Fr. Gabriel Amorth, Exorcist: Christ is the center of all creation, yes, even if Adam had not sinned

While the following has already been cited on this website (under the section on the Colossians where Christ’s headship and primacy is discussed), I thought it worth posting here, separately, after the post on Christ as the center of the angelic world as the Catechism of the Catholic Church # 331. Here is the citation directly from my book, A Primer on the Absolute Primacy of Christ:

In recent times, an expert on angelology and demonology, the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, Fr. Gabriel Amorth, wrote a most concise and lucid summation of the Franciscan thesis in his book An Exorcist Tells his Story. Before he ‘tells his story’, he begins by “first stating some basic facts about God’s plan for creation.” He writes:

“All too often we have the wrong concept of creation, and we take for granted the following wrong sequence of events. We believe that one day God created the angels; that He put them to the test, although we are not sure which test; and that as a result we have the division among angels and demons. The angels were rewarded with heaven, and the demons were punished with hell. Then we believe that on another day God created the universe, the minerals, the plants, the animals, and, in the end, man. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve obeyed Satan and disobeyed God; thus they sinned. At this point, to save mankind, God decided to send His Son.

“This is not what the Bible teaches us, and it is not the teaching of the Fathers. If this were so, the angels and creation would remain strangers to the mystery of Christ. If we read the Prologue of the Gospel of John and the two Christological hymns that open the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians, we see that Christ is ‘the firstborn of all creatures’ (Col. 1:15). Everything was created for Him and in the expectation of Him. There is no theological discussion that makes any sense if it asks whether Christ would have been born without the sin of Adam. Christ is the center of creation; all creatures, both heavenly (the angels) and earthly (man) find in Him their summation. On the other hand, we can affirm that, given the sin of our forebears, Christ’s coming assumed a particular role: He came as Savior. The core of His action is contained within the Paschal Mystery: through the blood of His Cross, He reconciles all things in the heavens (angels) and on earth (man) to God. The role of every creature is dependent on this christocentric understanding.”

Fr. Gabriel Amorth, An Exorcist Tells his Story (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1999) 19-20.

Msgr. Arthur Calkins comments on this passage and adds another quote of Amorth on how important this doctrine of the absolute primacy of Christ is for understanding Our Lady.

fr. maximilian mary dean, F.I.