as a proved fact and then tried to "baptize" it by asserting that "God did it." Priests doing that obviously find it is true for them. But is it actually true? Truth used to matter to Catholics. It doesn't work; the kids don't "buy" it and it undermines the whole Bible. They want to know where they came from, why they are here and where they are going. The current crop of Catholic educators has yielded to the school and the culture to provide those answers.The Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is inerrant. If one can say about the beginning of the Bible "Who can take it seriously," is the Bible only "conditionally inerrant?" Is anything else "very naïve?" Who decides if not the Church? The scholars? If the Chairman of the Bishops' Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis asks "Who can take it [the beginning of the Bible] seriously?", how can he expect people to take the rest of the Bible seriously when much of it asserts "truths" that impinge on one's moral autonomy? Meticulous social research produced by the decades-long "National Study of Youth and Religion" led by Christian Smith, Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, shows that many young Catholics are losing their faith because of what they see as a conflict between the Bible and (faux) science. As one of the teens interviewed by Christian Smith during his massive research project put it: "I mean there is proven [scientific] fact and then there is what's written in the Bible-and they don't match up. So it's kinda whatever you wanna believe: there is fact and there is a book, and some people just don't wanna believe the truth [of science]."This book provides a critical analysis of the scholars' catechesis which can be summarized as: "Our universe and our existence did happen by evolution as scientists say, that is, through random chance mutations of material but unbeknown to them, God guided it and made sure it had that certain amount of 'specificity' for it to have worked out." Proposed and explained by the author is a plan to revive Catholic catechesis by moving on from the enigma-riddled "big bang" cosmology of the 20th Century and the 19th Century inference-based biology of Darwinism that has been largely debunked. It is proposed to teach again the "forgotten" creation doctrines combined with the 21st Century natural science that proves intelligent design is more credible than the mere appearance of design that happened by chance. Such a catechesis would restore the integrity and harmony of so many Catholic teachings that are based on Scripture.
