Teilhard de Chardin: Trojoan Horse of Vatican II/Heretic Extraordinaire

...Some of the blame for our current predicament can be laid at the feet of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Priest who attempted to institute a “New Religion” by combining Darwinian evolution with his unorthodox view of Theism.

As Wolfgang Smith has written, Teilhard de Chardin intended to start a New Religion.[1] He made it quite clear on several occasions. In a letter to Leontine Zanta he wrote:

“As you already know, what dominates my interest and my preoccupations is the effort to establish in myself and to spread around a new religion (you may call it a better Christianity) in which the personal God ceases to be the great Neolithic proprietor of former times, in order to become the soul of the world; our religious and cultural stage calls for this.”[2]

Dietrich von Hildebrand and Wolfgang Smith trace much of the heterodoxy of the second Vatican Conciliar process to the circulation of Teilhardian conceptions of science[3] (especially with respect to biological evolution) and derivatively, Teilhard’s view of religion. Teilhard seems to have made the transformism[4] of biological evolution palatable to certain Catholic Theologians who wished to embrace what they perceived as modern evolutionary science. Traditionally, the entire notion had been thought heretical particularly as concerned the biological evolution of human beings.
MORE...

ENDNOTES:

[1] Wolfgang Smith. Teilhardism and the New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (Rockford, Ill., Tan Books and Publisher’s Inc., 1988), pp. 209-210.
[2] Lettres a Leontine Zanta (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1965), p. 127; quoted by von Hildebrand in Trojan Horse in the City of God (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1967), p. 239.
[3] Which was steeped in Baconian conceptions of science and which fully accepted the Bifurcationism of Descartes.
[4] Also referred to as “Macroevolution” in which major animal body plans are alleged to have developed slowly and incrementally over eons of time from entirely different ones, e.g. amphibians from fish, birds from reptiles etc. In evolutionary biology this is referred to as “common descent” with modification. There is no persuasive evidence that this has occurred above the level of genus or species if dispassionately considered. Recall also that Fr. Stanley Jaki has argued that “Origins” questions by their very nature are not scientific but philosophical meaning that the question of so-called Macro-evolution is non-scientific from the start since the origin and development of terrestrial life is scientifically unrepeatable. The most one could do is make inferences from established facts.