The first part of this post consists of some books on the topic of evolution; the second is a piece about Fr. Teilhard De Chardin (proponent of evolution and cosmic nonsense), extracted from something longer and unpublished. This should be coming out on June 28, which is the Eve of the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, who are the embodiments of the bedrock of the Faith. Teilhard has done much to undermine the Faith, and still retains a high status today among the post-modernists.
Thinking About Genesis by Margaret T. Munro (Chicago: Regnery Logos, 1966, pb, 1953 imprimatur). “The story in Genesis then represents God as forming man’s body from already existing matter, in a way that stresses both his kinship with what has gone before [animals, plants, etc.], and also his difference from it” (167). This paperback is a reprint of a 1953 hard cover edition.
So This Is Evolution! by Francis P. LeBuffe, S.J. (NY: The America Press, 1931, sc, 1931 Cdl. Hayes imprimatur). Yes. America, now the mouthpiece for liberal, dissident Jesuits and others, was once (albeit nearly a century ago) on the side of orthodoxy. Fr. LeBuffe’s pamphlet especially takes to task Prof. Osborne. LeBuffe’s final paragraph leaves open the question of evolution connected to the body’s development while insisting on God’s direct involvement in creation. “His creative intervention need not have gone beyond the production of the soul or principle of life” (32). That assertion accords with Catholic doctrine. This book appears in a Catholic University of America database.
The Evolution Hoax Exposed by A.N. Field (Rockford, IL: TAN, 1981, first published in 1941, pb). The title of this book when it first came out was Why Colleges Breed Communists, which seems appropro in light of today’s campus-based tumults. The author’s thesis is that taking evolution as a fact leads to multiple errors. Link to online version.
The Origins of Man “Nicolas Corte” (Msgr. Leon Cristiani) (NY: Hawthorn, 1958, hc, 1958 imprimatur, #29 in series). Cristiani explores myth and science, and his penultimate section references Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis, a not-so-secret attack on Teihard and his fellow travelers.
God In Creation and Evolution by A. Hulsbosch, O.S.A. (NY: Sheed & Ward, 1965, cloth, 1965 imprimatur). Hmmm. “The answers Father Hulsbosch gives these fundamental questions rests on the insights given both by science and the Bible. The result is a work of great power, which opens up startling and thrilling vistas for the Christian, who will find herein not only a discussion of original sin and evolution, but a cosmic Christology” (from the dust cover). That should send any orthodox believer gripping this book to deposit in the recycling. This is another example of how Sheed & Ward quickly fell into heterodoxy (or at least began publishing heterodox material).
Finally, The Theory of Evolution Judged by Reason and Faith by Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini (Boonville, NY: Preserving Christian Publications, 2008, hc, 1959 imprimatur). A reprint of a work dissecting evolution and transformism. “I have undertaken this work in order to show that evolution applied to living beings, as it is propounded by materialists, has no scientific basis; and that, in particular, transformism applied to man—even if restricted to the body—cannot be admitted” (iii).
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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?
Notes:
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” (November 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. 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.
Teilhard, Hymn of the Universe, 20.
Look up the letters between Gilson and De Lubac. Gilson sniffed him out as a fraud from the get go.
Providentially, I just read something concerning evolution in Sheen's 1960 "Go to Heaven": "One wonders why a world so much given to the philosophy of evolution does not see the grace of Jesus Christ as the answer to its aspirations. One of the reasons why evolution is held so highly is because of the promise it gives for the future, and yet, all that it can give, even in its wildest form, is the unfolding of something beneath man. But here in supernatural biology [Sheen has been expostulating on grace], there is the promise and the potency of a glory for man which exceeds even his imagination--the potency not of becoming a superman, but a son of God. There is no emergent in the whole field of evolution comparable to the 'new creatures' which emerge from the Sacrament of Baptism. True greatness of life is not a push from below, but a gift from above: 'I am come that you may have life and that in abundance'" (55-56).