(This post was originally published on 15th March 2025)
“We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church” (Pope Saint Pius X – Pascendi Domenici Gregis)
Background
The Pope of ‘surprises’ is back. Even while hospitalised at the Gemelli Hospital, multiple conditions of pneumonia and renal issues have not deterred the ‘Who am I to judge’ Pope from sending us his version of ‘encouraging’ messages. This latest message ‘motivates’ the world to perhaps see things the way he does: as a doomsday ‘Global Warming’ related cataclysmic event! The introduction to his message reads as:
With his latest fear mongering introduction, here are a few choice quotes of interest from the same letter:
“Listening to the sciences continually offers us new knowledge. Consider what we are told about the structure of matter and the evolution of living beings: there emerges a far more dynamic view of nature compared to what was thought in Newton’s time. Our way of understanding “continuous creation” must be re-elaborated….”
“We can cite as an example of this type of research Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his attempt – certainly partial and unfinished, but daring and inspiring – to enter seriously into dialogue with the sciences…Thus he launched his insights that focused on the category of relationship and interdependence between all things, placing homo sapiens in close connection with the entire system of living things.”
“These ways of interpreting the world and its evolution, with the unprecedented forms of relatedness that correspond to it, can provide us with signs of hope…”
Pope Francis in this latest message once again brings up the theme of evolution, something I have written about previously. However, in this blog I wish to focus on a specific aspect that I have been previously meaning to address. In his latest message Pope Francis once again invokes the ‘misunderstood saint!’ (/s) of the Jesuit order, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, who he loves to invoke from time to time (the previous occasion where Francis found it appropriate to reference Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, was in his encyclical, Laudato Si’). George Neumayr, the author of ‘The Political Pope, states in his book that
“The writings of Teilhard were repeatedly censured by the Church. But Francis cites him as an impeccably orthodox source, writing in Laudato Si’ of his “contribution” to the Church’s understanding of creation.”
Pope Francis is also said to have quoted Teilhard at a mass stating that Teilhard had been (ahem) ‘misunderstood’. Raymond De Souza, writing for the Lepanto Institute, says that Teilhard de Chardin being considered “misunderstood” is like saying that Martin Luther was “misunderstood” since he (Luther) also was a properly ordained Catholic priest, and “reformed” the church by fragmenting Her into thousands of sects. With all due respect to De Souza, Pope Francis and the Vatican has installed a bust of Martin Luther, and issued a postage stamp in his honor. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that under Pope Francis, it is now in vogue to celebrate heretics and venerate them as saints!
There is also a movement to rehabilitate Teilhard as a Doctor of the Church by whitelisting his writings that were previously banned. Ever since Rome declared that Teilhard’s writings were ambiguous, dangerous, and offensive to Catholic doctrine, that should have been the end of it, writes De Souza. But today Teilhard’s fans want to take the man’s doctrines out of the grave and elevate him to the level of… a Doctor of the Church! Hence, I believe it necessary in 2025, to revisit the memory of Teilhard and summarize his ‘weirdology’ and ‘demonology’ for newer readers not familiar with the man.
Teilhard: a brief portrait
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, henceforth referred to as ‘Teilhard’ in this article, was a French Jesuit priest who entered the Jesuit order in 1899 and was ordained in 1911. As were many of the former great Jesuits, he was a highly educated and well-known priest. The late Malachi Martin (another Jesuit priest, archaeologist, and writer, who later left the order) writes that,
“…A Jesuit had to display certain characteristics: high intellectualism, stature with powerful secular figures, a definite touch of poetry and mysticism, a streak of persecution by men of lower stature, a spirit of independence from Rome, and of revolution for the sake of principle and worldly-wise associations that gave him ‘class’ and a certain degree of ‘star’ quality – internationalism (today known as globalism in the 21st century). Pierre Teilhard De Chardin displayed all those characteristics to an eminent degree..”. and “Teilhard’s genius, for genius it was, lay in his being able to inject that new age with a ‘new philosophy’ and a new excitement, and with a deeply appealing romanticism…”1
Malachi Martin further describes Teilhard as an infectious, spirited and optimistic writer; he seemed like a visionary who was completely sure about the future. However, for all his mystical/theological musings, there was very little said or done that expressed similar enthusiasm for celebrating the Sacrifice of the Mass, or Marian or other such pious devotions. Teilhard was also said to be bitter or upset about people he thought of as clinging to old, outworn dogmas and pieties of traditional Catholicism. He also saw the Catholic Church as backward, living in a universe where modern man seemed to be absent (This will ring a bell with Conservative and Traditional Catholics who will be able to see a clear parallel to Pope Francis). Therefore, there emerges in Teilhard a certain insensitivity or dislike to traditional pieties and personal devotions which can only be possible by a collapse of genuine faith and belief in Catholic theology.
“When you examine Teilhard’s personal piety and practice of religious belief, you are finally forced to conclude that even as far back as his early years of training as a Jesuit, he had lost his Roman Catholic faith. He continued as a Jesuit and a member of the Church partly out of inertia, perhaps; But partly, for strategic reasons – the same strategic reasons that George Tyrell (another Jesuit Modernist) had for fiercely clinging to the skirts of Rome.” concludes Malachi Martin.1
Many Jesuits of the early 1900s were well trained in the natural sciences. Teilhard was no exception, having a strong affinity for geology (& later palaeontology) since he was young, and having studied botany, zoology, and geology at the University of Paris, he later lectured at the same university, graduating to a professor, later earning a doctorate in 1922. Teilhard received accolades from theistic evolutionists (those who believe that God and evolution are compatible sources of creation) such as the geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who venerated Teilhard by calling him “one of the great thinkers of our age”.
Teilhard’s most ‘ill-reputed’ moment in the scientific arena came in 1913, when he was involved in the paleontological dig of the finding of a supposed hominid (an ancient, supposedly less evolved, subhuman, primal ancestor to humans), that was given the name of ‘Piltdown Man’, which entered the hall of shame in 1949 for being identified as an ignominious fraud (click here). Teilhard’s other archaeological achievement was being part of the 1929 team that discovered the Peking Man fossils near Beijing, China, a fossil considered important to the anthropological study of man’s supposed evolutionary origins.
Teilhard’s New-Age Theology
It is also likely that Teilhard was a case of demonic possession after he was said to have had an encounter with what he later calls “the Thing.” Hugh Owen, the Director of ‘The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation’ quotes Fr. Seraphim Rose’s work in ‘Genesis Creation and Early Man’, who highlights that Teilhard, describing his experience in the third person, wrote:
“the Thing swooped down. . . Then, suddenly, a breath of scorching air passed his forehead, broke through the barrier of his closed eyelids, and penetrated his soul. The man felt he was ceasing to be merely himself; an irresistible rapture took possession of him as though all the sap of all living things, flowing at one and the same moment into the too narrow confines of his heart, was mightily refashioning the enfeebled fibers of his being . . . And at the same time the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed him, a confused feeling that the force which had swept down up him was equivocal, turbid, the combined essence of evil and goodness . . .”
“You called me here: here I am” [said “the Thing”]. “Grown weary of abstractions, of attenuations, of the wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself against Reality entire and untamed . . . I was waiting for you in order to be made holy. And now I am established on you for life, or for death . . . He who has once seen me can never forget me: he must either damn himself with me or save me with himself.”
Even without this background, Teilhard’s theology was something that one can only describe as being twisted and dangerously heretical. One of the theories advanced by Teilhard in his book titled ‘the Phenomenon of Man’ was that of the progressive evolution of Man towards a culminating ‘Omega Point’. As per Malachi Martin’s assessment of Teilhard’s hypothesis of the Omega point, Jesus was not really incarnate – only at the Omega Point will an event take place, an event Teilhard called Pan-Christicism (when man would become greater than man). According to Teilhard, we are still in the middle of that development and once Christ appears – who will be the Omega Point, “man will be more than man, will be what Teilhard calls Ultra-Human”, “a point of total self-consciousness”, elaborates Martin. Teilhard’s assertion was, therefore, that a new humanity was emerging as surely as night follows day”.1
Words like ‘Christogenesis’, Christification ‘Noosphere’, ‘Radial Energy’, etc. abound in his works, giving his writings a strong ‘New Age’ flavour. Teilhard is said to have an aversion for clearly defining what his hybrid terms actually meant. Yet, this aspect was lost on his sympathizers, who swallowed Teilhard’s works, hook, line, and sinker. With respect to the veracity of his theology being branded as New Age spirituality, Farley Clinton, in writing for Catholic Culture in 2003, provides support by virtue of a prohibition or caution of New Age spirituality in the Papal document by Pope John Paul II titled, “Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the “New Age“. Clinton writes:
“The footnote cites a poll of prominent ‘New Age’ luminaries conducted several years ago who were asked which thinker had most influenced them on their ‘New Age’ path. These luminaries identified Teilhard more often than any other person as the thinker who had launched them on the road to the ‘New Age’. He is almost the only Catholic among the 37 figures they mentioned as opening the way to the New Age” says Clinton.
I know. Embarrassing right?
In reality, Teilhard was a ‘Modernist’2, one of a breed that was a renegade of his time. With successive Popes, especially Pope Saint Pius X, coming down very hard on the lot of them before and after the 1900s on the backs of other problematic Modernists such as the other Jesuit, George Tyrell, and the father of Modernism, Alfred Loisy. Teilhard was criticised by quite a few Catholics, one of the chief among them being the eminent Catholic philosopher and writer, Dietrich von Hildebrand who called Teilhard a ‘false prophet’, and who further touted Teilhard as ‘not a careful scientist’, further arguing that Teilhard’s ‘Christ’ was not the Christ of the Bible, as he (Teilhard) had adapted religion to suit modern man.
Teilhard’s views on Evolution
Malachi Martin writes that when Roman Catholic scholars who wrongly accepted Evolution as fact tried to reconcile the Catholic church’s official doctrine (of special Creation) with Evolution, they assumed that God the creator intervened at a certain moment in time and space within the evolutionary process and infused a soul into an already evolved ‘higher animal’. But Teilhard was opposed to even this ‘theory’ or version of ‘Theistic’/ ‘Deistic’ evolution. Malachi Martin quotes Teilhard as speaking of a Cardinal Ruffini of Palermo as,
“The Cardinal is still convinced that evolution implies that God breathed a soul into an ape. It is irreconcilable with what we know from biology that our human species should be descended from a pair (of humans)”
It was thus very clear that Teilhard’s starting point was not God, but atheistic Darwinian Evolution.
To Jesus’s scripture reference of “I have come, not to destroy, but to fulfil the law”, Teilhard interpreted that as “I have come not to destroy, but to fulfil evolution.” God therefore “must become the God of Evolution”, For Teilhard believed in “a God who changes”. Teilhard believed that a neo-humanism was on the horizon, and the engine or the ‘divine Motor’ of that humanism was Evolution. Science, Technology, and Evolution would drive man towards the Omega Point, where humanity would be the new Jerusalem. The rule was; where man is most himself, there God must also be.1
Teilhard often spoke of Evolution with his usual flair and optimism, often placing the theory on a biased and one-sided pedestal, completely removed and with utter disregard to Catholic theology or Science:
“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory (curve) which all lines of thought must follow” ― The Phenomenon of Man
Teilhard’s integration and application of evolution with politics
Apart from Evolution being the primary change driver to the hypothesized Omega Point, another predominant theme of Teilhard’s views was the assumed aggregation and equalization of all the diverse human beings, through all kinds of bloody struggles and revolution, until they reached the Omega Point of perfect unity. Teilhard more than once applied this line of reasoning to the sociopolitical situation of his day. He distanced himself from capitalism, and his orientation to Marxism was quite evident. For Teilhard, Evolution at the biological level also implied ‘evolution’ in the distribution of goods and wealth, an ‘equalization’ of property that capitalism made impossible. “Human society has been more and more caught up in a yearning for true justice…a liberation from the bonds (of poverty and dependence brought on by capitalism) in which too many people are still held”1, his writings indicating an unmistakable precursor to Liberation Theology (a later South American off shoot of Marxism and Communism)
Teilhard wondered how one could continue being a Christian in a Capitalist world, as he opined that priests could perfectly find in the (Communist) system of Marxism, justice, hope, and care for Mother Earth, which in his imperial view were much stronger and powerful than evangelical activity. Right there is where one can see the beginnings and shades of what would later become ‘Woke Activism’ within the Jesuit fold.
Malachi Martin writes that,
“For Teilhard, Marxism presented no real difficulty. The Christian God on high, and the Marxist God of progress are reconciled in Christ.”
Notably so, Teilhard is said to be the only Roman Catholic author whose works were on public display with those of Marx and Lenin in Moscow’s Hall of Atheism. When the Communists took over China in 1949, he is reported to have commented that
“It is not because of their Catholicism that the faithful Chinese are better able to face the Marxism of Mao (referring to the then Communist Leader, ‘Chairman’ Mao)”,
implying that he was evidently supportive of Marxist theory and Communist political practices; Catholicism, not so much.1
The Vatican condemns Teilhard
Teilhard’s writings were censored heavily by Roman Superiors & more than one of his books never saw the light of day during his lifetime. Consecutive Superior Generals of the Jesuit order such as Father General W. Ledochowski and the later Father General Jean-Baptiste Janssens, consistently suppressed Teilhard’s writings, and for good reason too. Teilhard’s writings nevertheless clandestinely made its way into the Jesuit order.
“One can attribute this to his ‘mental agility’, his cunning and the power of his ideas that he finally was left alone by his Superiors and allowed to carry on his scholarly activities until he died” writes Malachi Martin.
In fact, so successful was Teilhard in the skills of persuasion and negotiation, that apart from being untroubled by the disciplinary efforts of Jesuit Superiors, he was not even required to live in a Jesuit residence as were the other regular Jesuits.1
A few years after Teilhard’s death, in 1962, under the instructions of Pope John XXIII, the Vatican issued a document warning both Jesuits and Catholics in general that Teilhard’s ideas were extremely dangerous for the Catholic faith
(“[I]t 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.”
However, by then, it was a little too late in the day, as Teilhard’s Mystical New Age Theology had become part of the psyche of the intellectual leadership of the Jesuits.
And it is to such a man, that our ‘beloved’ Holy Father Pope Francis raises a toast, to such a man who we must now endure demands of being coronated as a ‘Doctor of the Church’, a Saint perhaps. It is to such deviants that Pope Francis doffs his zucchetto and mitre to in fond remembrance and honour, to a hero of the Modernists, of the New-Age spiritualists, a defender of evolution and of revolution.
De Souza, in his article thus concludes:
“From authoring ambiguous and erroneous doctrines and being involved in ‘scientific’ frauds and bluffs, to becoming a Doctor of the Church is like a major somersault jump from the depth of hell to the height of heaven!”
Thirteen years into Pope Francis’s papacy, should this even surprise us at all?
As always, Pray for the Pope and Pray for The Holy Roman Catholic Church. Now more than ever, pray the Rosary. May Michael the Archangel defend us in battle, through the grace of the Most Holy Trinity, and through the intercession of Mary our Mother, Saint Joseph, and all the Saints and Angels in heaven.
References:
- All references to Malachi Martin are taken from the book, “The Jesuits – The Society Of Jesus And The Betrayal Of The Roman Catholic Church” (Linden press / Simon and Schuster; Ex-library edition, January 1, 1987)
- Modernist(s), referring to the heresy of ‘Modernism’ was condemned by Pope Saint Pius X in 1907 through his encyclical ‘Pascendi Domenici Gregis’. As detailed in the 2019 book ‘Infiltration’ by Dr. Taylor R. Marshall, “The Modernist heresy seeks to reinterpret biblical history, as well as Catholic philosophy, theology, and liturgy, through the modern prism of rational science and post-Enlightenment philosophy” through the rationale of the ‘evolution of dogma’.
Ave Maria
