Aloha: ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Hawaiian pizza?

 

In the Great Pizza debate there is really only one main question: Is Hawaiian pizza a delight or an abomination?

Sure, there are some subsidiary questions connoisseurs ask about, such as whether anthracite coal-fired or wood-fired ovens bakes a better pizza pie, although it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison because the answer partly depends on the kind of cheese topping and other ingredients, or whether the best pizzas in North America come out of a handful of pizza joints in New York City or New Haven, Connecticut? That sort of thing.

Coal-fired ovens typically run between 800°F and 1,000°F, sometimes even higher, according to Pizza Today, the industry’s leading trade magazine, which was launched in 1984 by pizzeria owner Gerry Durnell in the tiny town of Santa Claus, Indiana.

Durnell had worked his way through college as a rock and roll disc jokey, a TV cameraman, and as an announcer for the Ozark Jubilee. He was running an ice cream shop in Santa Claus, in southwestern Indiana, not too far from the Kentucky state line , when he decided to add baking pizzas to his restaurant menu.

In a Dec. 15, 2104 article in Pizza Today, headlined “Respecting the Craft: Wood vs. Coal,” Tony Gemignani, who got his start in 1991 as a pizza thrower at his brother’s Pyzano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley, California, notes “specialty cheese like a dry mozzarella, also known as a Caprese loaf, is common. This cheese is typically sliced and applied before the sauce. Common pizzas are tomato pies, clam and garlic, and sausage, says Gemignani, the first and only Triple Crown winner to date for baking at the International Pizza Championships in Lecce, Italy. “When you’re cooking at such a high temperature, even higher than a wood-fired oven,” he says, “you still have a longer bake time because a coal oven doesn’t have a high flame like a wood-fired oven. The pizza is typically 16 to 18 inches in diameter and is charred yet pliable. It has a slight crispness, with some stability.

“A wood-fired oven typically runs between 650°F and 900°F. At 900°F, pizzas can cook in 60 to 90 seconds. Fresh mozzarella and buffalo mozz are typically used. The pizzas that come from these ovens are typically 11 to 13 inches in diameter and come out of the ovens charred, soft, delicate and sometimes wet (even soupy at times). They are not recommended for delivery.

“When it comes to the price of wood and coal, they are very similar.”

Lombardi’s (a favourite of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso) was founded in 1905 on Spring Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan in New York City, and is the oldest pizzeria in the United States. While it is generally agreed pizza originated in Italy, the date of its invention is hard to pin down with exactitude. 

Neapolitan pizza is first mentioned by name in the late 18th century, and that’s usually considered to be the origin date for pizza, but a minority opinion in recent years is that pizza dates back to 997 in the 10th century, when it appears on a Latin list of foods to be supplied annually at Christmas and Easter as a tithe to the archbishops of Gaeta (“whether to us or our successors”) in central Italy, payable by the tenants of a mill on the nearby Garigliano River.

In support of the later Naples origins of pizza theory, an often recounted story holds that on June 11, 1889, to honour the Queen consort of Italy, Margherita of Savoy, the Neapolitan pizza-maker Raffaele Esposito created the “Pizza Margherita”, a pizza garnished with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil, to represent the national colours of Italy as on the Italian flag.

Carol Helstosky, an associate professor of history at the University of Denver, and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told CBC Radio earlier this year that “pizza never had that great a reputation throughout much of its history. As people tried pizza, it had its origins in Naples, right, in the 17th century. And as people outside of Naples, even other Italians or foreigners, tried pizza they reacted with absolute disgust. I believe American inventor Samuel Morse, when he visited Naples and tried pizza, he described that as a type of ‘nauseous cake.'”

In Naples, Helstosky says, there were several different types of pizza, but “mostly pizza was consumed by the poorest of the Neapolitans – soldiers, workers, families who didn’t have access to kitchens and purchased cheap street food. This was also a place where people could eat pasta street side, and so pizza would be a cheap takeaway snack. And so the pizzaiolo would make pizza out of whatever ingredients he happened to have on hand. Near Naples, tomatoes were certainly popular but also fish. And then some mozzarella made out of buffalo milk, fresh herbs like basil or oregano. Whatever was on hand would be sprinkled on top of a pizza.”

Morse, who hardly tried to telegraph his opinion on the matter, apparently was of a minority view on the subject of pizza, which in the 21st century is, if not quite a universal dish worldwide, well, at least and international dish. In March 2015, Pope Francis told Valentina Alazraki, the veteran Vatican correspondent for Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa,  the only thing he really missed after two years as pope was the ability “to go out to a pizzeria and eat a pizza,” adding that even as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires he was free to roam the streets, particularly to visit parishes (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/).

Almost half the population of Buenos Aires can rightfully claim Italian heritage, so it is little surprise the Argentinian capital is so well-known for its Napoletana pizza. “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza,” Pope Francis said, comparing his life now to how it was when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “In Buenos Aires I was a rover. I moved between parishes and certainly this habit has changed. It has been hard work to change. But you get used to it,”  Pope Francis told Alazraki.

Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

I also recall writing on Oshawa’s “Share Your Memories” webpage that “in keeping with the spirit of the thing, my own comment Feb. 3 [2014] reads, ‘Pepi’s Pizza, eh? Simcoe and John streets. I had a friend who worked there circa 1973-74. I still have fond memories of the pepperoni pizza … greasy, yes, sure. But superb also.’”

Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

In 2008, Brian Alger acquired the then-expired trademark to Mother’s Pizza – one of his favourite childhood brands – and along with another entrepreneur, Geeve Sandhu, re-opened April 1, 2013 at 701 Queenston Rd. in Hamilton, Ont.

When Sam Panopoulos emigrated, along with his two brothers, when he was 20, from Greece to Canada in 1954, pizza was an oddity. “Pizza wasn’t in Canada – nowhere,” he told CBC Radio’s As It Happens last February.

“At the time, the food was available in Detroit and was slowly making its way to neighbouring Windsor, Ont., not far from Chatham, Ont., the small town where Panopoulos had settled and opened a restaurant,” CBC reported.

“When visiting Windsor, he dined on pizza and decided to try making it at home. ‘Those days, the main thing was mushrooms, bacon and pepperoni. There was nothing else going on the pizza,'” said Panopoulos.

“Inspired by a can of pineapple on his shelf, he took a chance and tossed the fruit on his pizza. The year was 1962. Hawaiian pizza had arrived at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

“We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste,” Panopoulos told the BBC News last February. “We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments.

“Customers ended up loving the savoury sweetness of the dish.

“The creation also capitalized on the mid-century tiki trend, which popularized Polynesian culture in North America.

“Nobody liked it at first,” said Panopoulos. “Those days nobody was mixing sweets and sours and all that. It was plain, plain food.”

That debate continues 55 years later. Icelandic President Guðni Th. Jó­hann­es­son made world headlines earlier this year at a university in Iceland, in a story that became known as “Pineapplegate” after he was asked  whimsical question about his views on pineapple as a topping on pizza and he responded in a lighthearted way that he thought that it should be banned and that he was “fundamentally opposed” to pineapple on pizza and suggested. “I like pineapple, just not on pizza. But I can’t make laws that make it illegal for people to put pineapples on their pizzas,” Guðni said. “I am happy I don’t have that authority, presidents shouldn’t be tyrants. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where those in my position could ban things they don’t like. But I recommend putting seafood on pizza.”

Sam Panopoulos, who was 83, died last month. “From what I have read, Sam was a decent man with a good sense of humour,” Guðni wrote on Facebook. “Indirectly you could say we crossed paths after I jokingly (yeah, right) said that this particular topping should be banned.”

Me? Well, I don’t know that I tried any kind of pizza until maybe the early 1970s when I was 13 or 14. My parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, although I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

I think I may have had my first Hawaiian pizza in the late spring or early summer of 1976, at the very, very end of my Oshawa Catholic High School Grade 13 days, on a picnic table at Lakeview Park in the south end of Oshawa on the north shore of Lake Ontario, hanging out in those last glorious days of high school freedom with my comrades in numerous adventures, both big and small, Ann Marie (a.k.a. Annie and A.M.) McDermott, and Gerry Byrne, both of whom are friends to this day. I might even have been just finishing up my part-time after-school driving job for Mothers Pizza Simcoe North at the time, as I got ready to move to a higher-paying student summer job at General Motors of Canada, before beginning my higher learning at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario that September.

The Hawaiian pizza verdict? Well, last night I had both chunks of pineapple and anchovies’ paste on the pizza I constructed at home (pictured above), suggesting I’m quite OK with mixing sweets and sours, and enjoy the savoury sweetness of the Hawaiian pizza model (I tend to improvise a bit) that Sam Panopoulos first offered us in 1962 at his Satellite Restaurant in Chatham.

Thanks, and aloha, Sam!

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, versus young earth creationist Ken Ham, with some cautionary words of advice from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine

Phil Plait, who likes to be known as The Bad Astronomer, is a 51-year-old Boulder, Colorado writer, popular science blogger and a leading promoter of scientific skepticism. His PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 included a dissertation on SN 1987A, a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and is a very bright guy. But he’s also the kind of science zealot that puzzles me, such as here on Slate May 12 in a post headlined “Ken Ham Really Doesn’t Understand Science”
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/12/creationist_ken_ham_tweeted_a_series_of_very_bad_claims_meant_to_be_scientific.html) when he takes on Ham, the young earth creationist behind the Answers in Genesis ministry, the $27-million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which opened  on May 28, 2007, and the “Ark Encounter,” which opens July 7, and bills itself as a “one-of-a-kind, historically themed attraction” and at 510 feet in length, “the largest timber-frame structure in the United States.”

Plait accuses Ham of refusing to listen to “anything science has to say” and propagating falsehoods.

Writes Plait: “And I know this for a fact. That’s because Ham took to Twitter recently, posting a series of tweets that are not just wrong, but completely wrong, again demonstrating not just a misunderstanding of the topic, but a deep – I daresay fundamental – lack of understanding of even the most basic facts about the science he’s trying to deny.”

OK.

As a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight, as the idiom goes.

As Pope Francis noted, speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 2014, theories such as the Big Bang and evolution are not contrary to Catholic beliefs. Nothing Plait writes here is beyond the pale theologically for Catholics. But at the same time, as fashionable as it is intellectually to do so, we don’t dismiss creationism and folks like Ken Ham out of hand either. Why is that? Could have something to so with the fact professing Christians subscribe to a religion whose origin rests on accepting on faith the truth claim the founder rose from the dead after three days. The resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity. In Chapter 15, Verses 14 to 19, of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth, he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, and the hope for a life after our own death.

“Credo in Deum – ‘I believe in God’ the opening words of the Apostle’s Creed.” Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who in 1996 purchased Hull’s Family Bookstores in Winnipeg, which has been in business since 1919, from the Hull family, suggested on their website in 2014: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

If you profess to be a Christian, with the Apostles’ Creed, this is what you are assenting to:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.   I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.

While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Catholics think in terms of cosmological evolution, biological evolution and human evolution. One’s opinion concerning one of these areas does not dictate what one believes concerning others.

People usually take three basic positions on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans: special or instantaneous creation; developmental creation or theistic evolution; and non-theistic or random forces evolution.

The first theory holds that a given thing did not develop, but was instantaneously and directly created by God. The second position holds that a given thing did develop from a previous state or form, but that this process was under God’s guidance. The third claims that a thing developed due to random forces alone.

Related to the question of how the universe, life, and man arose is the question of when they arose? Those who attribute the origin of all three to special creation often hold that they arose at about the same time, perhaps 6,000- to-10,000 years ago. Those who attribute all three to non-theistic evolution have a much longer time scale. They generally hold the universe to be 10 billion to 20 billion years old, life on earth to be about four billion years old, and modern man –homo sapiens – to be about 30,000  years old.

Those who believe in varieties of developmental creation hold dates used by either or both of the other two positions. Around 13.82 billion years is the current best estimate for the age of the universe by those in the non-theistic camp. “Until recently,” says the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the solar system is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: by looking for the oldest stars; and by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.”

While there are definite parameters to the Catholic position on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans, much also concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled.

“Concerning cosmological evolution,” a tract from Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating says, “the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing [ex nihlo]. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must ‘confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing’ (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).  “The Church does not have an official position on whether the stars, nebulae, and planets we see today were created at that time or whether they developed over time (for example, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that modern cosmologists discuss). However, the Church would maintain that, if the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan, for scripture records: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host [stars, nebulae, planets] by the breath of his mouth’ (Psalm 33:6).

“Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

“Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that ‘the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – [but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God’ (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36), a papal encyclical promulgated on Aug. 12, 1950. “So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution,” says Catholic Answers, which received the nihil obstat (no objection) imprimatur for setting out the position of the Church “free of doctrinal or moral errors” from Bernadeane Carr, the director of the San Diego Diocesan Institute in Chula Vista, California, and the censor librorum of the Diocese of San Diego, and the imprimatur in accord with the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC) 827, which is where the Church’s norms on the authorization of books and other written materials is primarily found, and where permission to publish the work by now Bishop emeritus Robert Brom of the Diocese of San Diego was given in August 2004.

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared,” notes Catholic Answers. “The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age – that it has not existed from all eternity – but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.

“Catholics should weigh the evidence for the universe’s age by examining biblical and scientific evidence. “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth (Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).

“The contribution made by the physical sciences to examining these questions is stressed by the Catechism, which states, ‘The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (CCC 283).

“It is outside the scope of this tract to look at the scientific evidence, but a few words need to be said about the interpretation of Genesis and its six days of creation. While there are many interpretations of these six days, they can be grouped into two basic methods of reading the account – a chronological reading and a topical reading.

“According to the chronological reading, the six days of creation should be understood to have followed each other in strict chronological order. This view is often coupled with the claim that the six days were standard 24-hour days.

“Some have denied that they were standard days on the basis that the Hebrew word used in this passage for day (yom) can sometimes mean a longer-than-24-hour period (as it does in Genesis 2:4). However, it seems clear that Genesis 1 presents the days to us as standard days. At the end of each one is a formula like, ‘And there was evening and there was morning, one day’ (Genesis. 1:5). Evening and morning are, of course, the transition points between day and night (this is the meaning of the Hebrew terms here), but periods of time longer than 24 hours are not composed of a day and a night. Genesis is presenting these days to us as 24-hour, solar days. If we are not meant to understand them as 24-hour days, it would most likely be because Genesis 1 is not meant to be understood as a literal chronological account.

“That is a possibility.” Pope Pius XII warned us, ’What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East’ (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36).

“This leads us to the possibility that Genesis 1 is to be given a non-chronological, topical reading. Advocates of this view point out that, in ancient literature, it was common to sequence historical material by topic, rather than in strict chronological order.

“The argument for a topical ordering notes that at the time the world was created, it had two problems – it was “formless and empty’ (Genesis 1:2). In the first three days of creation, God solves the formlessness problem by structuring different aspects of the environment.

“On day one he separates day from night; on day two he separates the waters below (oceans) from the waters above (clouds), with the sky in between; and on day three he separates the waters below from each other, creating dry land. Thus the world has been given form.

“But it is still empty, so on the second three days God solves the world’s emptiness problem by giving occupants to each of the three realms he ordered on the previous three days. Thus, having solved the problems of formlessness and emptiness, the task he set for himself, God’s work is complete and he rests on the seventh day.

“The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

“Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work – things God really did.

“The Catechism explains that “scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun (CCC 338).

“It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.

“It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Genesis. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

“In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: ‘When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own’ (Humani Generis 37).

“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states ‘The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390).

“The Catholic Church has always taught that ‘no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits … If nevertheless there is a disagreement … it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly ‘the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation’; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people’ (Providentissimus Deus 18), Pope Leo XIII’s papal encyclical on the study of holy scripture, promulgated on Nov. 18, 1893.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved in June 1992 by now St. Pope John Paul II puts it, “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are” (CCC 159). The Catholic Church has no fear of science or scientific discovery.”

So while I have no problem with Plait’s criticism of Ham here, I think his promotion of scientific skepticism unfortunately shades into stereotypically characterizing creationists such as Ham as nothing more than no-nothing, redneck Hillbillies. Ham, 64, a former high school science teacher, who lives in Kentucky, was born in Australia, and first rejected what he termed “molecules-to-man evolution” during high school, and became influenced by American young earth creationists John Clement Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry Madison Morris’ 1961 book The Genesis Flood, while studying in college in 1974. Ham holds a Bachelor of Applied Science undergraduate degree from Queensland Institute of Technology, and a diploma in education from the University of Queensland, which allowed him to teach high school science for five years in Australia during the mid-to-late 1970s. He left his position in 1979 and co-founded what was to be later known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF).

Then there is a guy like Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ontario area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada. I’ve written a couple of newspaper stories and bog posts about Mason since April 2012, including most recently “Bear witness: The faith journey of electronic warfare experimental nuclear physicist Jim Mason to born-again Christian and young earth creationist” in April 2015 at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/bear-witness-the-faith-journey-of-electronic-warfare-experimental-nuclear-physicist-jim-mason-to-born-again-christian-and-young-earth-creationist/

I’ve heard Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and who spent 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems, speak twice in the last several years, and he just doesn’t fit the no-nothing country bumpkin rube stereotype Plait seems so ready to buy into when it comes to young earth creationists. For the first 20 years of his career, Mason developed passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s, mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.

He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, even as an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution, including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.

It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.

Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.

After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University, Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.

He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”

As I said earlier, as a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight. Much concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled. Catholics are free to believe in creationism and a young earth; they are also equally free to believe in an old earth, keeping in mind, one would hope, the centuries-old cautions of two doctors of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

“One should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous… irrisio infidelium [which translates to the mockery of the infidels], the scorn of the unbelievers,“ said St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. Likewise, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in A Commentary on Genesis: Two Books against the Manichees, unfinished works he wrote between 388 and 418 Anno Domini (AD):

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

“The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men … Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

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EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

Anyone who knows even a little about Joseph Pearce’s life story, a journey that has taken him from the far right British racialism of his youth, with more than a tinge of fascism 35 years ago, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism as a Chestertonian Catholic, and his life in America today as the director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, might well appreciate the fact that it is he narrating Francis Thompson’s story. Two Brits, two talented writers and two outsiders on the margins of the British society of their respective historical eras for more than a few years.

Thompson, a cradle Catholic from Preston in Lancashire, was rescued from the streets of London, where he lived under a bridge and was seemingly hopelessly addicted to laudanum – a then commonly available non-prescription, non-controlled tincture of opium containing about 10 per cent powdered opium by weight, the equivalent of one per cent morphine, which could be purchased from the local pharmacist – by Wilfrid Meynell, a Quaker convert to Roman Catholicism, and editor of the literary journal Merry England, who was impressed with his submission entitled “The Passion of Mary.”

Thompson, however, living largely in his own head, in a narcotic-induced dream and nightmare world, coping and surviving as best he could the hell of his real existence, had not expected Meynell to be impressed. He had no expectations really and no gauge to judge by. The 28-year-old Thompson had written to Meynell on Feb. 23, 1887:

“Dear Sir, In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written. For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect that where my prose fails my verse will succeed. Nevertheless, on the principle of ‘Yet will I try the last,’ I have added a few specimens of it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest. Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I remain yours with little hope,

Francis Thompson

“Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office.” 

The two eventually met in person on the common ground of mutual respect and at Meynell’s instigation and in a singular act of charity, Thompson recovered much of his health at Our Lady of England Priory in Storrington in West Sussex, home to a Community of Canons Regular of Prémontré, also known as Norbertines after Norbert of Xanten, the founder of the order.

After he recovered his health and wrote his greatest poetry over the next decade and a half, Thompson succumbed to tuberculosis and died on Nov. 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London, at the age of 47.  He is  buried in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery at Kensal Green in London.

On the death of Thompson, G.K. Chesterton wrote in his September 1915 essay,  “A Dead Poet” that, “With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation. But his real energy, and the real energy of Francis Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common Imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But great poets use the telescope and also the microscope”

A five-minute Vimeo trailer on the “The Hound of Heaven” 30-minute documentary aired by EWTN Oct. 16 was made last year by Oculus Studios of Lexington, Kentucky and can be found at

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