Digging Deeper
Long Piece, Pt. III
Third Excavation: July 3 and September 8, 1907, Striking at Revolution Root and Branch
Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII understood the threats facing the Church and the world, and both used the papal teaching office to inveigh against attacks on family, faith, and right governance. Pope St. Pius X, standing on his predecessors’ firm foundation, made an assault on the entire modernist project as the synthesis or collection of all heresies. He did this especially in two 1907 thunderbolts: Lamentabili Sane (dated July 3 under the auspices of the Holy Office), and Pascendi (September 8).41 Although American Independence Day is not on the Roman Calendar, it is a stroke of providence to have Lamentabili issued on the day prior as if to head off the destructive drive to “liberty” devoid of a proper national relationship to God. An additional endorsement of this line of thought is found at the document’s end: “The following Thursday, the fourth day of the same month and year, all these matters were accurately reported to our Most Holy Lord, Pope Pius X. His Holiness approved and confirmed the decree of the Most Eminent Fathers and ordered that each and every one of the above-listed propositions be held by all as condemned and proscribed.” An alternative July 4 indeed! As for Pascendi, it was fittingly promulgated on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, one of God’s greatest bulwarks against heresy.
Although it is tempting to perform an extensive mining of quotations from these two texts, it must be admitted that others of better qualifications have already examined these profound proclamations of Truth and denunciations of the false. A notable example is Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, whose life-long work rebutted those modernist errors. It is for that reason most appropriate that Lefebvre chose St. Pius X as the patron of the priestly fraternity he founded.
But diligence demands at least a brief mention of the contents of the two documents. Lamentabili is a list of erroneous or false propositions put forth by modernists and anathematized by the Holy Father. The document begins: “With truly lamentable results, our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race. Thus it falls into very serious errors, which are even more serious when they concern sacred authority, the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, and the principal mysteries of Faith.” There can be no doubt what the Church through its highest office on the authority of the Pope is saying to the faithful—STOP! Casting off traditional restraint is ruinous. Here is just one of those condemned propositions: “53. The organic constitution of the Church is not immutable. Like human society, Christian society is subject to a perpetual evolution.”
The encyclical Pascendi, rather than listing condemned propositions and beliefs, is written in a straightforward style. The Pope wastes no time in laying out the problem at hand. “2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. 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; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.” The revolution is stirring within the Church, Pius asserts. The remainder of the encyclical provides the evidence and the solution. Once again the problems are tied to a mistaken idea of freedom, actually no different from that peddled to Adam and Eve by the ancient adversary. “Should they [dissenters on matters of dogma] be rebuked for this [dissent and disobedience], they complain that they are being deprived of their liberty.”
St. Pius X succeeded in checking modernism, but not eradicating it. A suitable analogy comes from my backyard, courtesy of a certain noxious invasive species—Japanese knotweed. The plant was inexplicably brought here decades ago as an ornamental. A cursory look suggests a similarity to bamboo, though I don’t think there is any close genetic link. The stocks can easily be cut down or even pulled up, but that is not enough to get rid of it. Fire will not work, and neither will chemicals. It can be partly smothered but that only delays its emergence. The plant spreads and reproduces through underground rhizomes, and even a small piece can take root. Therefore, the only recourse is to dig out the affected area to the depth of several feet. Otherwise the plant keeps coming back, exhausting the property owner’s patience and resources. Modernism likewise was ready to spring back to active life once counter-measures ceased or were at least relaxed.
Hold on a minute. Isn’t this work meant to be somewhat of the story of my life? True, but I wasn’t born during these years of excavation. What about my family? They were mostly, on both sides, farmers. The paternal line came from the British Isles and was centuries removed from Catholicism. Nor were they—as far as I can tell—particularly religious or prone to preaching. The maternal line came from Quebec into northern New York and New England in the later nineteenth century. They were Catholic. Beyond that, I do not know. If there were any priests or religious in the family they are forgotten today. Meeting the basic requirements of the Church—especially in regards to sacraments like baptism, marriage, and burial—were just the accepted course of life. Seemingly their lives were like those of the ethnic Catholics of America in Henry Morton Robinson’s The Cardinal.42
After these theological excavations, it is time to return to the timeline of my life and to chart the course of Independence heading for its shattering collision with the Rock. As I toddled around our farm in the first part of the 1960s the Church’s bishops met to enact aggiornamento. It was fairly recently that I learned the council discussions were conducted in Latin, an impossibility today. Yes. The Council that despite its own documents to promote Latin and use of Latin in its proceedings put the stake through the heart of the unifying tool of the Church. In 1967 the Land O’Lakes statement declared Catholic colleges and universities independent of Church control.43 That year my brother (the middle of three) was born, a fact I shared at kindergarten show-and-tell. But it was the following year that was a turning point for the Church, the world, and my family.
The Year of Catholic Death: 1968
The facts of life = death. Nineteen-sixty-eight featured death in many guises: Vietnam and the Tet offensive; the death of sanity as students and radicals rose up in bifurcated France, eldest daughter of the Church and bastion of the Revolution; death of the old Mass as many priests began celebrating facing the people and in the vernacular; the death of traditional morality with the rejection of Paul VI’s greatest achievement, Humanae Vitae; the death of my Uncle Dan in large part from trauma experienced in Vietnam; the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Romano Guardini, and Padre Pio. And in the midst of death, the birth of my youngest brother.
· RFK, Bobby, Senator, Attorney General…Catholic father of many children. Was he the one who could have bridged the gap and joined together tradition, liberalism, youth, and justice? Or is the buzz about his rebirth as a spiritual visionary (as opposed to a hard-fisted politician) just so much Catholic Democrat nostalgia, like those pictures of the California Brown family with Jerry in his Jesuit garb? Was he a harbinger of celebrity Catholicism? For instance: Martin Sheen arrested at an anti-nuclear demonstration; Susan Sarandon portraying Sister Helen Prejean; Dorothy Day seated at a protest, with menacing police goons towering over her; or Pope John Paul II, greeted like a rock star at World Youth Day.
· Regarding Trappist Merton: There is still a penumbra of mystery around his death, supposedly by an electrical accident. Two words will make anyone suspicious: Rembert Weakland. He was involved with reporting the incident and caring for Merton’s body. I suspect Merton’s death was a case of God intervening before Father Louis (his name in religion, remember?) slid any further down the slippery slope of an indifferentism-false-ecumenism-all-paths-lead-to-God syncretic chute straight down to hell. Another Catholic celebrity casualty.
· I have a very soft spot in my heart and mind for Fr. Guardini (1885-1968). I have never read one of his books without profit. Yes. Occasionally I come across something that might give me pause, but more often there are penetrating insights into liturgy, relationship to God, or human society and nature. His book, Sacred Signs, inspired me to write a Verse Companion to it. Who knows how the great teacher would have responded to the assault on the Church unfolding even at his life’s end?
· We know how Padre Pio received permission to continue saying the Mass without change. I think one reason he remains a popular saint is because of his uncompromising ministry. There is a genuine cult of Padre Pio; no such cult exists for Paul VI, the epitome of wishy-washiness. The Franciscan friar’s hard words to penitents were spiritual surgery of a kind we rarely see anymore. Instead we see too many souls perishing for lack of that same surgery while Church priests and bishops offer the placebo of false compassion to those with spiritual cancer.
How many have died in mortal sin—enmity with God—because of the shepherds who assist the wolves?! How many have confused the false freedom of America with the ordered freedom of God?
The last Catholic death I mentioned is my uncle Dan. When he died I was almost seven. I remember him, but from a child’s perspective, augmented by some details revealed to me by my mother and grandfather. He was never an altar boy. Didn’t seem particularly devout. Service in the infantry in Vietnam changed him. He died with a gun. There must have been a charitable interpretation of his last moments, because he is buried in hallowed Catholic ground. My own future grave site is not far from his.
It was a year of Catholic death. Of celebrities and brothers and teachers of the Faith.
It was also the year of non-Catholic birth, because my youngest brother was born that June.
Soon the Church’s calendars would change. The unfinished Tower of Babel would return, a multitude of tongues—not of fire, but of dust—clamoring for attention from an indifferent world, passing by the dying remains of Latin, despised mocked and reviled Latin, supposed enemy of understanding and participation, the guardian preventing the young from cavorting at the carnival of liturgical options. But stealthily, some Latin survived, and at the behest of America. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. Novus ordo seclorum: new order of the ages. Annuit coeptis: [He] favors [our] undertakings. Those crafty freemasons knew what they were doing!
Even in that year of Catholic death, 1968, the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave and carrier of freemasonic ideals expressed in Latin, was preparing for a celebration of itself in only eight short years. What a year and date for a Yankee Doodle Dandy firecracker baby to look forward to: turning fifteen on the nation’s two-hundredth birthday. But it was not to be the year I might have envisioned.
The Bicentennial: 1976, Protest in Montreal, and Two French Priests
Montreal. Island city. In old Quebec the raucous, loose-living post to Quebec City’s stony austerities. Only a little over an hour away, it was the first real city I ever visited. It was also the source of much of our t.v. viewing and radio, though at least half of it in French, the language my mother’s family had stopped speaking. My first time there was for the World’s Fair: Expo ’67. I almost rushed onto the Metro but was snatched back at the last instant. In following years Montreal was a destination to see the baseball team—the Expos, of course—play at Jarry Park.
In 1976 I went there on a school trip. Hanging out in the school art room and taking art class had its advantages. For one thing, there was the gorgeous Mrs. White, our teacher. But there were also the offbeat kids, music lovers, and pot smokers. We got to tag along with the French classes and tour museums, eat at an exotic (to us) Chinese restaurant, and run around during the Quebec national holiday: Fete National (Ste. Jean Baptiste Day), remnant of the former French colony’s Catholic foundations. But what I best remember of that day was my first in-person exposure to anti-Americanism. A group of protesters (students?) were marching through downtown Montreal with signs and chanting: “The Shah is a U.S. puppet; down with the Shah!” I didn’t know I was encountering a signpost for where I’d be in a few years, sailing on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, keeping an eye on Islamic revolutionary and hostage-taking Iran and the Soviets in Afghanistan.
*
Nineteen seventy-six was also the year Montreal hosted the summer Olympics, though I didn’t go to that. Part of the draw of Montreal (besides its stunning site in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, former Jesuit highway to and from the interior of North America) is its French culture. Sadly, by that year, Catholicism, a vital part of that culture, had been cast away.44
I am grateful for my French ancestors. Grateful they came to this country, bringing the Faith with them. But it saddens me to see almost my entire family turned away from that Faith. Is it possible to be both American and Catholic? Archbishop Carroll thought so. So did Mother Seton, and Mother Cabrini, who obtained citizenship. And Archbishop Sheen. But it is not easy. It is like trying to work with two potentially-incompatible operating systems at the same time, or simultaneously using metric and inches.
The French have wrestled with similar problems, only their revolution was even worse than ours…or maybe it was just more honest. Like the two baskets of figs in Jeremiah’s vision (Jer. 24:1-2), one good and one rotten, two French priests exemplify what is good in tradition and what is rotten in trying to undermine it. Those two priests were Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991) and Father Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955). In the year 1976, when we Americans were celebrating our Lockean revolution to secure our materialistic, deistic, anti-Catholic republic, shooting off fireworks, and finding ways to merchandise all manner of things by inserting them into the bicentennial mold, Abp. Lefebvre was defending Tradition and the Mass of St. Pius V against the modernizing pantheists beholden to Teilhard for their un-Christian beliefs. But for me during the Bicentennial, life was not all that different from what one can view in the 1993 movie set in 1976, Dazed and Confused. Thankfully the world did not end in 1976.
There is much—too much—that could be said about Teilhard.45 Scholars Romano Amerio and Roberto de Mattei both identify Teilhard’s ideas as corrosive to the traditional faith. Amerio, in Iota Unum, cites the Jesuit’s thoughts on “an unknown religion, a religion which nobody could imagine or describe hitherto” (8-9).46 De Mattei in The Second Vatican Council (an unwritten story) describes Teilhard’s writings as “outlin[ing] a philosophical and religious concept incompatible with Christianity” (38).47 He further details the rehabilitation of Teilhard and his writing on the eve of the Second Vatican Council by his Jesuit confreres Fathers de Lubac and Danielou, to the extent that Teilhard’s “name fluttered over the impending council and would be an interpretive key thereof” (164). That in spite of a monitum from the Holy Office. Or, as H. Reed Armstrong put it, “In the mid-twentieth century, one may have paraphrased St. Jerome: ‘the world awoke, without so much as a whimper, to find itself Teilhardian.’”
If I understand correctly, homeopathic medicine involves using micro-doses of a particular substance to fight disease symptoms using the like against like approach. Given Teilhard’s cosmic sensibility (which to me seems like a boring LSD trip), I will use a trippy, somewhat stream-of-consciousness approach to encompass, as best I can, his errors and bad gifts to the Church and world.
Hubris.
Evolution as a scientific paradigm used to explain spiritual matters. Did this WWI medic and stretcher-bearer try to carry Faith off the field of battle? Did this scion of French nobility and relative of Voltaire through his pious mother side with the peasants or the enlightened? Ordained in 1911, the terrors of battle did not push him to view reality with a conservative vision, but instead to grow in a sort of pantheism in which Adam and Eve were denied. Rarely in a cassock, he more than once allowed himself to be out in the field without the requisites to celebrate Mass. Always pushing to have his work published, and having the bad luck to bid goodbye forever to purported Peking Man, he never settles down to the normal priestly life. He appeals to those who doubt. The Divine Milieu is “written for the waverers, both inside and outside; that is to say for those who, instead of giving themselves wholly to the Church, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it.”48 Furthermore, “thus it is that those whose education or interest leads them to listen primarily to the voices of the earth, have a certain fear that they may be false to themselves if they simply follow the Gospel path.”49
Where is Christ, Father de Chardin?
“The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.”50 Whither this evolving Man? “The more man becomes man, the less will he be prepared to move except towards that which is interminably and indestructibly new.”51 He was able to personally test his theories when he died in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1955. Did he ascend to the “Omega Point?”52 What has he learned about “the Cosmic Law of Complexity-Consciousness?”53 Is it true that “the only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalising’ universe?”54 To date Teilhard has not conveyed any data as to whether or not his hypotheses are true or false.
But we have already been given an answer by Pope Pius XII. “Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution.”55 Fr. De Lubac in his book about Teilhard’s religion, makes the repeated refrain that people have misunderstood Teilhard or used his words out of context for their own purposes. But from the preceding quote we can see that Pope Pius XII understood Teilhard’s ideas as erroneous. Sadly, the first Jesuit pope does not.
Teilhard the student of Bremond, Grandmaison, and excommunicated Tyrell.56 Unauthorized reader of forbidden Bergson. Censored. Rebuked. Unrepentant. Piltdown and Peking fraudster. Coiner of neologisms: Omega Point, Cosmogenesis, Noosphere. “The growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming.”57 Garrigou-Lagrange is your nemesis.
Teilhard always spoke of evolution and upward motion, but the flight from tradition actually results in devolution. “If I live as I ought,” wrote Fulton Sheen, “I become a man; if I live as I please, I may become a beast.”58
Did Teilhard ever meet Sheen? Or his fellow Frenchman, Archbishop Lefebvre? I can’t imagine either of those meetings to be anything other than polite yet empty. What could the pseudo-mystic and composer of “Hymn on the World”59 have to say to the American bishop who spent an hour a day in front of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, or the renowned missionary who learned native languages in order to share the Gospel?
Non serviam. The Holy Father and his Humani Generis are misguided and wrong, but Teilhard has seen the truth!
Is that any different than the mythical American seizing of independence? Self-realization trumps obedience and hierarchy. What were we celebrating in 1976? And why, with the exception of a brief moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, would we so quickly turn to self-loathing after our Bicentennial triumph?
*
Even as I began my descent into a rebellious, vain and fruitless quest for peace through drugs, another story was unfolding in 1976. It was a tale of stubborn adherence to enduring truth and a rejection of poisonous novelty. It was about paying a price for standing firm.
In a book-length interview, Dutch Catholic journalist Jose Hanu carried on an edifying conversation with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).60 Lefebvre makes his position clear in the book’s foreword, where he expresses his hope that he “might contribute to the establishment of the social kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is my only aim.”61 He also makes clear that “we [SSPX] are not rebels.”62 Hanu and Lefebvre consider the Archbishop’s life, Vatican II, the seminary at Econe, and the SSPX’s relations with the Vatican. Lefebvre defends the monarchical nature of the Church, and praises the virtues of his parents who helped mold him and his siblings into well-disciplined adults.
“Harmony in the material order fosters harmony in the soul,” says the Archbishop.63 That is a theme Lefebvre considered important, and it shows now almost a half century later in the order found in SSPX chapels and schools, and in the Society’s well-formed priests. How very different from the chaos and multiple stimuli so prevalent in much of post-modern life. That harmony will show itself in all aspects of life. “We are either Catholic or we are not. If we are, we think that the example and teachings of Jesus Christ are divine, therefore unique….Every man who is imbued by the Gospel conducts himself at the same time as a good son, a good husband, a good employee, a good artisan, a good mayor, a good deputy, a good minister, a good president of the republic. He loves his brethren and he is just, generous and courageous.”64
Of the council (where he spoke out in defense of Tradition), he notes how “the progressives and the liberals like to live in a climate of ambiguity.”65 One way they did that was to first say that Vatican II was pastoral, but later to insist that it was actually dogmatic. “The Council has become ‘dogmatic,’ and whoever considers it ‘pastoral’ is [considered by the progressives] a heretic or schismatic!”66 So Lefebvre’s overall assessment of the Council should come as no surprise. “As you can see,” he told Hanu, “my judgment about the Council was not formed yesterday. Even before the closing of the Council [in 1965], I proclaimed to all the Fathers assembled there that, according to my view, it was not the Holy Spirit who inspired the Council but possibly Satan.”67 Moreover, the Archbishop considered the Council’s whole approach as flawed and contrary to the true principles of Tradition. “The evidence is in. Vatican II, in its desire to be young and modern, to meet the world, has applied false principles. We can see the results every day. We must therefore fight everywhere for the faith, that is, denounce the consequences, recall the true principles, principles which hold for all times and under all conditions.”68 That was and is the agenda of the SSPX and allies going forward into the twenty-first century.69
In 1976 we were dealing with a concept of freedom as lack of restraint both external and internal. Hierarchy (the vertical) was despised and equality (the horizontal) was “in.” This was manifest in liturgy, with the Traditional Mass demonstrating the ascent to God by the construction of the sanctuary and priest’s actions, while the Novus Ordo of Paul VI exhibited a mundane, this-worldly horizontal supposed relationship to one another, the priest-presider, and God, as if we could pull the Lord down to our level. “In the face of this sacrilegious desacralization of the Mass, our beautiful treasure, there is only one thing we can do: uphold tradition.”70
The Catholic imagination and soul and even the natural man crave the strong and sure. “Believe me,” stated Archbishop Lefebvre, “what young people are looking for is not ‘leaders,’ again an insidious word, but educators who are able to set an example. If it were otherwise, how can you explain that the seminary at Econe, where life consists of studies, prayer and spirituality, could attract so many young vocations?”71
In response to a question from Hanu, the Archbishop comments on the novelty of national bishops’ conferences, which detract from a bishop’s ability to govern his own diocese. “Unfortunately, the Council introduced the new and pernicious idea of collective government. No bishop can henceforth make a decision by himself. He has to refer to the Conference of Bishops of his country.”72 He clearly understood the ecclesiological confusion of the Church in the council’s aftermath.
Archbishop Lefebvre was the clear-sighted physician who knew the right prescription and protocols for a restoration of health. The conciliar Church chose another approach, one offered by quacks and those guilty of malpractice but who retained control of accreditation. Hanu quotes from Lefebvre’s 1974 declaration responding to a malicious investigation and report on the Econe seminary: “All these reforms have contributed to the ruin of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, the defacement of the sacrifice and sacraments of religious life, to a Teilhardian, naturalistic teaching in the universities, the seminaries, in catechesis, teachings which have their roots in liberalism and Protestantism which were condemned untold times by the magisterium of the Church.”73
Archbishop Lefebvre also mentions his “illegal” condemnation by Rome and how it violated all norms. “Had one ever seen such a thing in the Church, except under the Inquisition? This is another fruit of Vatican II: it preaches so-called tolerance toward all ideas, but as soon as one opposes one of its aims, it is intolerance personified. Denying justice does not faze them.”74 Further on he makes clear his criticism of the perversion of law, authority, and process in the post-conciliar Church. “The law, like everything in the Church, should be at the service of faith. As soon as the law is in the service of destruction of faith, it must not be obeyed. The same holds for all the authority of the Church.”75
There are many more points made by the Archbishop which seem to be culled from controversies of 2023, such as the loss of the missionary imperative and the descent toward indifferentism. But I will close this section with one final declaration by Lefebvre. “One must understand this: Our battle is not a confrontation between persons and characters. It goes well beyond: it is the battle of faith against error.”76
Notes:
41. Lamentabili Sane: Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius10/p10lamen.htm; Pascendi Dominici Gregis: Encyclical of Pope Pius X On the Doctrines of the Modernists, https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html (Both accessed June 27, 2023). An excellent and balanced biography of St. Pius X is Yves Chiron’s Saint Pius X: Restorer of the Church (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2002).
42. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950).
43. See note 31.
44. See the now-classic story of a Montreal priest confronting the end of traditional Quebec Catholicism in Pastor Out in the Cold: The Story of Fr. Normandin’s Fight for the Latin Mass in Canada (St. Mary’s Kansas: Angelus Press, 2021).
45. I have read some of Teilhard’s work, though it is so chocked-full of jargon and gobbledygook that it is difficult to digest due to its neologisms and anti-traditional theses. I have based what I have written on the following works. For an introduction to Teilhard and his thought (very positive and not critical), the website
https://www.teilhard.org.uk/
is a starting point. For a slightly more critical book, see The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin by Henri de Lubac, S. J. (N.Y.: Desclee, 1967). For a brief, damning presentation, see Rev. Paul Wickens’ Christ Denied: Origin of the Present Day Problems In the Catholic Church (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1982). For a serious look at Teilhard as a scientist, see Amir Aczel’s The Jesuit & the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007). For a criticism of Teilhard (not by name), see the 1950 Encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis. Teilhard’s books only came out after his death. His first was The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Also of note is his Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), which contains his notorious “The Mass on the World.” His most well-known book is The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). For an official endorsement of Teilhard, see the 2015 Encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, particularly footnote 53 mentioning Teilhard by name. H. Reed Armstrong penetrates to the heart of the myth of Teilhard in his 1Peter5 essay, “Teilhard de Chardin: The Vatican II Architect You Need to Know” (Novemebr 27, 2017; accessed July 24, 2023). Finally, Michael Hichborn’s presentation at the June 2023 Cancelled Priests Conference brilliantly connects Yeats’ disturbing poem “The Second Coming” with Teilhard’s creepy pseudo-mystical encounter with something spiritual. Peter Kwasniewski at his Substack Tradition & Sanity writes about Teilhard as the key to understanding Pope Francis:
.
46. Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century (Kansas City, MO: Sarto House, 2021).
47. Roberto de Mattei, The Second Vatican Council (an unwritten story) (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2012).
48. Teilhard, The Divine Milieu, 43.
49. Ibid.
50. Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man, 221.
51. Ibid, 231-232.
52. Ibid, 279.
53. Ibid, 300-302.
54. Ibid, 290.
55. Humani Generis, paragraph 5.
56. Wickens, Christ Denied, 5ff.
57. Teilhard, Hymn of the Universe, 20.
58. Sheen, Dependence, 90.
59. Found in Hymn of the Universe. A small sample: “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 earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world” (20). Watch Hichborn’s presentation for the un-Christian nature of this “mass.”
60. Vatican Encounter: Conversations With Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2014 revised edition). The title is misleading because there is no explicit mention of an encounter at the Vatican and the interview seems to take place at Econe, the headquarters of the SSPX.
61. Vatican Encounter, vii.
62. Ibid, 1.
63. Ibid, 22.
64. Ibid, 44.
65. Ibid, 52.
66. Ibid.
67. Vatican Encounter, 57.
68. Ibid, 68.
69. As a side note as this section pertains to Quebec in 1976, Lefebvre mentions the wholly un-Catholic content of the Canadian catechism and its approach to sexuality. Despite this profane material, the catechism sports an imprimatur. See Vatican Encounter, 72. See also p. 84 for the decision in Quebec to allow priests to wear “civilian” clothing rather than the cassock.
70. Ibid, 104.
71. Ibid, 77.
72. Ibid, 91.
73. Ibid, 118, emphasis added.
74. Ibid, 122.
75. Ibid, 129.
76. Ibid, 138.