Dear Dennis:

I am very sorry for the loss of your son. We will be in prayer for the repose of his soul. Take comfort that those who die from suicide are not judge negatively by God because God understand the circumstances and the heart of your son.

We will also be in prayer for your whole family.

I praise God that you have not left the faith. This is a test, but perserving through this tragedy will make you and your family stronger. God promises to make sweet lemonade out of the lemons in our life. This is a big lemon for your family, but from bog lemons comes great lemonade.

To your question, dinosaurs roamed the earth from approximately 230 million to around 65 million years ago.

The Genesis creation record is not meant to be a history or science. Rather, it is to inform us who did the creation. This creation myth gives us a religious message, not a historical or scientific one.

Do not get out of shape for my using the term "myth". Myth and fiction are not the same thing. Most oral history myths are based in a truth. The telling of the story of creation was wrapped in mythological language to better tell the story to the generations in a way that they will remembrer. This type of oral history was common at the time of Moses (who was the one to write down this oral history that we can read today).

God could, if he wanted to, create all of the universe in six twenty-four hour periods (which has revelance only to the earth and not the universe since the idea of a twenty-four hour day is derived solely by the rotation of the earth in juxiposition to the sun). He could have created the universe in less time that a blink of an eye. Or, he could have created the big bang to get the ball rolling and allow nature to develop and evolve. Any of these three options would glorify God.

The Church does not condemn macro-evolution as long as three truths are not tampered with:

1) God is the creator of all things
2) Human being had an original pair of parents
3) The human soul is not evolved, but individually created by God at the moment of conception.

As long as science does not mess with these three truths, the Church says that the mechancs of nature is the purview of science.

The six days of creation and one day of rest was a religious teaching in which God was telling his children to take one day of rest for their own good psychologically and physically, and to spend part of that day of rest in worship of Him. Sabbath, by the way, does not mean "Saturday", it simply means "rest."

The story also tells us that it is God who is the creator and that God is a God of order, not chaos.

The story tells us about our first parents. Even science, these days, believes that the human race can be traced back to an original pair of parents.

And, and finally, the story tells us the tale of sin and prepares us for the redemption to come in the person of Christ.

The human species may have been evolved over millions of years. That does not matter since a human being is not just an animal. What makes the human animal a human being is the soul created for it by God at the moment of conception.

God could have waited until evolution evolved a creation that would have the physical and brain requirements to become a human being imbued with a soul. It is when God imbued a creature with a soul that made us human beings.

Thus, while the material bodies of human may have evolve, they were not human beings until God imbued into them a soul, made in His image.

This evolutionary process glorified God just as much as a literal 6-day creates does.

Since the Church has not issued binding doctrine on this, a good Catholic may believe in the evolutionary process I just describe, with the three provisos of Pope John Paul II that I outlined, or a good Catholic can believe in the literal 6-days of creation.

The point either way is that God is the creator, He is orderly, and he created a creature that has a soul made in his image. It must also be remembered that to God there is no time or space. Thus, the 5 billion years that the earth has been in existence is in the eternal present to God. The time between the big bang and the year 2012 is as to God less than a nanosecond, as-it-were.

Time to us is a construct totally dependent upon our presence on the planet called Earth. If we lived on a different planet the days and years would be completely different.

To God there is no time.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary