Originally published at crisis magazine
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
