Fr. Teilhard de Chardin

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Fr. Teilhard de Chardin Mar 2, 2018 14:27:40 GMT

Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2018 14:27:40 GMT

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (French: [pjɛʁ tejaʁ də ʃaʁdɛ̃]); 1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the vitalist idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of noosphere.

Although many of Teilhard's writings were censored by the Catholic Church during his lifetime because of his views on original sin, Teilhard has been posthumously praised by Pope Benedict XVI and other eminent Catholic figures, and his theological teachings were cited by Pope Francis in the 2015 encyclical, Laudato si.

Life

Early years

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born in the Château of Sarcenat at Orcines, close to Clermont-Ferrand, France, on 1 May 1881. On the Teilhard side he was descended from an ancient family of magistrates from Auvergne originating in Murat, Cantal, and on the de Chardin side he was descended from a family that was ennobled under Louis XVIII. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father, Emmanuel Teilhard (1844–1932), an amateur naturalist, collected stones, insects and plants and promoted the observation of nature in the household. Pierre Teilhard's spirituality was awakened by his mother, Berthe de Dompiere. When he was 12, he went to the Jesuit college of Mongré, in Villefranche-sur-Saône, where he completed baccalaureates of philosophy and mathematics. Then, in 1899, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-en-Provence, where he began a philosophical, theological and spiritual career.

When the Associations Bill of 1901 required congregational associations to submit their properties to state control, some of the Jesuits exiled themselves in the United Kingdom. Young Jesuit students continued their studies in Jersey. In the meantime, Teilhard earned a licentiate in literature in Caen in 1902.
Academic career

From 1905 to 1908, he taught physics and chemistry in Cairo, Egypt, at the Jesuit College of the Holy Family. He wrote "... it is the dazzling of the East foreseen and drunk greedily ... in its lights, its vegetation, its fauna and its deserts."

Teilhard studied theology in Hastings, in Sussex (United Kingdom), from 1908 to 1912. There he synthesized his scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge in the light of evolution. His reading of L'Évolution Créatrice (The Creative Evolution) by Henri Bergson was, he wrote, the "catalyst of a fire which devoured already its heart and its spirit." Teilhard was ordained a priest on 24 August 1911, at age 30.

Paleontology

From 1912 to 1914, Teilhard worked in the paleontology laboratory of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, studying the mammals of the middle tertiary period. Later he studied elsewhere in Europe. In June 1912 he formed part of the original digging team, with Arthur Smith Woodward and Charles Dawson, at the Piltdown site [a video on this fraud], after the discovery of the first fragments of the (fraudulent) "Piltdown Man". Some have suggested he participated in the hoax. Marcellin Boule, a specialist in Neanderthal studies, who as early as 1915 had recognized the non-hominid origins of the Piltdown finds, gradually guided Teilhard towards human paleontology. At the museum's Institute of Human Paleontology, he became a friend of Henri Breuil and in 1913 took part with him in excavations at the prehistoric painted Caves of Castillo in northwest Spain.

Service in World War I

Mobilised in December 1914, Teilhard served in World War I as a stretcher-bearer in the 8th Moroccan Rifles. For his valour, he received several citations including the Médaille militaire and the Legion of Honour.

During the war he developed his reflections in his diaries and in letters to his cousin, Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, who later published a collection of them. He later wrote: "...the war was a meeting ... with the Absolute." In 1916, he wrote his first essay: La Vie Cosmique (Cosmic life), where his scientific and philosophical thought was revealed just as his mystical life. While on leave from the military he pronounced his solemn vows as a Jesuit in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon on 26 May 1918. In August 1919, in Jersey, he wrote Puissance spirituelle de la Matière (The Spiritual Power of Matter).

At the Sorbonne Teilhard pursued three unit degrees of natural science: geology, botany and zoology. His thesis treated the mammals of the French lower Eocene and their stratigraphy. After 1920, he lectured in geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris and after earning a science doctorate in 1922 became an assistant professor there.

Research in China

In 1923 he travelled to China with Father Emile Licent, who was in charge in Tianjin of a significant laboratory collaboration between the Natural History Museum in Paris and Marcellin Boule's laboratory. Licent carried out considerable basic work in connection with missionaries who accumulated observations of a scientific nature in their spare time. He was known as 德日進 (pinyin: Dérìjìn) in China.

Teilhard wrote several essays, including La Messe sur le Monde (the Mass on the World), in the Ordos Desert. In the following year he continued lecturing at the Catholic Institute and participated in a cycle of conferences for the students of the Engineers' Schools. Two theological essays on Original Sin sent to a theologian at his request on a purely personal basis were wrongly understood.

July 1920: Chute, Rédemption et Géocentrie (Fall, Redemption and Geocentry)
Spring 1922: Notes sur quelques représentations historiques possibles du Péché originel (Note on Some Possible Historical Representations of Original Sin) (Works, Tome X)

The Church required him to give up his lecturing at the Catholic Institute in order to continue his geological research in China.

Teilhard traveled again to China in April 1926. He would remain there for about twenty years, with many voyages throughout the world. He settled until 1932 in Tientsin with Emile Licent, then in Beijing. Teilhard made five geological research expeditions in China between 1926 and 1935. They enabled him to establish a general geological map of China. That same year, Teilhard's superiors in the Jesuit Order forbade him to teach any longer.

In 1926–27, after a missed campaign in Gansu, Teilhard traveled in the Sang-Kan-Ho valley near Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) and made a tour in Eastern Mongolia. He wrote Le Milieu Divin (The Divine Milieu). Teilhard prepared the first pages of his main work Le Phénomène Humain (The Phenomenon of Man). The Holy See refused the Imprimatur for Le Milieu Divin in 1927. He joined the ongoing excavations of the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian as an advisor in 1926 and continued in the role for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China following its founding in 1928. Teilhard resided in Manchuria with Emile Licent, then stayed in Western Shansi (Shanxi) and northern Shensi (Shaanxi) with the Chinese paleontologist C. C. Young and with Davidson Black, Chairman of the Geological Survey of China.

After a tour in Manchuria in the area of Great Khingan with Chinese geologists, Teilhard joined the team of American Expedition Center-Asia in the Gobi Desert organised in June and July, by the American Museum of Natural History with Roy Chapman Andrews. Henri Breuil and Teilhard discovered that the Peking Man, the nearest relative of Pithecanthropus from Java, was a faber (worker of stones and controller of fire). Teilhard wrote L'Esprit de la Terre (The Spirit of the Earth).

Teilhard took part as a scientist in the Croisière Jaune (Yellow Cruise) financed by André Citroën in Central Asia. Northwest of Beijing in Kalgan, he joined the Chinese group who joined the second part of the team, the Pamir group, in Aksu. He remained with his colleagues for several months in Ürümqi, capital of Sinkiang. The following year the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) began.

In 1933, Rome ordered him to give up his post in Paris. Teilhard subsequently undertook several explorations in the south of China. He traveled in the valleys of Yangtze River and Sichuan in 1934, then, the following year, in Kwang-If and Guangdong. The relationship with Marcellin Boule was disrupted; the museum cut its financing on the grounds that Teilhard worked more for the Chinese Geological Service than for the museum.

During all these years, Teilhard contributed considerably to the constitution of an international network of research in human paleontology related to the whole of eastern and southeastern Asia. He would be particularly associated in this task with two friends, the English/Canadian Davidson Black and the Scot George B. Barbour. Often he would visit France or the United States, only to leave these countries for further expeditions.

World travels

From 1927 to 1928, Teilhard based himself in Paris. He journeyed to Leuven, Belgium, and to Cantal and Ariège, France. Between several articles in reviews, he met new people such as Paul Valéry and Bruno de Solages, who were to help him in issues with the Catholic Church.

Answering an invitation from Henry de Monfreid, Teilhard undertook a journey of two months in Obock, in Harrar and in Somalia with his colleague Pierre Lamarre, a geologist, before embarking in Djibouti to return to Tianjin. While in China, Teilhard developed a deep and personal friendship with Lucile Swan.

During 1930–1931, Teilhard stayed in France and in the United States. During a conference in Paris, Teilhard stated: "For the observers of the Future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience and a human work to make." From 1932–1933, he began to meet people to clarify issues with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, regarding Le Milieu divin and L'Esprit de la Terre. He met Helmut de Terra, a German geologist in the International Geology Congress in Washington, D.C..

Teilhard participated in the 1935 Yale–Cambridge expedition in northern and central India with the geologist Helmut de Terra and Patterson, who verified their assumptions on Indian Paleolithic civilisations in Kashmir and the Salt Range Valley. He then made a short stay in Java, on the invitation of Dutch paleontologist Ralph von Koenigswald to the site of Java man. A second cranium, more complete, was discovered. Professor von Koenigswald had also found a tooth in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1934 that he believed belonged to a three-meter-tall ape, Gigantopithecus, which lived between one hundred thousand and around a million years ago. Fossilized teeth and bone (dragon bones) are often ground into powder and used in some branches of traditional Chinese medicine.

In 1937, Teilhard wrote Le Phénomène spirituel (The Phenomenon of the Spirit) on board the boat Empress of Japan, where he met the Raja of Sarawak. The ship conveyed him to the United States. He received the Mendel Medal granted by Villanova University during the Congress of Philadelphia, in recognition of his works on human paleontology. He made a speech about evolution, the origins and the destiny of man. The New York Times dated 19 March 1937 presented Teilhard as the Jesuit who held that man descended from monkeys. Some days later, he was to be granted the Doctor Honoris Causa distinction from Boston College. Upon arrival in that city, he was told that the award had been cancelled.

Rome banned his work L’Énergie Humaine in 1939. By this point Teilhard was based again in France, where he was immobilized by malaria. During his return voyage to Beijing he wrote L'Energie spirituelle de la Souffrance (Spiritual Energy of Suffering) (Complete Works, tome VII).

In 1941, Teilhard submitted to Rome his most important work, Le Phénomène Humain. By 1947, Rome forbade him to write or teach on philosophical subjects. The next year, Teilhard was called to Rome by the Superior General of the Jesuits who hoped to acquire permission from the Holy See for the publication of Le Phénomène Humain. However, the prohibition to publish it that was previously issued in 1944 was again renewed. Teilhard was also forbidden to take a teaching post in the Collège de France. Another setback came in 1949, when permission to publish Le Groupe Zoologique was refused.

Teilhard was nominated to the French Academy of Sciences in 1950. He was forbidden by his Superiors to attend the International Congress of Paleontology in 1955. The Supreme Authority of the Holy Office, in a decree dated 15 November 1957, forbade the works of de Chardin to be retained in libraries, including those of religious institutes. His books were not to be sold in Catholic bookshops and were not to be translated into other languages.

Further resistance to Teilhard's work arose elsewhere. In April 1958, all Jesuit publications in Spain ("Razón y Fe", "Sal Terrae","Estudios de Deusto", etc.) carried a notice from the Spanish Provincial of the Jesuits that Teilhard's works had been published in Spanish without previous ecclesiastical examination and in defiance of the decrees of the Holy See. A decree of the Holy Office dated 30 June 1962, under the authority of Pope John XXIII, warned that "... it is obvious that in philosophical and theological matters, the said works [Teilhard's] are replete with ambiguities or rather with serious errors which offend Catholic doctrine. That is why... the Rev. Fathers of the Holy Office urge all Ordinaries, Superiors, and Rectors... to effectively protect, especially the minds of the young, against the dangers of the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers" (AAS, 6 August 1962).

The Diocese of Rome on 30 September 1963 required Catholic booksellers in Rome to withdraw his works as well as those that supported his views.

Death

Teilhard died in New York City, where he was in residence at the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, Park Avenue. On 15 March 1955, at the house of his diplomat cousin Jean de Lagarde, Teilhard told friends he hoped he would die on Easter Sunday. On the evening of Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, during an animated discussion at the apartment of Rhoda de Terra, his personal assistant since 1949, Teilhard suffered a heart attack and died.He was buried in the cemetery for the New York Province of the Jesuits at the Jesuit novitiate, St. Andrew-on-Hudson, in Hyde Park, New York, With the moving of the novitiate, the property was sold to the Culinary Institute of America in 1970.

Teachings

Teilhard de Chardin has two comprehensive works, The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu.

His posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In the book, Teilhard abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations. The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way. Teilhard argued in Darwinian terms with respect to biology, and supported the synthetic model of evolution, but argued in Lamarckian terms for the development of culture, primarily through the vehicle of education. Teilhard made a total commitment to the evolutionary process in the 1920s as the core of his spirituality, at a time when other religious thinkers felt evolutionary thinking challenged the structure of conventional Christian faith. He committed himself to what the evidence showed.

Teilhard made sense of the universe by assuming it had a vitalist evolutionary process. He interprets complexity as the axis of evolution of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, into consciousness (in man), and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point).

Teilhard's unique relationship to both paleontology and Catholicism allowed him to develop a highly progressive, cosmic theology which takes into account his evolutionary studies. Teilhard recognized the importance of bringing the Church into the modern world, and approached evolution as a way of providing ontological meaning for Christianity, particularly creation theology. For Teilhard, evolution was "the natural landscape where the history of salvation is situated."

Teilhard's cosmic theology is largely predicated on his interpretation of Pauline scripture, particularly Colossians 1:15-17 (especially verse 1:17b) and 1 Corinthians 15:28. He drew on the Christocentrism of these two Pauline passages to construct a cosmic theology which recognizes the absolute primacy of Christ. He understood creation to be "a teleological process towards union with the Godhead, effected through the incarnation and redemption of Christ, 'in whom all things hold together' (Col. 1:17). "He further posited that creation would not be complete until each "participated being is totally united with God through Christ in the Pleroma, when God will be 'all in all' (1Cor. 15:28)."

Teilhard's life work was predicated on his conviction that human spiritual development is moved by the same universal laws as material development. He wrote, "...everything is the sum of the past" and "...nothing is comprehensible except through its history. 'Nature' is the equivalent of 'becoming', self-creation: this is the view to which experience irresistibly leads us. ... There is nothing, not even the human soul, the highest spiritual manifestation we know of, that does not come within this universal law." The Phenomenon of Man represents Teilhard's attempt at reconciling his religious faith with his academic interests as a paleontologist. One particularly poignant observation in Teilhard's book entails the notion that evolution is becoming an increasingly optional process. Teilhard points to the societal problems of isolation and marginalization as huge inhibitors of evolution, especially since evolution requires a unification of consciousness. He states that "no evolutionary future awaits anyone except in association with everyone else." Teilhard argued that the human condition necessarily leads to the psychic unity of humankind, though he stressed that this unity can only be voluntary; this voluntary psychic unity he termed "unanimization." Teilhard also states that "evolution is an ascent toward consciousness", giving encephalization as an example of early stages, and therefore, signifies a continuous upsurge toward the Omega Point[18] which, for all intents and purposes, is God.

Teilhard also used his perceived correlation between spiritual and material to describe Christ, arguing that Christ not only has a mystical dimension but also takes on a physical dimension as he becomes the organizing principle of the universe—that is, the one who "holds together" the universe (Col. 1:17b). For Teilhard, Christ forms not only the eschatological end toward which his mystical/ecclesial body is oriented, but he also "operates physically in order to regulate all things "becoming "the one from whom all creation receives its stability." In other words, as the one who holds all things together, "Christ exercises a supremacy over the universe which is physical, not simply juridical. He is the unifying centre of the universe and its goal. The function of holding all things together indicates that Christ is not only man and God; he also possesses a third aspect—indeed, a third nature—which is cosmic." In this way, the Pauline description of the Body of Christ is not simply a mystical or ecclesial concept for Teilhard; it is cosmic. This cosmic Body of Christ "extend throughout the universe and compris[es] all things that attain their fulfillment in Christ [so that] . . . the Body of Christ is the one single thing that is being made in creation." Teilhard describes this cosmic amassing of Christ as "Christogenesis." According to Teilhard, the universe is engaged in Christogenesis as it evolves toward its full realization at Omega, a point which coincides with the fully realized Christ. It is at this point that God will be "all in all" (1Cor. 15:28c).

Our century is probably more religious than any other. How could it fail to be, with such problems to be solved? The only trouble is that it has not yet found a God it can adore.

Relationship with the Catholic Church

In 1925, Teilhard was ordered by the Jesuit Superior General Wlodimir Ledóchowski to leave his teaching position in France and to sign a statement withdrawing his controversial statements regarding the doctrine of original sin. Rather than leave the Society of Jesus, Teilhard signed the statement and left for China.

This was the first of a series of condemnations by certain ecclesiastical officials that would continue until after Teilhard's death. The climax of these condemnations was a 1962 monitum (warning) of the Holy Office cautioning on Teilhard's works. It said:

Several works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, some of which were posthumously published, are being edited and are gaining a good deal of success. Prescinding from a judgement about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine. For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.

The Holy Office did not place any of Teilhard's writings on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books), which existed during Teilhard's lifetime and at the time of the 1962 decree.

Shortly thereafter, prominent clerics mounted a strong theological defense of Teilhard's works. Henri de Lubac (later a Cardinal) wrote three comprehensive books on the theology of Teilhard de Chardin in the 1960s. While de Lubac mentioned that Teilhard was less than precise in some of his concepts, he affirmed the orthodoxy of Teilhard de Chardin and responded to Teilhard's critics: "We need not concern ourselves with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence". Later that decade Joseph Ratzinger, a German theologian who became Pope Benedict XVI, spoke glowingly of Teilhard's Christology in Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity:

It must be regarded as an important service of Teilhard de Chardin's that he rethought these ideas from the angle of the modern view of the world and, in spite of a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach, nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly and in any case made them accessible once again. Let us listen to his own words: The human monad "can only be absolutely itself by ceasing to be alone".

In the background is the idea that in the cosmos, alongside the two orders or classes of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, there is a third order, which determines the real drift of evolution, namely, the order of the infinitely complex. It is the real goal of the ascending process of growth or becoming; it reaches a first peak in the genesis of living things and then continues to advance to those highly complex creations that give the cosmos a new center: "Imperceptible and accidental as the position they hold may be in the history of the heavenly bodies, in the last analysis the planets are nothing less than the vital points of the universe.

It is through them that the axis now runs, on them is henceforth concentrated the main effort of an evolution aiming principally at the production of large molecules." The examination of the world by the dynamic criterion of complexity thus signifies "a complete inversion of values. A reversal of the perspective".

This leads to a further passage in Teilhard de Chardin that is worth quoting in order to give at least some indication here, by means of a few fragmentary excerpts, of his general outlook. "The Universal Energy must be a Thinking Energy if it is not to be less highly evolved than the ends animated by its action. And consequently ... the attributes of cosmic value with which it is surrounded in our modern eyes do not affect in the slightest the necessity obliging us to recognize in it a transcendent form of Personality."

Over the next several decades prominent theologians and Church leaders, including leading Cardinals, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI all wrote approvingly of Teilhard's ideas. In 1981, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, on behalf of Pope John Paul II, wrote on the front page of the Vatican newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano:

What our contemporaries will undoubtedly remember, beyond the difficulties of conception and deficiencies of expression in this audacious attempt to reach a synthesis, is the testimomy of the coherent life of a man possessed by Christ in the depths of his soul. He was concerned with honoring both faith and reason, and anticipated the response to John Paul II's appeal: "Be not afraid, open, open wide to Christ the doors of the immense domains of culture, civilization, and progress".[27]

Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., said in 2004:

In his own poetic style, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin liked to meditate on the Eucharist as the first fruits of the new creation. In an essay called The Monstrance he describes how, kneeling in prayer, he had a sensation that the Host was beginning to grow until at last, through its mysterious expansion, "the whole world had become incandescent, had itself become like a single giant Host". Although it would probably be incorrect to imagine that the universe will eventually be transubstantiated, Teilhard correctly identified the connection between the Eucharist and the final glorification of the cosmos.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote in 2007:

Hardly anyone else has tried to bring together the knowledge of Christ and the idea of evolution as the scientist (paleontologist) and theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., has done. ... His fascinating vision ... has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together. ... These brief references to Teilhard cannot do justice to his efforts. The fascination which Teilhard de Chardin exercised for an entire generation stemmed from his radical manner of looking at science and Christian faith together.

Pope Benedict XVI in his book Spirit of the Liturgy incorporates Teilhard's vision as a touchstone of the Catholic Mass:

And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same—divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the "Noosphere" in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its "fullness". From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological "fullness". In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.

In July 2009, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said, "By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn’t be studied."

Pope Francis refers to Teilhard's eschatological contribution in his encyclical Laudato si'.

Evaluations by scientists

According to Daniel Dennett, "it has become clear to the point of unanimity among scientists that Teilhard offered nothing serious in the way of an alternative to orthodoxy; the ideas that were peculiarly his were confused, and the rest was just bombastic redescription of orthodoxy." Similarly, Steven Rose wrote that "Teilhard is revered as a mystic of genius by some, but amongst most biologists is seen as little more than a charlatan."

In 1961, the Nobel Prize-winner Peter Medawar, a British immunologist, wrote a scornful review of The Phenomenon Of Man for the journal Mind:[35] "the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself". The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called Medawar's review "devastating" and The Phenomenon of Man "the quintessence of bad poetic science".

Sir Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist, praised the thought of Teilhard de Chardin for looking at the way in which human development needs to be examined within a larger integrated universal sense of evolution, though admitting he could not follow Teilhard all the way. Theodosius Dobzhansky drew upon Teilhard's insistence that evolutionary theory provides the core of how man understands his relationship to nature, calling him "one of the great thinkers of our age".

George Gaylord Simpson, however, felt that if Teilhard were right, the lifework "of Huxley, Dobzhansky, and hundreds of others was not only wrong, but meaningless", and was mystified by their public support for him. He considered Teilhard a friend and his work in paleontology extensive and important, but expressed strongly adverse views of his contributions as scientific theorist and philosopher.

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, wrote that Teilhard has been "largely forgotten as a scientist" but believes that he remains "amazingly relevan[t]" and anticipated his own work in multilevel selection theory.

Legacy

Brian Swimme wrote "Teilhard was one of the first scientists to realize that the human and the universe are inseparable. The only universe we know about is a universe that brought forth the human."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 10 April. George Gaylord Simpson named the most primitive and ancient genus of true primate, the Eocene genus Teilhardina.

Teilhard and his work continue to influence the arts and culture. Characters based on Teilhard appear in several novels, including Jean Telemond in Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman (mentioned by name and quoted by Oskar Werner playing Fr. Telemond in the movie version of the novel) and Father Lankester Merrin in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. In Dan Simmons' 1989–97 Hyperion Cantos, Teilhard de Chardin has been canonized a saint in the far future. His work inspires the anthropologist priest character, Paul Duré. When Duré becomes Pope, he takes Teilhard I as his regnal name. Teilhard appears as a minor character in the play Fake by Eric Simonson, staged by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2009, involving a fictional solution to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax.

References range from occasional quotations—an auto mechanic quotes Teilhard in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly—to serving as the philosophical underpinning of the plot, as Teilhard's work does in Julian May's 1987–94 Galactic Milieu Series. Teilhard also plays a major role in Annie Dillard's 1999 For the Time Being. Teilhard is mentioned by name and the Omega Point briefly explained in Arthur C. Clarke's and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days. The title of the short-story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor is a reference to Teilhard's work. The American novelist Don DeLillo's 2010 novel Point Omega borrows its title and some of its ideas from Teilhard de Chardin. Robert Wright, in his book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, compares his own naturalistic thesis that biological and cultural evolution are directional and, possibly, purposeful, with Teilhard's ideas.

Teilhard's work also inspired philosophical ruminations by Italian laureate architect Paolo Soleri, artworks such as French painter Alfred Manessier's L'Offrande de la terre ou Hommage à Teilhard de Chardin and American sculptor Frederick Hart's acrylic sculpture The Divine Milieu: Homage to Teilhard de Chardin. A sculpture of the Omega Point by Henry Setter, with a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, can be found at the entrance to the Roesch Library at the University of Dayton. The Spanish painter Salvador Dali was fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point theory. His 1959 painting The Ecumenical Council (painting) is said to represent the "interconnectedness" of the Omega Point. Edmund Rubbra's 1968 Symphony No. 8 is titled Hommage à Teilhard de Chardin.

Several college campuses honor Teilhard. A building at the University of Manchester is named after him, as are residence dormitories at Gonzaga University and Seattle University.

The De Chardin Project, a play celebrating Teilhard's life, ran from 20 November to 14 December 2014 in Toronto, Canada.[55] The Evolution of Teilhard de Chardin, a documentary film on Teilhard's life, was scheduled for released in 2015.

Founded in 1978, George Addair based much of Omega Vector on Teilhard's work.

The American physicist Frank J. Tipler has further developed Teilhard's Omega Point concept in two controversial books, The Physics of Immortality and the more theologically based Physics of Christianity. While keeping the central premise of Teilhard's Omega Point (i.e. a universe evolving towards a maximum state of complexity and consciousness) Tipler has supplanted some of the more mystical/ theological elements of the OPT with his own scientific and mathematical observations (as well as some elements borrowed from Freeman Dyson's eternal intelligence theory).

In 1972, the Uruguayan priest Juan Luis Segundo, in his five-volume series A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity, wrote that Teilhard "noticed the profound analogies existing between the conceptual elements used by the natural sciences — all of them being based on the hypothesis of a general evolution of the universe."

The philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand criticized severely the work of Teilhard. According to this philosopher, in a conversation after a lecture by Teilhard: "He (Teilhard) ignored completely the decisive difference between nature and supernature. After a lively discussion in which I ventured a criticism of his ideas, I had an opportunity to speak to Teilhard privately. When our talk touched on St. Augustine, he exclaimed violently: 'Don’t mention that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural.'" Von Hildebrand writes that Theihardism is incompatible with Christianity, substitutes efficiency for sanctity, deshumanizes man, and describes love as merely cosmic energy.

Influence on the New Age movement

Teilhard has had a profound influence on the New Age movement and has been described as "perhaps the man most responsible for the spiritualization of evolution in a global and cosmic context". New Age figure and self-described evolutionary biologist Jeremy Griffith described Teilhard as a "visionary" philosopher and a contemporary "truth-sayer" or "prophet".

Adapted from here.

Last Edit: Mar 16, 2018 11:41:10 GMT by Admin

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Fr. Teilhard de Chardin Mar 2, 2018 15:46:15 GMT

Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2018 15:46:15 GMT

Teilhard de Chardin: The Vatican II Architect You Need to Know

November 27, 2017

In the middle of the fourth century, Saint Jerome remarked that the world “awoke with a groan to find itself Arian.” Arianism divided the Church and Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries and beyond by claiming that the Divine Logos, Jesus Christ, was not of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father and not co-eternal with the Father as defined at the Council of Nicea (325 A.D.). Some sought to substitute homoiousios, “of a similar nature,” to find a peaceful solution. However, as the Catholic Church has perennially taught, the truth must be presented whole and complete, without subterfuge or compromise.

In the mid-twentieth century, one may have paraphrased St. Jerome: “the world awoke, without so much as a whimper, to find itself Teilhardian.”

Still troubled by the Galileo affair, the Church bent over backwards in trying to incorporate faith and science into a seamless garment. Following the 1925 Scopes Trial, Darwin’s theory of evolution was more and more presented as dogma by the scientific community, and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955) took it upon himself to reconcile Darwinian evolution and Catholic theology .

In fact, Teilhard was originally censured and exiled by his Jesuit superiors in 1923 for questioning the doctrines of original sin and eternal damnation. In 1947, upon return from banishment in China, he was once again censured by the Holy Office, Pope Pius XII himself having called his work a “cesspool of errors.” However, Teilhard began further insinuating his ideas among his fellow Jesuits at the French theologate La Fourvière in Lyon by means of unsigned mimeographed monographs. By the mid- to late 1950s, his theories were extolled by many, if not most, Jesuits, including Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, and especially Henri de Lubac, who wrote glowingly of Teilhard: “We need not concern ourselves with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence” [ii]. By the time of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, the Society of Jesus had all but abandoned the Neo-Scholastic theology of Francisco Suarez in favor of Teilhardian evolutionary “cosmogenesis.”

The reason for Teilhard’s popularity, as stated above, was his apparent resolution of the differences between religious truth as proposed by the Catholic Church and scientific “fact” as proposed by Darwinian evolution. The problem was that his solution was neither particularly scientific nor particularly Catholic, a fact he admitted privately to his cousin Léontine Zanta in 1936:

What increasingly dominates my interests, is the effort to establish within myself and define around me, a new religion (call it a better Christianity, if you like) where the personal God ceases to be the great monolithic proprietor of the past to become the Soul of the World which the stage we have reached religiously and culturally calls for. [iii]
This proposed synthesis is not a “new and better Christianity,” but rather a negation of the Catholic faith, as presented in the definitive dogmatic constitution of Vatican I, Dei Filius (April 24, 1870):
Deus … est re et essentia a mundo distinctus, in se et ex se beatissimus, et super omnia quae praeter ipsum sunt et concipi possunt, ineffabiliter excelsus. (God … is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world, of supreme beatitude in and from Himself, and ineffably exalted above all things which exist, or are conceivable, except Himself.)

Teilhard’s “God,” the “soul of the world,” is identical with nature and consequently subject to change. As Teilhard explains it in his book Human Energy:

As a direct consequence of the unitive process by which God is revealed to us, he in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us. … I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself. [iv]

And, again:

[God] evolves, via “complexification” and “convergence” to his own perfection, immersed in matter. … One is inseparable from the other; one is never without the other[.] … No spirit (not even God within the limits of our experience) exists, nor could structurally exist without an associated multiple, any more than a center can exist without its circle or circumference[.] … n a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit, all that exists is matter becoming spirit [God]. [v]

One must note that in Teilhard’s writing there is hardly any mention of purely spiritual beings or entities within the existing cosmos. There is virtually no mention of angels or demons, no Satan, no St. Michael, no guardian angels, nor is there much mention of particular judgment or the existence of Hell.**

Teilhard’s “God” is no more nor less than the “god” of Pantheism as described (and rejected) by St. Pius IX in his allocution Maxima Quidem, June 9, 1862:

There exists no Supreme Being, perfect in His wisdom and in His providence and distinct, all things are God and have the very substance of God. God is thus one and the same thing as the world and consequently spirit is identified with matter, necessity with liberty, truth with falsehood, good with evil and justice with injustice[.]

Teilhard, through his denial of original sin and of the consequent need for redemption, tried to inject Christ into his pantheism by naming him the “Cosmic Christ” or the “Alpha” and “Omega” of revelation. Christ is an emanation of God infused into matter from the beginning, evolving, was born into this world, died, rose from the dead, and ascended – not to heaven, but to the “noosphere,” a spiritual level encircling the earth, where all spirits contained in matter will eventually converge at the “Omega Point,” where Christ awaits us, guiding us on with “unconditional love.” At the “Omega Point,” we, and the entire cosmos, down to the lowliest atom, will be divinized, and “God” will be “all in all” [vi]. The quote was selectively picked from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 15:28. Whether this “all in all” will be totally spiritual, as in Buddhism and other Eastern religions with which it shares similarities, or whether, as others affirm, humans, alive at the end of time, the “Omega Point,” will become “transhuman,” filled with the transformative knowledge of the “noosphere” (some even citing the internet), is unclear in the writings of Teilhard.

As for Teilhard, the problem of evil is not due to angelic or human malice, but is an inevitable side-effect of the evolutionary process: “In our modern perspective of a Universe in a process of cosmogenesis, the problem of evil no longer exists.” The “Multiple” is “essentially subject to the play of probabilities of chance in its arrangements.” It is “absolutely unable to progress toward unity without engendering [evil] here or there by statistical necessity” [vii]. It appears, then, that there is no room for error or sin, as all is inevitably evolving toward the “Omega Point” drawn on by the infinite love of Christ.

In fact, for Teilhard, the Mystical Body of Christ “forms a cosmic Center for mankind and the whole material universe” [viii]. This insight he claims to have found in St. Paul. The passage – “You … are Christ’s Body[;] … each of you is a different part of it” (I Cor. 12:27) – reveals humanity in its varying functions to be the mystical Body. This is a misreading of St. Paul, who is clearly speaking of the baptized Christian community.

It is just on the part of God and to give relief to you [followers of Christ] who are afflicted and to us as well, when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire. These [who afflict you now] will be punished with eternal ruin, away from the face of the Lord and the glory of his power[.] (2 Thessalonians 1: 6-8)

It also contradicts the words of Our Lord himself:

I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. … I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world[.] (John 17: 9-16)

For Teilhard, all religions are an attempt to realize this ultimate transformation, led on by the Cosmic Christ, who animates, loves, and awaits all at the Omega Point.

Teilhard does not deny the role of the Church in bringing about his vision of cosmogenesis. In a letter to his friend Auguste Valensin, S.J., he writes:

I believe in the Church, mediatrix between God and the world[.] … The Church, the reflectively christified portion of the world, the Church, the principal focus of interhuman affinities through super-charity, the Church, the central axis of universal convergence and the precise point of contact between the universe and Omega Point. … The Catholic Church, however, must not simply seek to affirm its primacy and authority but quite simply to present the world with the Universal Christ, Christ in human-cosmic dimension, as animator of evolution.

Teilhard, therefore, said:

We must work toward an ecumenism open not only to Christianity, but also to other religions, because all religions of inner necessity converge in the Cosmic Christ and are destined to find their completion in the single Church of Christ.

Having done away with an eternal supernatural order, there is no room for “sanctifying grace” freely bestowed by God, especially through the sacraments (historical Catholic prerequisites to eternal salvation). All that exists is the onward movement of the cosmos toward unity in the Cosmic Christ, who animates and awaits us at the Omega Point.

As to the Eucharist, according to Teilhard, it is by means of the Eucharist that the Church gradually divinizes the world:

“Adherence to Christ in the Eucharist must inevitably, ipso facto, incorporate us a little more fully on each occasion in a christogenesis which itself … is none other than the soul of universal cosmogenesis.”

Teilhard de Chardin’s “Mass on the (Altar of the) World":

Since once again, Lord … I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole world my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world[.] … I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits[.] … My chalice and my paten are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to a new day[.] … I call before me the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity; those … who, … through their vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe in the progress of earthly reality and who today will again take up their impassioned pursuit of the light[.] … This is the material of my sacrifice, the only material you desire[.] … Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day.

In Teilhard’s “Mass,” there is no mention of Christ’s propitiatory death on the cross for the salvation of souls, nor of Transubstantiation [ix] of the Eucharistic Species into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Rather, this is an offering of all trials and works of humanity to build a future divinized common earthly reality.

Given this brief summary, it should be clear that Teilhard’s “new and better Christianity” is a paean to Darwinian evolution raised to the level of universal theosis and has little or nothing in common with traditional Catholic Christology.

It is therefore not surprising that, at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Office, under the pontificate of Pope John XXIII, issued the following “monitum” (warning):

Several works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, some of which were posthumously published, are being edited and are gaining a good deal of success. Prescinding from a judgment about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine[.] (Given at Rome, from the palace of the Holy Office, on the thirtieth day of June, 1962. Sebastianus Masala, Notarius.)

It would appear that the case was closed; however, this was not to be. Under the influence of Jesuit periti (counselors), especially Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Teilhardian vision re-emerged [x]. Pope Paul VI tentatively wrote in a 1966 address contained in Insegnimenti di Paulo VI, the official compilation of his thought: “Teilhard de Chardin, who gave an explanation of the universe that, among many fantastic and imprudent things, nonetheless understood how to find the intelligent principle that one should call God inside everything. Science itself, therefore, obliges us to be religious. Whoever is intelligent must kneel and say: ‘God is present here’” [xi].

The real revolution, according to Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the present head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, began with Pope John Paul II and his letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996, when he affirmed:

Some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies – which was neither planned nor sought – constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

On May 12, 1981, the centenary of Teilhard’s birth, cardinal secretary of state Agostino Casaroli wrote to Cardinal Poupard, rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, as follows:

The international scientific community and, more broadly, the whole intellectual world, are preparing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. … I am happy, Your Excellency, to communicate this message to you on behalf of the Holy Father [Pope John Paul II] for all the participants in the conference over which you preside at the Catholic Institute of Paris as a tribute to Father Teilhard de Chardin, and I assure you of my faithful devotion.

The Vatican Press Office, however, two months later, reaffirmed the monitum, which remains in effect:

Communiqué of the Press Office of the Holy See (printed in L’Osservatore Romano, English ed., July 20, 1981):

The letter sent by the Cardinal Secretary of State to His Excellency Mons. Poupard on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin has been interpreted in a certain section of the press as a revision of previous stands taken by the Holy See in regard to this author, and in particular of the Monitum of the Holy Office of 30 June 1962, which pointed out that the work of the author contained ambiguities and grave doctrinal errors. The question has been asked whether such an interpretation is well founded.

After having consulted the Cardinal Secretary of State and the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, by order of the Holy Father, had been duly consulted beforehand, about the letter in question, we are in a position to reply in the negative.

H.H. John Paul II, echoing Teilhard’s “Mass on the Altar of the World,” continued in his praise of Teilhard:

The Eucharist is also celebrated in order to offer “on the altar of the whole earth the world’s work and suffering” in the beautiful words of Teilhard de Chardin. [xii]

The praise was continued by Cardinal Ratzinger, who said in his Principles of Catholic Theology:

The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence [on the Council]. With daring vision it incorporated the historical movements of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution from Alpha to Omega. … The Council’s ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (Gaudium et Spes) took the cue; Teilhard’s slogan “Christianity means more progress, more technology,” became a stimulus in which the Council Fathers from rich and poor countries alike found a concrete hope. [xiii]

And again, from his Spirit of the Liturgy (emphasis added):

Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. … From here Teilhard went on to give new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the Christological “fullness.” In his view, the Eucharist provided the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on. [xiv]

Pope Benedict also reaffirmed his praise of Teilhard on July 24, 2009, during the vespers service in the Cathedral of Aosta in northern Italy, as reported by John Allen (emphasis added):

Toward the end of a reflection upon the Letter to the Romans, in which St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship, Pope Benedict said: “It’s the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had: At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host. Let’s pray to the Lord that he help us be priests in this sense,” the pope said, “to help in the transformation of the world in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves.”

To confirm the shift from traditional Catholic theology to Teilhard’s “new and better Christianity” in July of 2009, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J. said, “By now, no one would dream of saying that [Teilhard] is a heterodox author who shouldn’t be studied.”

The current holy father, Pope Francis, as a product of Jesuit education, refers to Teilhard’s eschatological contribution in his encyclical Laudato Si in paragraph 83 (footnote 53):

83. The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things [53]. Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things.

In footnote 53 of the encyclical, the pope makes a clear reference to the statements of previous conciliar popes cited above:

Against this horizon we can set the contribution of Fr Teilhard de Chardin; cf. PAUL VI, Address in a Chemical and Pharmaceutical Plant (24 February 1966): Insegnamenti 4 (1966), 992-993; JOHN PAUL II, Letter to the Reverend George Coyne (1 June 1988): Insegnamenti 11/2 (1988), 1715; BENEDICT XVI, Homily for the Celebration of Vespers in Aosta (24 July 2009): Insegnamenti 5/2 (2009), 60.

We see here Pope Francis’s reliance on Teilhard and his vision of the “Cosmic Christ” drawing all, regardless of religious affiliation, nationality – in fact, all living creatures, and even inert matter, which contains rudimentary “Spirit” – to be Christified at the end of time, or the “Omega Point” of evolution. It explains his fascination with ecology as well as the tearing down of all walls, both political (including the end of nationalism and amalgamation via mass immigration) and religious (via ecumenism): “Proselytism is solemn nonsense.” “Luther’s intention 500 years ago was to renew the Church, not divide her.” As Teilhard expounded in Human Energy, “[t]he age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth” [xv].

The evolutionary theories of Teilhard help explain some of the current holy father’s most puzzling statements. In a March 15, 2015 interview, Eugenio Scalfari, the famed atheist reporter, quotes (from memory) as follows: “What happens to that lost soul? Will it be punished? And how? The response of Francis is distinct and clear: there is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul. All the others will participate in the beatitude of living in the presence of the Father. The souls that are annihilated will not take part in that banquet; with the death of the body their journey is finished.” This interview was first published on the Vatican website but then removed. When questioned, Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica did not deny the conversation, but said, “They were private discussions that took place and were never recorded by the journalist.”

These sentiments were reiterated on October 9 of this year, 2017, in an article published by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, once again quoting Eugenio Scalfari:

Pope Francis has abolished the places where souls were supposed to go after death: hell, purgatory, heaven. The idea he holds is that souls dominated by evil and unrepentant cease to exist, while those that have been redeemed from evil will be taken up into the beatitude, contemplating God. ...The universal judgement that is in the tradition of the Church therefore becomes devoid of meaning. It remains a simple pretext that has given rise to splendid paintings in the history of art. Nothing other than this.

To understand, perhaps, some of Pope Francis’s reticence to clarify passages of Amoris Laetitia, one must recall that neither original sin nor traditional mortal sins exist in Teilhard’s worldview – only infinite mutations or variants in the evolutionary process moved by the unconditional love of the “Cosmic Christ.” Some of the pope’s statements include the following, emphasizing that all who live in loving relationships share, to some degree, in the all-encompassing love of Christ:

– The unmarried. “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity[.]”

– The sacramentally married. “ great majority” of Catholic marriages are “null.”

– The so-called “remarried. "Priests could – in some cases – offer the “help of sacraments” to Catholics living in “irregular family situations” as part of a broader effort to support and integrate divorced Catholics in other relationships into the life of the church.

– Homosexuals. “Who am I to judge?”

Further evidence of the underlying Teilhardian influence on Amoris Laetitia are found in the words of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, Austria, whom Pope Francis named official interpreter of Amoris Laetitia:

Hardly anyone else has tried to bring together the knowledge of Christ and the idea of evolution as the scientist (paleontologist) and theologian Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., has done. … His fascinating vision has remained controversial, and yet for many it has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together. … These brief references to Teilhard cannot do justice to his efforts. The fascination which Teilhard de Chardin exercised for an entire generation stemmed from his radical manner of looking at science and Christian faith together.

It should be remembered that on October 11, 2016, the weekly bulletin of Cardinal Schönborn’s cathedral in Vienna published, with pictures, a glowing profile of a same-sex couple and their adopted son, titled “we are dads.”

While all the confusion existing in the modern Church cannot be fully laid at his feet [xvi], Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. and his Jesuit confrères, with their “new and better Christianity,” have unfortunately deracinated Holy Mother Church, replacing the worship of the eternal God with the worship of man and creation.

Finally, it is worth mentioning: while there is no direct evidence linking Fr. Teilhard to Freemasonry, their goal is the same: the deification of man. In the words of Manly P. Hall in his Lost Keys of Freemasonry:

Man is a God in the making. … The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth. It is relevant that Teilhard’s works are read and quoted in the lodges. [xvii]

*Editor’s note: after we received this essay for publication, the news broke at Vatican Insider that the “Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture largely approved a proposal to be sent to Pope Francis, asking him to contemplate whether it is possible to remove the Monitum of the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office on the works of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”. The petition, according to Vatican Insider, was approved on Saturday, November 18, 2017, “during the work of the Assembly on ‘The Future of Humanity: New Challenges to Anthropology’.” Further:

The proposal, as raised by the online newspaper Sir , is thus motivated: “We believe that such an act would not only restore the genuine efforts of the pious Jesuit in an attempt to reconcile the scientific vision of the universe with Christian eschatology but would also represent a formidable stimulus for all theologians and scientists of good will to collaborate in the construction of a Christian anthropological model which, following the directions of the encyclical Laudato Si, is naturally placed in the wonderful plot of the cosmos. “

Pope Francis is expected to receive the proposal for consideration soon, if not already. As of this writing, no decision has been announced.

NOTES:

It should be mentioned here that a contemporary of Teilhard, Fr. Georges Lemaître, a renowned physicist and the postulator of the “Big Bang” theory, advised Pope Pius XII not to mention his discovery as proof of the doctrine of creation “ex nihilo,” as scientific knowledge, which is refined and always growing and changing and should not be used in defense of the Faith, which is unchanging.

[ii] Henri Cardinal de Lubac, S.J., The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Image Books (1967). De Lubac is generally considered the main influence on the Vatican II document The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes). De Lubac, himself first censured by Pope Pius XII, went on to be named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1983.

[iii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Léontine Zanta, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 114 (letter dated 26 January 1936).

[iv] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1978), p. 54.

[v] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jahanovich, 1969), pp. 57, 58, 162.

[vi] “What we call inorganic matter is certainly animate in its own way[.] … Atoms, electrons, elementary particles … must have a spark of spirit” (Science and Christ, written 1920s, published in English in 1968).

[vii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Comment je vois, Par. 29, Tr. p.39, cit. Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968), p. 265.

[viii] Le Coeur de la Matière, (1950), p. 30, cit. “The Body of Christ in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin S.J.,” by Cristopher Moody S.J.

[ix] The Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 spoke of the bread and wine as “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ: “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been transubstantiated, by God’s power, into his body and blood.”

[x] David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church (New York: William B. Erdmans, 1996), footnote 34 on p. 22, exposes von Balthasar’s cautious but fundamental dependence on Teilhard.

[xi] Speech to Employers and Workers of a Pharmacy Company, February 24, 1966, in Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, Poliglotta Vaticana, 1966, pp. 992-993.

[xii] Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, (New York: Image, 1996), p. 73.

[xiii] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 334.

[xiv] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 29.

[xv] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 37.

[xvi] See Philip Trower, The Church and the Counter Faith (Oxford: Family Publications, 2006) for a résumé of intellectual currents leading up to Vatican II, or here for an essay on the Jesuit formation of Pope Francis.

[xvii] “The Masonic bishop, priest, or layman will forsake his faith in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ. This may occur slowly but it is inevitable. Sooner or later he will be confronted with the dilemma posed by Monsignor Dillon above. If he remains in the Craft, however, he will lose touch completely with the Divine element in the religion he has secretly betrayed and become preoccupied with the human. He may recite the prayer of the Modernist Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, with conviction—

“‘May the Lord preserve in me a burning love for the world, and a great gentleness and may he help me persevere to the end, in the fullness of my humanity.'”

This post has been updated.

** Correction: this article originally claimed that “nowhere in Teilhard’s writing is there to be found any mention of purely spiritual beings or entities within the existing cosmos. There is no mention of angels or demons, no Satan, no St. Michael, no guardian angels, nor is there any mention of particular judgment or the existence of Hell”. It has been brought to our attention by a reader that in fact, there is some mention of these things — though very little, and not in a way that expresses with clarity and firmness the Church’s teaching on these matters — specifically, in Le Milieu Divin, under the subheading ‘The outer darkness and the lost souls,’ (p.140-143.). Nevertheless, we have amended the text accordingly in the interest of correctness and fairness to the late Fr. de Chardin.

Adapted from here [all emphasis in red font ours].