VATICAN CITY — The 70th anniversary of the death on April 10 of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the controversial French Jesuit whose works the Vatican formally censured in 1962, has given further reason for those sympathetic to his thought — including Pope Francis and senior Vatican officials — to celebrate his life and legacy.

The latest efforts, which have amounted to an effective rehabilitation of Teilhard as he was familiarly called, came in a two-page spread in the March 27 edition of the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. 

Among the six articles in the newspaper’s tribute, which extolled the late philosopher and paleontologist for being, among other attributes, a “brilliant and stimulating thinker” and a “Moses of the 20th century,” were several articles on a new favorable biography published March 31 by the Vatican’s own publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Titled Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography, author Mercè Prats has examined the works of Teilhard “at a time when questions about the future of the planet are increasingly important,” says the book’s blurb. “Teilhard de Chardin’s passionate quest can be viewed through the prism of ecology, following his ever-hopeful outlook,” it continues. 

This is Prats’ second major work on Teilhard; Prats is a historian of monotheisms at the Laboratory of Monotheism Studies in Paris and a member of the British Teilhard Network. 

This latest work of hers features a preface by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Education and Culture, which has been published in both the L’Osservatore Romano edition and online via Vatican Media.

Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, a close confidant of Pope Francis and undersecretary at the Dicastery for Education and Culture, has been at the forefront of promoting Teilhard in recent years. He spoke last week at launches of Prats’ book in Rome and at the diocesan curia in Verona, describing Teilhard as a poet who speaks “what is, and will be, the language of the future.” 

The Vatican newspaper continued its positive coverage of Teilhard on March 29, when it published an article on a symposium in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, also featuring Father Spadaro as a speaker. It quoted Giuseppe De Rita, founder of Censis, an Italian socioeconomic research institute, who favorably referred to Teilhard at the event; De Rita asserted a distinctly progressive view of Church and society and advocated an embrace of “subjectivism.” 

 

Long-Standing Criticism

The works of Teilhard, who died at age 73 of a heart attack on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, after attending Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, have drawn significant criticism over the years on both theological and philosophical grounds. 

The Holy Office’s 1962 monitum (“warning”) stated that Teilhard’s theological works, which have never received the Church’s imprimatur, “abound in such ambiguities, and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine.” It also urged Church leaders to protect “the minds, particularly of the youth,” from his writings. Recent scholarship has appeared to confirm his “firm commitment” to eugenics and his questionable views on race. In a 1981 statement, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed that the monitum remained in effect. 

Orthodox-thinking theologians have long regarded him nothing short of a heretic; Dietrich von Hildebrand described his thinking as “hopelessly at odds with Christianity,” and Jacques Maritain called him “a man of great imagination” but not a serious philosopher or theologian, while the late Catholic writer Malachi Martin concluded from studying Teilhard’s writings that he had lost the Catholic faith.  

Despite this, frequent attempts to rehabilitate the controversial French Jesuit have taken place during this pontificate. Pope Francis has led the way in this regard, praising Teilhard’s theological vision in a footnote in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, calling him “often misunderstood” in a homily in Mongolia in 2023, and describing him last month as “daring and inspiring” in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Life. 

In 2017, participants of the then-Pontifical Council for Culture formally praised Teilhard’s “prophetic vision” as inspiring theologians and scientists worldwide and asked Pope Francis to lift the 1962 monitum. 

In his preface to Prats’ biography, Cardinal de Mendonça’s described Teilhard as “one of the most fascinating and complex figures of twentieth century thought.” 

The Portuguese cardinal, known for his poetry and progressive leanings, said Teilhard’s work “lies at the intersection of science, theology, and philosophy” and represents “a bold attempt to integrate cosmic evolution with a spiritual vision of the universe.” He described his thought as an “original synthesis” that challenges “traditional dichotomies between faith and reason, nature and spirit, time and eternity.”

The “theory of evolution” was central to Teilhard’s thought, the cardinal went on, adding that he saw evolution not simply as a biological process, “but a cosmic movement that involves all of creation.” The French Jesuit believed that the universe “is animated by an inner force that pushes it toward the omega point, a term coined by Teilhard to indicate the pinnacle of evolution, where human and divine consciousness unite in harmony.”

Such “boldness in reinterpreting the Catholic faith” in light of scientific discovery “provoked contrasting reactions within the Church,” Cardinal de Mendonça acknowledged. He highlighted the 1962 monitum, but also correctly noted that Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI each had some positive words to say about him (Benedict admired Teilhard’s creativity and theological insights, but maintained reservations about certain aspects of Teilhard’s work, particularly its potential ambiguities and deviations from orthodox doctrine.).

Cardinal de Mendonça went on to praise Prats for rereading Teilhard’s ideas “in the light of the challenges of the contemporary world” and for her ability “to dialogue with current issues, such as the ecological crisis, globalization and the search for spiritual meaning in the technological age.” 

 

Teilhard’s Resonances Today

Teilhard’s ideas have clearly found resonance with the Vatican of today and come close to several of its priorities. Martin explained in his book The Jesuits how Teilhard’s alienation from capitalism oriented him to “the people,” that “Marxism presented no real difficulty” for him, and that he was opposed to rigidity in doctrine, once dryly criticizing Archbishop Fulton Sheen for seeing “religion without mysteries, save those of theology,” and commenting that, for Sheen, “all is revealed.” 

Martin also highlighted what he saw as Teilhard’s chief target, favored, he said, by “all genuine modernists,” which was “its hierarchy of bishops united with the Pope as their head” — an observation not dissimilar to criticisms today of the Synod on Synodality. For Martin, the Church’s hierarchy, “would not survive Teilhardism.” 

He assessed that the change demanded of the Church by Teilhard “was total” and that in his “God of Evolution,” Teilhard saw everything as being in perpetual flux — an observation echoing the belief that Francis is promoting a “liquid society Church.” Teilhard, Martin wrote, “believed not in Nietzsche’s ‘God who is dead,’ and not in the immutable God of the Church, but in ‘a God who changes.’” This, he said, led Teilhard to believe that everything in the Church “must be rethought” and that she must “ally herself with science because ‘this would help clear away the obstacles that hinder the Church from knowing her own truth.’” 

After analyzing his personal piety and practice of religious belief (he noted that Teilhard once described the supernatural as a “monstrous idea”), Martin concluded that, “quite obviously, Teilhard had stopped believing as a Catholic,” and deduced that, partly from his theories, the discredited theology of liberation emerged. 

In his famous 1967 critique of Teilhard titled Trojan Horse in the City of God, von Hildebrand accused him of promoting a crass naturalism that subordinated the individual soul to cosmic processes and ignored the supernatural destiny of humanity. He found Teilhard’s pantheistic tendencies troubling, especially his portrayal of Christ as a figure tied to evolutionary processes rather than as the Redeemer of mankind.

“It was only after reading several of Teilhard’s works,” he wrote, “that I fully realized the catastrophic implications of his philosophical ideas and the absolute incompatibility of his theology fiction — as Etienne Gilson [a 20th historian and philosopher] calls it — with Christian revelation and the doctrine of the Church.” 

Teilhard’s staunch advocates naturally reject such criticisms, but the spiritual dangers of Teilhard’s writings, ones that led to the Vatican’s monitum, remain for many just as valid today as they were then.