"Further, parallel with Teilhard’s denigration of “care lavished on the wounded [or weak], we read that 40-50% of deaths from the coronavirus are among those in nursing homes and assisted living. And in correspondence with his proposal for weeding out “unprogressive ethnical groups”, statistical analysis claim that death rates among blacks and Latinos are 2-3 times higher than among the white population. George Soros, financier of abortion, euthanasia, population control, same-sex “marriage,” and transgenderism around the world, and certainly to be counted among the elite of the new regime called for by Teilhard de Chardin, has claimed that this current situation represents a “revolutionary moment” for social change not possible under “normal” conditions. Whether or not we believe that this virus was engineered by man for such purposes, it certainly is now being employed for such an agenda as Teilhard proposed. We might therefore justly believe that the most appropriate name for what is happening is not “pandemic”, but rather 'Paneugenics'."
- James Larson
It is the Catholic Monitor's honor to post Catholic scholar James Larson's article. Larson is an American independent scholar who resembles the British independent scholar Christopher Dawson in depth of analysis as well as learning. He is much better known in England than in the United States.
This is an essays on the heretical nature of the Teilhard de Chardin theory which proposes human evolution and well as other evolution theories by my friend Jim Larson.
Before we get into his piece, it's is important to explain that even a true pope can fall into error according to the First Vatican Council:
Vatican I expert Fr. Chad Ripperger, PhD, in his book Magisterial Authority explains that "saying that the pope is infallible regardless of conditions" could be "proximate to heresy":
"[T]reat[ing] ALL papal statements as if they are infallible... is proximate to heresy because it rejects the precise formulation of the conditions of infallibility as laid out in by Vatican I... by essentially saying that the pope is infallible regardless of conditions... "
"... Worse still, those who were to follow a pope who was in error in a non-infallible teaching which is taught contrary to something that is infallible is not, therefore, excused."
(Magisterial Authority, Pages 5-14)
http://rosarytotheinterior.com/
“For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone.” (Pope Pius X: Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici – On the Study of Thomistic Philosophy in Catholic Schools).
In studying the Gift of Knowledge and its corresponding Beatitude of Mourning, we have been dealing precisely with that knowledge of created things, and our proper relationship to them, which is absolutely necessary if we are to be able “to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed God and to God alone”, thereby establishing ourselves in that true relationship to God which makes us receptive to His grace. This is why we are devoting several articles to this subject – in order to help us acquire that understanding which will liberate us from those false forms of knowledge which now ensnare us and suffocate the life of the Holy Spirit in our souls.
The form of false knowledge which has been the most powerful cultural force for establishing the modern world in that false understanding of creation which makes impossible a true knowledge of God is the theory of evolution. On the one hand, it is the most effective “engine of destruction” employed by atheists and others who directly seek the destruction of the Catholic Faith and the Church. It is integral to all those ideologies and philosophies which seek to promote man’s becoming at the expense of the submission of man’s mind and heart to God Who has revealed Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is therefore the foundation of all such ideologies as Secular Humanism, Transhumanism, Socialism, Messianic Democracy (the rule of the people), and Communism.
There is possibly no better testimony to this truth than that found in a little booklet titled The Surrender to Secularism (1967 – Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation), written by Most Rev. Cuthbert M. O’Gara, former bishop of Yuanling, China. He relates the following:
“When the Communist troops over-ran my diocese they were followed in very short order by the propaganda corps – the civilian branch of the Red forces – an organization, if anything, more disciplined, more zealous, more fanatical, then the People’s Army of Liberation itself. The entire population, city and countryside, was immediately organized into distinctive categories – grade school and high school pupils and teachers (Catholic, Protestant and pagan), merchants, artisans, members of the professions, yes, and even the lowly coolies. Everyone, for a week or more, was forced to attend the seminar specified for his or her proper category and there, willy-nilly in servile submission, listen to the official Communist line.
“Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the indoctrinees? One might have supposed that this would have been some pearl of wisdom let drop by Marx, Lenin or Stalin. Such however was not the case. The first, the fundamental, lesson given was man’s descent from the ape – Darwinism! …. Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the after-life. Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and the end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created. In the Red prison in which I was held, the slogan, ‘Bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end’, was hammered into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony. Nothing but a groveling holocaust of the human person can satiate the lust for dominance of Peking’s Red Regime.”
In service to this proposed evolutionary destiny, Communism tortured and murdered (outside of war, and of course not including abortion and contraception), approximately 15,000,000 people in the 20th century. Communism, however, is only one aspect of this engine of destruction. Bishop O’Gara goes on to state, and offer evidence for the fact, that all forms of atheism, including the militant forms of secularism which rule our modern societies, demand this holocaust of the human person. It matters little whether we are dealing with Communism, Socialism, Nazism, abortion, sex-education, the whole secular culture of perversity and death, the exclusion of God from public education, the crisis within the Church, or a whole host of other individual and social agendas – all are intimately related, and have as a powerful causative factor, belief in Darwinian Evolution.
We need therefore to emphasize that the destructive effect of evolutionary theory is not only manifested by its effect upon man’s concept of himself as simply a glorified animal (with all the degrading consequences that this implies), but also in terms of “Social Darwinism” which, in one form or another, now perceives the evolutionary future to be manipulable and controllable by man himself. The 20th century was strewn with hundreds of millions of victims of such plans for “social engineering” (Communism, Nazism, the world-wide agenda of Planned Parenthood, the abortion and birth-control holocaust in the United States and other nations, 400 million murdered babies under China’s one-child policy, and the population policies of the UN). And the 21st century opened with the prospect and reality of such technology now being applied to the deepest structures of human genetics and life.
But equally important, we must realize that belief in evolution comprises that poison of self-contradiction and duplicity in the minds and hearts of most Catholics which constantly eats away at the supernatural foundations of our faith, and consequently renders us helpless before the spirit of Antichrist which is increasingly coming to dominance in the world. It is therefore a primary causative factor in that prostitution of the Church to the world which has now rendered the Church largely impotent in regard to possessing that power of the Holy Spirit absolutely essential to spiritual combat against the forces of evil invading our lives and the lives of our families.
The almost universal capitulation of the Church hierarchy to the idea that the protection of our health and welfare from the ravaging forces of the present pandemic requires almost total suppression of the Sacraments, while at the same time requiring a “religious” subjection of mind and will to the “wisdom” and “science” of governments and their Health Boards or Institutes, is only the most recent sign of such impotency and prostitution of the Church before the world. As we have pointed out repeatedly, the ultimate source of this prostitution lies in an intellectual surrender to the world of reductive science, and a consequent taking precedence of man’s evolutionary becoming over the Being and Grace of God. We rightly consider this it to be an ominous sign of much worse things to come. But we also need to understand that what is now occurring within the Church, and with the hierarchy, is not something which is radically new and unexpected. St. Peter writes, “Dearly beloved, think not strange the burning heat which is to try you, as if some new thing happened to you.” (1 Pet. 4: 12). St. Peter is here speaking of all the suffering and persecution that is destined to come upon us, and the necessity of shouldering these crosses in our following of our Christ. But this passage would also seem singularly appropriate for helping us to understand that the present crisis in the Church is not a “new thing’, but rather is something which has very specific historical causes. As the popular saying goes, “it is a case long in the making”.
When we consider the specific issue of the submission of the minds and hearts of Catholics to evolutionary theory, and especially the submission of members of the hierarchy to such errors, we necessarily come face to face with Pope Pius XII’s teaching concerning evolution in his encyclical Humani Generis. It is conventional wisdom among those who seek to be orthodox Catholics that Pius XII’s teaching in this encyclical amounted to a very balanced and meritorious approach to the question of the evolution of the human body. Following is paragraph #36 from Humani Generis, which contains the relevant teaching on this matter:
“For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussion, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith. Some however rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the fact which have been discovered up to now, and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.”
The “bottom line” of Pope Pius XII’s teaching in the above paragraph is that the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid research and discussion in regard to the question concerning the evolution of the human body from pre-existent matter. In addition, this paragraph does indeed amount to a mandate for such research and discussion to occur, a mandate which recognizes that it is not only permitted, but necessary, that evidence and arguments for both sides of this question be presented.
It is our position, however, that such permission and mandate are in themselves in contradiction to already-defined Church dogma, and as such constitute a surrender and submission to reductive evolutionary science. If this be true – that any belief in the bodily evolution of man be in contradiction to already defined doctrine – we would not be amiss, for instance, in comparing this to a permission and mandate to provide arguments from both sides in regard to any other defined doctrine of the Catholic Church. Such permission and mandate would not only result in a deep confusion and scandal to the faithful, but would also constitute in itself justification for entertaining doubt about already defined dogma. This, of course, is precisely the aftermath which ensued from Pope Pius XII’s statement in paragraph 36.
This is not the only case, in recent times, of such a “permission” and “mandate” coming from Popes which has resulted in immense scandal and detriment to faith among Catholics. It may indeed be aptly compared to the equally destructive aftermath of Pope John XXIII and Paul VI’s permission and mandate for studying the question of birth control. By the time the Catholic Church emerged from this permission, 80-90% of Catholics were to be found believing that artificial contraception was permissible in at least some cases.
The Catholic dogma which is contradicted by Pope Pius XII’s permission and mandate is that which was defined by the Ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311-12). It states the following:
“”Whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic.”
This dogma was repeated by Lateran Council V (1512-1517).
To say that the human soul is in itself and essentially the form of the human body is to say that the human body cannot exist without this form. Period. The soul is not merely something in “addition” to the body. Rather it is the soul which actualizes and makes existent the human body. Thus, the following statements from St. Thomas work The Soul (Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, Book II, Chapter I):
#225-226: “We must not think, therefore of the soul and body as though the body had its own form making it a body, to which a soul is superadded, making it a living body; but rather that the body gets both its being and its life from the soul….Therefore, when life departs the body is not left specifically the same; the eyes and flesh of a dead man, as is shown in “Metaphysics’, Book VII, are only improperly called eyes and flesh. When the soul leaves the body another substantial form takes its place; for a passing-away always involves a concomitant coming-to-be.”
#233: “…the soul is the primary actuality of a physical bodily organism.”
#234: “the soul is the form of the body….form is directly related to matter as the actuality of matter….the body gets its being from the soul, as from its form.”
If “the body gets both its being and its life from the soul”, and if the soul is the actual “form of the body”, and “the body gets it being from the soul, as from its form”, then their can never possibly exist a pre-existing body (ape or otherwise) to which a soul is added or infused in order to make it a human being.
Pope Pius XII’s permission and mandate for studying of the possibility of the evolution of the human body from pre-existent matter was thus clearly in direct contradiction to defined Catholic Dogma. Paragraph #36 of Humani Generis therefore represents not some sort of courageous call for caution in regard to consideration of the question of the possibility of the bodily evolution of man, but rather a profound capitulation to the false theories of modern reductive science, and a surrender of the entire Catholic world to uncertainty in regard to already defined doctrine. It therefore represents a pivotal historical moment in the surrender of the collective Catholic consciousness to reductive science.
We also need add that any proposal that the human body could be a product of evolution is not only in direct contradiction to Catholic Dogma (as we have examined above), but also amounts to a deep assault upon the “sense of the faithful” in regard to the goodness of God’s creation and the integral dignity of the human person, created body and soul in the image of God. It is therefore profoundly ironic, at least from Satan’s perspective, that Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis on August 12, 1950, less than 3 months before he defined the Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven on November 1, 1950. In other words , in almost the same breath, Pius XII opened up to the world the legitimate consideration of the possibility of Mary’s immaculate body being ancestrally derived from apes, while at the same time affirming that it possessed that spotless purity worthy of eternal glorification. One might almost hear Satan laughing.
The Catholic world had, of course, already been long in preparation for this capitulation to evolutionary theory. “Theistic Evolution” became the norm in Catholic intellectual circles, with virtual total disregard for “the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure” which was called for by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, and in which he demanded careful consideration of evidence from both sides of the alleged “question”.
In the beginning of this catapult into embrace of evolutionary theory, most “theistic evolutionists” were found to embrace the very crude and embarrassing notion that God somehow used evolution to finally produce an advanced ape body, and then infused a human soul into this creature. Such a view was of course rightly open to the coarsest ridicule. One might well imagine a newspaper cartoon with a Michelangelo-like God-figure grasping an ape by the neck with one hand, booting out an ape-soul with a large foot, while injecting this creature with a syringe clearly labeled “Human Soul”.
However, around the same time that Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis was issued, the written works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (died 1955) were gaining in popularity. Here we encounter a form of evolutionary theory (Teilhardian Cosmic Evolution) vastly different from the grossly naïve version mentioned above. In one short sentence (to be elaborated upon below), Teilhard taught that what we call spirit in a human being is not the result of infusion of a distinct soul, but rather the fruit of a long evolutionary process of the development of matter itself, through a process of complexification, all the way from the simplest cell through the plant and animal kingdoms, and finally culminating in man.
By 1967, America’s most popular Catholic personality, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, having embraced Teilhard’s central concepts and terminology, would write in his work Footprints in a Darkened Forest that in 50 years it would be very likely that Teilhard de Chardin “will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century” (Meredith Press, p. 73). This was only a sign of the times. By 1960, the writings of Teilhard (especially his book The Phenomenon of Man) had become popular fare, especially on college campuses.
It should have been no surprise, therefore, that in an October, 1995 letter released to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting in Rome, Pope John Paul II declared: “fresh knowledge leads to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.”
However, in order to understand the depths of Catholic intellectual surrender to Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theory, we need first to examine the life and work of Teilhard himself. We shall than proceed to examine the fulsome embrace of his ideas in the writings and thought of Pope Benedict XVI and in the environmental encyclical Laudato Si of Pope Francis. What the reader will encounter below was also part of our article on the Third Sorrowful Mystery in our series on the Rosary. We consider it very necessary to also cover these subjects again here. We especially ask the reader to persevere through what he might at first be tempted to dismiss as the “nonsense” of Teilhard de Chardin. As will be seen, this nonsense has been deeply embraced by both Benedict XVI and Francis. It has become the Papal norm, and we shall not be able to engage the battle for a return to Catholic sanity unless we first see the enemy.
“It is Christ, in very truth, who saves, – but should we not immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by Evolution?” (Teilhard de Chardin)
In the following analysis, we will be dealing with three short works of Teilhard de Chardin. They are all to be found in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin: The Heart of Matter (Harcourt, 1978). All page references to quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this edition.
The first is titled The Heart of Matter. It was written in 1950, and is considered the last of his major works. It is autobiographical, and contains a summation of his thought and the personal history of his spiritual development. Therefore, it is a singularly important work for understanding the man and his completed system.
The second, titled The Christic, was written one month before his death in 1955. It contains his culminating thoughts on Christ as the Omega Point of Evolution.
The third work, The Mass on the World (originally titled The Priest), was begun in 1918, and it became a project which he worked on for the rest of his life. It is here that we find his most darksome prayer to a Christ for Whom the Consecrated Bread and Wine are only symbols of what Teilhard considered to be the real consecration of the whole world through evolutionary transformation and ascent to the Omega point.
During the following analysis, we ask the reader to continually keep in mind the extraordinarily perverse statement, as quoted at the beginning of this section, that “it is Christ who is saved by Evolution” (p., 92)
Great intellectual perversities in adulthood usually demand distortions of normal childhood perceptions and desires. Teilhard de Chardin himself wants us to understand the childhood roots of his spiritual journey, and so we quote the following description of his first memory:
A memory? My very first! I was five or six. My mother had snipped a few of my curls. I picked one up and held it close to the fire. The hair was burnt up in a fraction of a second. A terrible grief assailed me; I had learnt that I was perishable… What used to grieve me when I was a child? This insecurity of things. And what used I to love? My genie of iron! With a plow hitch I believed myself, at seven years, rich with a treasure incorruptible, everlasting. And then it turned out that what I possessed was just a bit of iron that rusted. At this discovery I threw myself on the lawn and shed the bitterest tears of my existence!” (From a 1938 edition of The Heart of Matter, translated by Claude Cuenot).
In his autobiography, The Heart of Matter, Teilhard begins by stating that the “axis” which gives continuity to his whole life is the innate “Pleromic Sense” which has been with him since earliest childhood – the appetite for some “Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.” (p. 16-17). He describes a mental state as a child in which, although he was devoted to the child Jesus, “In reality, however, my real ‘me’ was elsewhere….I withdrew into the contemplation, the possession, into the so relished existence of my ‘Iron God’….nothing in the world was harder, heavier, tougher, more durable than this marvelous substance apprehended in its fullest possible form…Consistence: that has undoubtedly been for me the fundamental attribute of Being.”
In other words, at an age when healthy children “relish” in the love of mother, father, and siblings, Teilhard withdrew into a contemplative relationship with the iron “lock-pin of a plow.” (p. 18-19).
Having been betrayed by the rusting lock-pin, Teilhard moved on to rocks (they don’t rust), and especially quartz. This passion stayed with him the rest of his life. He writes, “The truth is that even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter…” (p. 20).
The problem in all of this, of course, is what to do with living things. Teilhard writes that, “Because of its apparent fragility…the living World greatly worried and disconcerted me as a child.” On the one hand he was drawn to it by his “Pleromic Sense,” (there is, after all, a certain obvious plenitude of being in living things that is not in rocks); on the other he was repulsed and terrified by their inconsistency and fragility. He admits that, because of this conflict, “I had at that time [28 years old] come to a standstill in my awakening to Cosmic Life, and I could not start again without the intervention of a new force or a new illumination” (p. 23-24). In other words, at the age of 28, he was still looking for a justification for relishing the living over the dead.
It is interesting that at this stage of development (if we care to grace it with such a term), Teilhard was tempted by Eastern Mysticism. Having found no real object in this world to answer his quest for “Plenitude,” he was tempted to go entirely beyond this world into the formless Monism of Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism. He states that such would have been the case “had it not been that just at the appropriate moment the idea of Evolution germinated in me, like a seed: whence it came I cannot say.” (p. 24).
Evolution became for our philosopher a “magic word…which haunted my thoughts like a tune: which was to me like an unsatisfied hunger, like a promise held out to me, like a summons to be answered….” (p.24). It was in fact Evolution which enabled Teilhard to transfer his Sense of Plenitude from the “ultra-material” (iron and rocks) to the “ultra living.” He writes:
“You can well imagine, accordingly, how strong was my inner feeling of release and expansion when I took my first still hesitant steps into an ‘evolutive’ Universe, and saw that the dualism in which I had hitherto been enclosed was disappearing like the mist before the rising sun. Matter and Spirit these were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff….” (p. 26).
It was Paleontology which provided the key for Teilhard:
“By its gravitational nature, the Universe, I saw, was falling – falling forwards – in the direction of Spirit as upon its stable form. In other words, Matter was not ultra-materialized as I would at first have believed, but was instead metamorphosed into Psyche. Looked at not metaphysically, but genetically, Spirit was by no means the enemy or the opposite of the Tangibility which I was seeking to attain: rather was it its very heart [Spirit, in other words, is the Heart of Matter].” (p.28)
“Matter is the matrix of Spirit. Spirit is the higher state of Matter.” (p. 35).
According to Teilhard, matter itself is under pressure everywhere by a directional spirit and energy which is “an extraordinary capacity for “consolidation by complexification.” It is this “complexification” which eventually produces living organisms in the “Biosphere,” and it is further “complexification” which eventually produces the critical point at which living organisms become conscious and reflective:
“Reflection, the ‘cosmic’ critical point which at a given moment is inevitably met and traversed by all Matter, as soon as it exceeds a certain degree of psychic temperature and organization.” (p. 35).
But this is by no means the end of the evolutionary process.
Individual consciousness and self-reflection are not the terminus of the evolutionary process of complexification. It is only the beginning of what Teilhard calls the evolution of the Noosphere. The word “Noosphere” should not scare us. It is derived from the Greek word for mind: Nous. Teilhard teaches that this Noosphere is not just an abstract concept, but a living reality surrounding the planet – what he calls ”a gigantic planetary contraction.” Its very nature is that it is unitive and involutive, in that it moves towards a final total unity of all minds in a “Super-Mind.” Thus:
“The irresistible ‘setting’ or cementing together of a thinking mass (Mankind) which is continually more compressed upon itself by the simultaneous multiplication and expansion of its individual elements: there is not one of us, surely, who is not almost agonizingly aware of this, in the very fibre of his being. This is one of the things that no one today would even try to deny: we can all see the fantastic anatomical structure of a vast phylum [social, psychic, informational, etc.] whose branches, instead of diverging as they normally do, are ceaselessly folding in upon one another ever more closely, like some monstrous inflorescence – like, indeed, an enormous flower folding-in upon itself; the literally global physiology of an organism in which production, nutrition, the machine, research, and the legacy of heredity are, beyond any doubt, building to planetary dimensions [one can only imagine the ‘fuel’ which the Internet would have provided for Teilhard’s ‘Great Vision’]….Writing in the year 1950, I can say that the evolution of my inner vision culminates in the acceptance of this evident fact, that there is a ‘creative’ tide which (as a strict statistic consequence of their increasing powers of self-determination) is carrying the human ‘mega-molecules’ towards an almost unbelievable quasi ‘mono-molecular’ state; and in that state, as the biological laws of Union demand, each ego is destined to be forced convulsively beyond itself into some mysterious super-ego.” (p. 37-38). [We might well imagine the delight of any sort of Antichrist figure at the prospect that he has both divine and evolutionary sanction to “convulsively force” all men into “some mysterious super-ego.”]
Thus, we have reached what Teilhard considers the Omega point of Natural Evolution. This, however, is not the end of the story. Parallel to Natural Evolution, there must also be seen in the Teilhardian system an “axis” of Evolution of the Divine.
In the “Great Vision” of Teilhard de Chardin, the historical Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ is not an ontological event which accomplishes our redemption, but rather the beginning of a larger evolutionary process. For Teilhard, the multiplicity of things in this world is “irreducible,” and there is therefore no “organic relationship of dependence” between them and God. (p. 93-94). There is therefore something “incomplete” in God and in Christ which can only be remedied by His evolutionary incorporation in all matter:
“It is Christ, in very truth, who saves, – but should we not immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by Evolution? (p. 92)
Teilhard teaches a double evolutionary movement in the universe, and a final convergence between what he calls the “God of the Ahead” and the “God of Above.” The God of the Ahead is the result of natural evolution from the geosphere (inanimate matter), to the biosphere (living things), to the noosphere (consciousness), and finally to the collective “Super-Mind” in the Omega Point. But the “God of the Above” also entails an evolutionary process by which God, through natural evolution, incarnates Himself in order to draw all things into final union with the Christic, which is something more than the historical Christ. Teilhard writes:
“On one side – in my ‘pagan’ ego – a Universe which was becoming personalized through convergence [Natural Evolutionary Complexification leading to consciousness, next to the building up of the Noosphere, and finally to unity in the ‘Super-Mind or Omega Point].” On the other side – in my Christian ego – a Person – the Person of Christ – who was becoming universal through Radiation.” By each of these two roads, that is to say, the Divine was joining itself, through all Matter, to all the Human, in the direction of the infinity of the ages lying ahead… (p. 44).
“Classical metaphysics had accustomed us to seeing in the World – which it regarded as an object of ‘Creation’ – a sort of extrinsic product which had issued from God’s supreme efficient power as the fruit of his overflowing benevolence. I find myself now irresistibly led – and this precisely because it enables me both to act and to love in the fullest degree – to a view that harmonizes with the spirit of St. Paul: I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself.” (p.54).
“…the Christ of Revelation is none other than the Omega of Evolution.” (p.92).
All of this obviously demands an entirely new view of Christianity, of the Church, of Revelation, of Christ, and of our sanctification in Him. It also demands a “New Mass.”
Having detailed the nature of cosmic evolution, both Natural and Christic, Teilhard then breaks forth in a description of the “true” Cosmic Liturgy:
“And then there appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the Eucharistic mystery itself, extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation, in which the words of the Consecration apply not only to the sacrificial bread and wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the Convergence of the World as it progresses.” (p. 94)
The first sentence of The Mass on the World reads as follows:
“Since once again, Lord – though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the stepes of Asia – I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself [Note: there is no way that Teilhard could use these words, and make this juxtaposition if he believed in the substantial, Real Presence of Christ after the Consecration]; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.” (p. 119).
And, a little further on, he elaborates:
This restless multitude, confused or orderly, the immensity of which terrifies us; this ocean of humanity whose slow, monotonous wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose faith is most firm: it is to this deep that I thus desire all the fibres of my being should respond. All the things in the world to which this day will bring increase; all those that will diminish; all those too that will die: all of them, Lord, I try to gather into my arms, so as to hold them out to you in offering. This is the material of my sacrifice; the only material you desire.
Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to slake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming.
Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day. (p. 121)
Such is the “Living Liturgy,” the “Great Vision,” of Teilhard de Chardin. It is now largely dominant within the Church, including the minds of both Popes Benedict XVI and Francis. It necessitates the dissolution of all things truly Catholic.
“The role of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy. This is also the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end we shall achieve a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.” (Benedict XVI, Homily, Celebration of Vespers with the Faithful of Aosta, July 24, 2009)
Having analyzed the philosophy and theology of Teilhard de Chardin , the above-quoted words of a reigning Pope should take on immense, and immanently frightening, significance for any orthodox Catholic.
It is, of course, almost a knee-jerk response for any good Catholic to instinctively diffuse the import of such an outrageous statement (quoted above) made by a reigning Pope. Somehow, we think, he does not really mean it – he does not understand Teilhard, and has not read him in depth. The fact is, however, that the opposite is true. In his book Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004), Joseph Ratzinger quotes from five of Teilhard’s works, including The Heart of Matter which we made the principle subject of analysis of his thinking. He has read Teilhard, he understands Teilhard, and he has accepted, with minor qualifications, the “Great Vision” of Teilhard.
In order to be able to understand Benedict XVI’s “Teilhardism”, we need to do some preparatory examination of his particular evolutionary views. Again, we tend to have a “diffused” view concerning the evil involved in the acceptance of evolutionary theory, and especially the consequences attendant upon having a Pope who is a convinced evolutionist. This is fostered by a number of factors.
We tend, for instance, to think of all so-called Christian evolutionists as coming from that camp of “Theistic Evolutionists” who believe that at a certain stage of physical evolution, God infused a soul into a being who was hithertofore an animal. Joseph Ratzinger absolutely rejects such a view. His evolutionary view is very different, and as we shall see, much more destructive to the Catholic Faith.
We also tend to minimize the evil of evolutionary belief because of all the prominent Catholics who have believed in evolution: As we have already seen, Bishop Sheen was an evolutionist, had read Teihard de Chardin, and embraced his central concepts and terminology. He even went so far as to say that in 50 years it would be very likely that Teilhard “will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century”. Leaving judgment of Bishop Sheen to others, or to other times, we must yet note that it is now 53 years since Bishop Sheen made this prediction, and with recent Papacies, we do now indeed appear to be on the cusp of its fulfillment.
Let us, first of all, establish absolute certainty as to Joseph Ratzinger’s embrace of evolution.
The year 2009 saw the publication by Ignatius Press of a book of essays written by Joseph Ratzinger titled Credo for Today: What Christians Believe (translated from the original 2006 German version). The essays are taken from various works published between the years 1971-2006. Credo for Today contains a chapter titled Creation: Belief in Creation and the Theory of Evolution (taken from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1972 work Dogma and Verkündung (Preaching or Proclamation)). It is devoted to an attempt to reconcile the Christian view of creation with the scientific theory of evolution. Here we read the following:
“…the pre-Darwinian idea of the invariability of the species had been justified in terms of the idea of creation [and, of course, by taking the Bible seriously] ; it regarded every individual species as a datum of creation that had existed since the beginning of the world through God’s creative work as something unique and different alongside the other species. It is clear that this form of belief in creation contradicts the idea of evolution and that this expression of the faith has become untenable today.”(p. 34)
And, further:
“We have established that the first aspect, that is, the concrete form which the idea of creation had taken in practice, has been abolished by the idea of evolution; here the believer must allow himself to be taught by science that the way in which he had imagined creation was part of a pre-scientific world view that has become untenable.”(p.36)
The first thing we must realize, therefore, is that Joseph Ratzinger is not merely “influenced” by evolutionary thinking. He has embraced it in its depths. And this embrace has necessitated what, in the very first sentence of his article, he calls “a revolution in our world view that was no less thoroughgoing than the one that we associate with the name Copernicus.”
Secondly, the fundamental component in this “revolution in our world view” consists in the fact that, in the light of what Joseph Ratzinger considers the indisputable truth of evolution, the concept of “being” does not indicate any sort of fixed substantial nature, but rather that “being is time; it does not merely have time. Only in becoming does it exist and unfold into itself.” (Ibid, p. 42). This evolutionary “becoming” is meaningful, according to Joseph Ratzinger, because, contrary to the view of materialistic evolutionists, it is directed by “Mind” or “Creative Reason,” and has a “forward” momentum. All this is in deep agreement with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. The latter in fact specifically defends himself against the charge of being a pantheist because he believes in the ultimate goal of evolution as being union with “some pre-existent being.”
This “becoming” is fully explored by Joseph Ratzinger in his book Introduction to Christianity. It is in the passages of this work that one sees both his endorsement of Teilhard’s system as a whole and his adoption of its specific terminology.
As we have seen, the key “scientific” term which facilitates Teilhard’s system of evolutionary growth towards the Omega Point is “complexification.” Joseph Ratzinger seems enamoured of this term – there are eleven uses of the terms “complexity” or “complexification” in 10 pages of his treatment of the thought of Teilhard de Cardin. Following are several examples:
“In the background is the idea that in the cosmos, alongside the two orders or classes of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, there is a third order, which determines the real drift of evolution, namely, the order of the infinitely complex. It is the real goal of the ascending process of growth and becoming….” (p. 237)
“But let us return to man, He is so far the maximum in complexity. But even he as mere man-monad cannot represent an end; his growth itself demands a further advance in complexity.” (Ibid.)
“From here it is possible to understand the final aim of the whole movement as Teilhard sees it: the cosmic drift moves ‘in the direction of an incredible ‘mono-molecular’ state, so to speak, in which…each ego is destined to attain climax in a sort of mysterious superego’.” (p. 238).
“From here onward faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single ‘body’ the man to come.”(p. 239).
“From this perspective the belief in the second coming of Jesus Christ and in the consummation of the world in that event could be explained as the conviction that our history is advancing to an ‘omega’ point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability that seems to us to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter; that, on the contrary, the real, firm ground is mind. Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality: it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist. That there is such a thing as this process of ‘complexification’ of material being through spirit, and from the latter its concentration into a new kind of unity can already be seen in the remodeling of the world through technology.” (p. 320-321).
And, in order to demonstrate that this sort of Teilhardian cosmology is not just a momentary aberration in a single work, we also have the following from Joseph Ratzinger’s book titled Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life:
“We left the question of the materiality of the resurrection at the point to which Thomas Aquinas had brought it. The fundamental insight to which Thomas broke through [the real unity of soul and body) was given a new twist by Rahner when he noted that in death the soul becomes not acosmic [having nothing to do with the physical world] but all-cosmic. This means that its essential ordination to the material world remains, not in the mode of giving form to an organism as its entelechy [thus, out the window goes the teaching of the Council Vienne that the soul is the substantial form – the entelechy – of the body], but in that of an ordering to this world as such and as a whole. It is not difficult to connect this thought to ideas formulated by Teilhard de Chardin. For it might be said in this regard that relation to the cosmos is necessarily also relation to the temporality of the universe, which knows being only in the form of becoming [this is gibberish in light of Thomistic metaphysics], has a certain direction, disclosed in the gradual construction of ‘biosphere’ and ‘noosphere’ from out of physical building blocks which it then proceeds to transcend. Above all it is a progress to ever more complex unities. This is why it calls for a total complexity: a unity which will embrace all previously existing unities….The search reaches the point of integration of all in all, where each thing becomes completely itself precisely by being completely in the other. In such integration, matter belongs to spirit in a wholly new and different way, and spirit is utterly one with matter. The pancosmic existence, which death opens up would lead, then, to universal exchange and openness, and so to the overcoming of all alienation. Only where creation realizes such unity can it be true that ‘God is all in all.”( p. 191-192).
The quotes given above should be sufficient in order to establish with absolute certainty the extraordinary degree to which Joseph Ratzinger has embraced both the specific terminology and general cosmology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is interesting that at the beginning of his discussion of Teilhard, he mentions a “not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” in Teilhard’s approach to these subjects, but then immediately states that he “nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly….” We shall examine further on wherein this “objectionable tendency” lies. The reader will be justly horrified.
For now, we continue with our examination of the depths of Joseph Ratzinger’s embrace of Teilhardian theology.
The problem in all this, as Joseph Ratzinger fully admits, is the question as to how we explain the rise of man, and the fact that we believe that he possesses a spiritual “soul.” As noted earlier, he categorically rejects the position of some “Theistic Evolutionists” who basically conceive of a God Who “waits in the wings,” and at the opportune moment in evolutionary history, infuses a spiritual soul into an animal body. He dismisses such a solution as being “intolerable” to both the evolutionist and the theologian (Credo For Today, p. 38).
It is here that he again has recourse to Teilhard. After quoting a rather dense passage from his writings, Joseph Ratzinger offers us the following exposition:
“Certainly one can debate the details in this formulation; yet the decisive point seems to me to be grasped quite accurately: the alternative: materialism [the view that “spirit” and consciousness are ultimately only an accidental phenomenon of matter] or a spiritually defined world view, chance or meaning, is presented to us today in the form of the question of whether one regards spirit and life in its ascending forms as an incidental mold on the surface of the material world…or whether one regards spirit as the goal of the process and, conversely matter as the prehistory of the spirit. If one chooses the second alternative, it is clear that spirit is not a random product of material developments, but rather that matter signifies a moment in the history of spirit.” (Credo For today, p. 45).
It is clear here that Joseph Ratzinger’s thinking is in striking accord with “the decisive point” of Teilhard de Chardin in regard to the evolution of spirit and mind. Many traditionalists are in confusion in regard to Benedict’s evolutionary views because he rejects “meaningless evolution.” (as he did in his 2011 Easter Vigil Homily). But to reject meaningless evolution is not at all the same as rejecting evolution. Teilhard de Chardin also totally rejects meaningless evolution.” In both men’s thinking there is in fact so much significance and meaning to evolution that it is the primary vehicle by which God deals with man, and by which man’s spirit arises.
Lest we are tempted to think that Teilhard is a theologian with whom Benedict XVI is not really in essential agreement, we have the following matter-of-fact conclusion from Joseph Ratzinger’s pen in regard to the appearance of spirit in a human being:
“This would then lead to the insight that spirit does not enter the picture as something foreign, as a second substance, in addition to matter: the appearance of spirit, according to the previous discussion, means rather that an advancing movement arrives at the goal that has been set for it….The clay became man at that moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought ‘God’. The first ‘thou’ that – however stammeringly – was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed.” (Ibid, p. 46-47).
One can only surmise that Adam’s next act after his initial dim and stammering thought of God was a puzzled grunt. There is here no Adam and Eve created in the fullness of sanctifying grace, possessing the infused gifts, both natural and supernatural, necessary for what has traditionally been known as the state of “Original Justice.” There can be no loss of this state through Original Sin. There can be no real moral responsibility for a human mind and will living in such dimness and stammering. There is only evolution and becoming.
Joseph Ratzinger in fact rejected the Church’s dogmatic teaching (Council of Trent) on the nature of original sin. The following is taken from his book In the Beginning…A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (William B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1995):
“In the story that we are considering [Ch. 3 of Genesis], still a further characteristic of sin is described. Sin is not spoken of in general as an abstract possibility but as a deed, as the sin of a particular person, Adam, who stands at the origin of humankind and with whom the history of sin begins. The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin’. What does this mean? Nothing seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in which one’s relatives are imprisoned because he is a liberating God of love, who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it correctly?
In the above passage, Joseph Ratzinger is simply denying that original sin was something which resulted in the passing on, through generation, of a fallen nature to all men. He in fact mocks this absolutely essential Catholic truth by comparing it to the idea that God runs a concentration camp which punishes all subsequent men born into this world for the sins committed by Adam. His answer (which is to be found in the long paragraph which followed the above quote) consists in asserting that “original sin” is not inherited at conception through generation, but is picked up by us through damaged relationships after conception and birth. He in fact uses some form of the word “relation” or “relationship” thirteen times in this paragraph in order to try to hammer home this new version of original sin. Again, success in such an enterprise destroys the Catholic Faith. And such is an absolute necessity of the evolutionary view of man and God.
This destruction must also affect belief in Christ and the Incarnation. As we have seen, Teilhard teaches that “it is Christ who is saved by evolution,” that “[Christ] is becoming universal through radiation,” and that “I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself.”
It is, of course, traditional Catholic teaching that Christ’s Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection brought a radical change into the world. Christ’s Advent, and the resultant conversion of millions from a state of original sin to one of sanctifying grace, resulted in an ontological change in millions of souls, which in turn radically changed social realities, and created a Christian civilization. The teachings of many previous Popes contain stirring testimonies to this radical “ontological” change which ensued from Christ’s Advent. As Pope Leo XIII wrote:
“Then man, as though awakening from a long-continued and deadly lethargy, beheld at length the light of the truth, for long ages desired, yet sought in vain. First of all, he realized that he was born to much higher and more glorious things than the frail and inconstant objects of sense which had hitherto formed the end of his thoughts and cares. He learnt that the meaning of human life, the supreme law, the end of all things was this: that we come from God and must return to Him. From this first principle the consciousness of human dignity was revived: men’s hearts realized the universal brotherhood: as a consequence, human rights and duties were either perfected or even newly created, whilst on all sides were evoked virtues undreamt of in pagan philosophy. Thus men’s aims, life, habits and customs received a new direction. As the knowledge of the Redeemer spread far and wide and His power, which destroyeth ignorance and former vices, penetrated into the very life-blood of the nations, such a change came about that the face of the world was entirely altered by the creation of a Christian civilization.” (Encyclical Tametsi – on Christ Our Redeemer).
Such radical, ontological change and restoration is, of course, impossible in the world of Teilhardian evolution. The Incarnation, according to Teilhard de Chardin, is not to be seen as a one-time event which restored salvation to mankind, but only the beginning of an ages-long process of evolutionary incorporation of the human into the divine, and of the incarnation of the divine into the human, reaching final convergence at the Omega Point of the Christic. This Teilhardian rejection of the traditional understanding of Christ’s Advent is perfectly expressed by Joseph Ratzinger in the following passage from his book Being Christian:
“This week we celebrate with the Church the beginning of Advent. If we think back to what we learned as children about Advent and its significance, we will remember being told that the Advent wreath, with its candles, is a reminder of the thousands of years (perhaps thousands of centuries) of the history of mankind before Christ. It reminds all of us of the time when an unredeemed mankind awaited salvation. It brings to our minds the darkness of an as yet unredeemed history in which the light of hope was only slowly kindled until, in the end, Christ, the light of the world, came and freed mankind from the darkness of condemnation. We learned also that those thousands of years before Christ were a time of condemnation because of original sin, while the centuries after the birth of our Lord are ‘anni salutis reparatae,’ years of restored salvation. And finally, we will remember being told that, in Advent, besides thinking back on the past to the period of condemnation and expectation of mankind, the Church also fixes her attention on the multitude of people who have not yet been baptized, and for whom it is still Advent, since they wait and live in the darkness of the absence of salvation.
“If we look at the ideas we learned as children through the eyes of contemporary man and with the experiences of our age, we will see that we can hardly accept them. The idea that the years after Christ, compared with those before, are years of salvation will seem to be a cruel irony if we remember such dates as 1914, 1918, 1933, 1939, 1945; dates which mark periods of world war in which millions of men lost their lives, often in terrifying circumstances; dates which bring back the memory of atrocities such as humanity has never before experienced. One date (1933) reminds us of the beginning of a regime which achieved the most cruel perfection in the practice of mass murder; and finally, we remember that year in which the first atomic bomb exploded on an inhabited city, hiding in its dazzling brilliance a new possibility of darkness for the world.
“If we think about these things, we will have difficulty in distinguishing between a period of salvation and one of condemnation. And, extending our vision even further, if we contemplate the works of destruction and barbarity perpetrated in this and the preceding centuries by Christians (that is to say by us who call ourselves ‘redeemed’), we will be unable to divide the nations of the world into the redeemed and the condemned.
“If we are sincere, we will no longer build up a theory which divides history and geography into zones of redeemed and zones of condemned. Rather, we will see the whole of history as a gray mass in which it is always possible to perceive the shining of a goodness which has not completely disappeared, in which there can always be found in men the desire to do good, but also in which breakdowns occur which lead to the atrocities of evil.”
It is immensely ironic and tragic that Joseph Ratzinger does not realize that the 20th Century atrocities which he lists in no way provide evidence against the traditional view of Christ’s Advent, or against such doctrines as original sin, sanctifying grace, or the necessity for implementing the Social Kingship of Christ. Rather, they provide profound confirmation of the inevitable consequences of a decay of traditional Christian orthodoxy and civilization, and the resultant ascension to power of forces, ideas, individuals, and movements (Communism, Nazism, and secular-messianic democracy) at total war with Christianity. Nor does he realize what atrocities the dark horizons of the future hold in store as a consequence of his own betrayals of this Tradition, and his embrace of Teilhardian evolution.
In his most comprehensive work on theology, Principles of Catholic Theology, Joseph Ratzinger offers the following assessment of Teilhard de Chardin’s influence upon Vatican Council II:
“The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence. With daring vision it incorporated the historical movement of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution from Alpha to Omega: since the noogenesis, since the formation of consciousness in the event by which man became man, this process of evolution has continued to unfold as the building of the noosphere above the biosphere.” (p.334).
There has existed a tremendous blindness among traditional Catholics in regard to the philosophy and theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. Largely this has been due to his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, and the widespread permission it gave for offering the Traditional Latin Mass. But as we have seen in the case of Teilhard de Chardin and his ”Mass on the World” (which of course was the form of Mass offered exclusively during his time), the TLM in itself does not guarantee that it cannot be offered free of intentions which invert the entire Catholic Faith. This inversion is completely evident in a passage from Chapter 2 of Cardinal Ratzinger’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000):
“And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same—divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the ‘Noosphere’, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its ‘fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological ‘fullness’. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”
It needs to be added that it is frequently claimed that during the social “revolutions” of 1968, then Fr. Joseph Ratzinger underwent some sort of conversion from being a “liberal” to a “conservative”. But “conservativism” is not the same as Catholic orthodoxy. One can prefer Gregorian Chant and Mozart to Pop music, and still not be Catholic. One can love the beauty of the traditional liturgy, and find repulsive the banality of the way in which the Novus Ordo is usually offered, and still not really understand. One can be abhorred at the promotion of drastic, violent forms of evolution and revolution, while at the same time being an evolutionist and an agent of revolution. One can be a “cultural conservative”, while still expounding philosophy and theology which completely inverts the Catholic Faith.
By now the reader should not be too befuddled by Teilhard-Ratzinger newspeak. What is being said here is that the “daring” event that was Vatican II amounted to an “opening” (aggiornamento) and incorporation of the Church into the larger evolutionary movement of the entire world and all of its individual realities and forces. What this means, of course, is that all dogmas – both of Faith and Morals – which have kept the Church separate from the world and all of its aspirations, must now somehow be “essentialized”, subjected to a “hermeneutics of continuity” (the last two expressions were favorites of Pope Benedict XVI), diluted, de-emphasized, transformed into an ideal only attainable in some future Omega Point, or simply cloaked behind a wall of silence, in order to facilitate this evolutionary process. And this is where Pope Francis comes upon the stage.
Finally, we come to the question, posed earlier, as to what Joseph Ratzinger meant when he mentioned a possible “not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” in
Teilhard’s system of Cosmic Evolution. This certainly cannot have anything to do with Teilhard’s ideas concerning biological evolution culminating in the appearance of consciousness and “spirit” through a process of biological “compexification”. As we have seen from his writings, Joseph Ratzinger completely embraced this “biological approach”.
Almost certainly therefore, Joseph Ratzinger’s reference to “a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” refers to Teilhard de Chardin’s embrace of eugenics as something we are absolutely obligated to embrace as a means of gaining control of the evolutionary process..
The earth itself, in Teilhard’s cosmology, being part of the collective process of evolution from matter into spirit and beyond, plays an enormous part in this process. Teilhard in fact calls the earth a “thinking planet”. In itself, being a finite surface upon which millions of reflective hominids have proliferated, the earth is a primary factor in the cosmogenic “heat” or “pressure” which cause the compression and convergence (through social communication, etc.) which generates the Noosphere. By the very fact that mankind now is being forced by modern science, technology, and communications beyond himself into some sort of super-ego which is an evolutionary precursor to the Ultra-Human, and because this clearly negates any notion that the question of salvation must focus on the individual soul and its relation to God, then it becomes quite clear why the people like Pope Francis are now so intent in uniting the Church with the secular agenda of integral ecology. The Instrumen Laboris for the Amazonian Synod described the Amazonian indigenous people as not only those who live in communion with the earth, but also as those who live in “intercommunication with the entire cosmos”, for whom “the land is a theological place by which the faith is lived”, and a “unique source of God’s revelation”. It therefore provides the perfect venue for promoting a “spirit of this world”, undermining the vertical dimension of Catholic belief and practice, in order to institute this new religion which will come from the evolutionary pressure and “heat” which is now rising and converging from below and within. Teilhard writes:
“It is unmistakably apparent (as all of us can see) that at this moment we are irretrievably involved in a rapidly accelerating process of human totalization. Under the combined force of the multiplication (in numbers) and expansion (in radius of influence) of human individuals on the surface of the globe, the noösphere has for the last century shown signs of a sudden organic compression upon itself and compenetration. This is without any doubt the most massive and the most central of the events the earth has experienced in our day.”
Teilhard then proceeds to tell us that all of this places an extraordinary demand upon us to “make up our minds and get down to work, quickly, and immediately”. And he continues:
“For, if it is really true that an ultra-human [destiny] can be distinguished ahead of us, to be attained by ultra-evolution, it is equally true that this ultra-evolution, operating henceforth in a reflective medium, can only be (at least in its most seminal and central axis) an auto- or self-evolution: in other words, it must be a consciously and passionately willed deliberate act. If the totalization of the noösphere is to be biologically successful, it cannot be simply instinctive and passive. It looks to us for an active and immediate collaboration, for a vigorous drive, based on conviction and hope. For evolution will not mark time.”
In other words, according to Teilhard, we now must choose for the belief that mankind is evolving into the “Ultra-Human”, and act upon it. Again, Teilhard writes:
“That is the precise point upon which mankind is obliged to divide itself (as, indeed, we can see for ourselves it is actually doing) into two irreconcilably conflicting blocs. And, we can confidently predict, only that portion of mankind which has made the correct choice will survive—and super-live.”
Teilhard here makes an extraordinary proclamation, deserving of our most profound reflection. He flatly states that mankind is dividing itself into “two irreconcilably conflicting blocs”. Clearly, he is here contrasting those who agree to participate in his evolutionary agenda towards the Ultra-Human, with those who refuse. And also, clearly, anyone who believes according to the traditional Catholic Faith in a truly Supernatural God falls under the second category, and must be numbered among those who cannot survive.
Why is this so? It is because traditional Catholicism embodies that “static” and “rigid” presence in this world which clings to the notion that human fulfillment lies not in man’s evolutionary transformation into some future Ultra-human state, but rather in the fundamental act of faith by which he surrenders his mind and will to a God of infinite Truth and Love Who has fully revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. This places all faithful Catholics in the category of those who refuse to “move” and “act” in cooperation with Teilhard’s evolutionary mandate.
The “need to act now”, according to Teilhard, is absolutely imperative, and what is more, it also demands eugenics:
“the duty and clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (radical no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere. Simultaneously, too, the necessity of drawing up as soon as possible the main lines of a spiritual energetics devoted to the study of the conditions under which the human zest for auto-evolution and ultra-evolution – which at the moment is dissipated in any number of different forms of faith and love – may be in a position to form a compact group [a One-World Teilhardian religion?], to safeguard itself and to intensify – to meet the requirements, and through the influence of, the new regime we have just entered: that of a world in a reflective state of self-transformation.”
As is the case with all such utopian programs (Gnosticism, Communism, etc.) which promote man’s becoming over God’s Being, this new regime will be in the hands of an elite. Teilhard writes:
“It is a matter of bringing together a large number of minds that are sufficiently open and in tune with influences of the cosmic order to perceive, record and amplify [through eugenics] a movement of the noosphere in relation to itself. Such an enterprise, it is evident, can profitably be undertaken only after a very considerable preliminary work of discussion and tentative inquiry conducted by physicists and biologists.
But such eugenics will not confine itself merely to those such as traditional Catholics who refuse to cooperate with Teilhard’s evolutionary “vision”. It will also be applied to those peoples and races who are deemed to be “unprogressive”. Again, from Teilhard:
“Now eugenics does not confine itself to a simple control of births. All sorts of related questions, scarcely yet raised despite their urgency, are attached to it. What fundamental attitude, for example should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? [We do well here to pause, and consider what Teilhard’s view of the “indigenous” peoples of the Amazon would have been]. The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving what is so often no more than one of life’s rejects? Something profoundly true and beautiful (I mean faith in the irreplaceable value and unpredictable resources contained in each personal unit) is evidently concealed in persistent sacrifice to save a human existence. But should not this solicitude of man for his individual neighbor be balanced by a higher passion, born of the faith in that other higher personality that is to be expected, as we shall see, from the world-wide achievements of our evolution? To what extent should not the development of the strong (to the extent that we can define this quality) take precedence over the preservation of the weak? How can we reconcile, in a state of maximum efficiency, the care lavished on the wounded with the more urgent necessities of battle? In what does true charity consist?” (Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, p.131-132).
All of this would seem very relevant to the current “pandemic”. In line with Teilhard de Chardin’s statement that “mankind is obliged to divide itself” and “only that portion of mankind which has made the correct choice will survive”, the Catholic Church, and her source of sacramental graces, has been suppressed. Further, parallel with Teilhard’s denigration of “care lavished on the wounded [or weak], we read that 40-50% of deaths from the coronavirus are among those in nursing homes and assisted living. And in correspondence with his proposal for weeding out “unprogressive ethnical groups”, statistical analysis claim that death rates among blacks and Latinos are 2-3 times higher than among the white population. George Soros, financier of abortion, euthanasia, population control, same-sex “marriage,” and transgenderism around the world, and certainly to be counted among the elite of the new regime called for by Teilhard de Chardin, has claimed that this current situation represents a “revolutionary moment” for social change not possible under “normal” conditions. Whether or not we believe that this virus was engineered by man for such purposes, it certainly is now being employed for such an agenda as Teilhard proposed. We might therefore justly believe that the most appropriate name for what is happening is not “pandemic”, but rather “Paneugenics”.
Having examined Teilhard’s eugenics, it should be a matter of horror to us that Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI found in Teilhard writings only “a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach”. As we have clearly demonstrated, it is quite clear that he indeed fully embraced the Teilhardian “biological approach” which proposes “matter as the prehistory of spirit” and the emergence of spirit and the human soul as a result of biological complexification leading to the consciousness, the noosphere, and finally to the “Super-human”. It would therefore seem difficult for us not to conclude that it is Teilhard’s eugenics to which he refers. If so, his silence in regard to this aspect of Teilhard’s thought is not merely “objectionable”, but also fully “unconscionable”, especially in the face of the worldwide secular agenda which has now clearly been manifested for quite some time.. For a man who bothered to detail all the atrocities of “social engineering” of the twentieth century which we quoted above from his horrendously distorted writing concerning the meaning of Christ’s Advent, his blindness or silence in regard to Teilhardian evolutionary eugenics should indeed seem unconscionable.
In prophetic anticipation of the crisis which we now have with us, Teilhard de Chardin wrote just one month before he died in 1955:
On the other hand, I cannot fail to feel around me – if only from the way in which ‘my ideas’ are becoming more widely accepted – the pulsation of countless people who are all – ranging from the border-line of belief to the depths of the cloister – thinking and feeling, or at least beginning vaguely to feel, just as I do. It is indeed heartening to know that I am not a lone discoverer, but that I am, quite simply, responding to the vibration that (given a particular condition of Christianity of the world) is necessarily active in all the souls around me…..Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. These two components are everywhere ‘in the air’; generally, however, they are not strong enough, both at the same time, to combine with one another in one and the same subject. In me, it happens by pure chance (temperament, upbringing, background) that the proportion of the one to the other is correct, and the fusion of the two has been effected spontaneously – not as yet with sufficient force to spread explosively — but strong enough nevertheless to make it clear that the process is possible — and that sooner or later there will be a chain-reaction. (The Christic, p. 101-102).
The “chain-reaction” of which Teilhard de Chardin spoke in the above passage has taken sixty years to materialize (and we might also keep in mind Bishop Fulton Sheen’s prophetic statement quoted earlier). His work was censured by various Church officials for decades, culminating in the 1962 Monitum of the Holy Office exhorting “all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers”. As late as 1981, the Holy See issued a communiqué reaffirming this warning.
Teilhard’s Evolutionary Gnosticism has now been blessed with both the voice and the vehicles empowering it to be mainstreamed. The voice is that of Pope Francis, and the vehicles which he has employed are his encyclical Laudato Si, and his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
Just as uniting the concept of evolution to Christology provided the theological key to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of all matter evolving towards the Omega Point of the “Christic” (this constituting his concept of a “Cosmic Liturgy”), so the ecological movement is now providing the necessary chemistry for the “explosion” of this poisoned theology and spirituality within the minds and hearts of millions of Catholics. Laudato Si is rightly seen as the manifesto of this revolution. Following are passages from this encyclical which speak of the universal transfiguration of all created things upon the evolutionary “altar of the world”.
Three more examples:
237. On Sunday, our participation in the Eucharist has special importance. Sunday, like the Jewish Sabbath, is meant to be a day which heals our relationships with God, with ourselves, with others and with the world. Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, the “first day” of the new creation, whose first fruits are the Lord’s risen humanity, the pledge of the final transfiguration of all created reality.
243.Jesus says: “I make all things new” (Rev 21:5). Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.
244.In the meantime, we come together to take charge of this home which has been entrusted to us, knowing that all the good which exists here will be taken up into the heavenly feast.
In order to see the grievous error represented in these passages from Laudato Si, we need only consult Holy Scripture, and the many passages from both Old and New Testaments which clearly reveal that the earth will totally perish and cease to be, that the world is not our lasting home, and that Christ’s assurance that He will “make all things new” in no way signifies a final transfiguration of any created thing, living or dead, which does not have a spiritual soul:
“With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.” (Isaiah 24:3)
“For behold, I create new heaven, and a new earth: and the former things shall not be in remembrance, and they shall not come upon the heart.” (Isaiah 65:1.)
“Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass. “(Matthew 24:35).
“But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men.” (2 Peter 3:7)
“But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief, in which the heavens shall pass away with great violence, and the elements shall be melted with heat, and the earth and the works which are in it, shall be burnt up. Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness? Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat? But we look for new heavens and a new earth according to his promises, in which justice dwelleth.” (2 Peter 3:10-13).
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone, and the sea is now no more,” (Apoc. 21: 1).
The Teilhardian spiritualism implicit in Pope Francis’ concept of the altar of the world, and his concept of the final transfiguration of all created things, demands that the above scriptures be considered false. If “matter is the prehistory of spirit” (Joseph Ratzinger’s phrase), and if, as Pope Francis teaches, all creatures are to be “resplendently transfigured” and be present at the “heavenly feast”, then all creatures possess a dignity and sacredness that demands an imperishability which parallels that of human beings.
The “ecological spiritualism” proposed throughout Pope Francis’ Laudato Si therefore represents not just a lengthy and inappropriate descent of the Church into the science of this world, but is preeminently constituted as a manifesto for a totally radical change in Catholic theology and spirituality.
In the City of God, St. Augustine spoke of two Cities in combat for the souls of men: “These two Cities are made by two loves: the earthly City by love of oneself even to the contempt of God; the heavenly City by love of God even to the contempt of self.” (City of God, 14:2). Seventeen hundred years later, these two loves are now represented by two altars: the traditional Catholic altar which receives the Gift of Christ from above, and the Teilhardian altar of the world upon which man worships his own becoming, and the evolutionary ascent of all of creation.
There is, of course, a legitimate use of the expression “altar of the world”. Fatima has long been called the ‘Altar of the World” because pilgrims come from all over the world to worship at this place of Our Lady’s visitation. It is also true that the Mass itself might be considered the Altar of the World – wherever it is offered on this earth, God becomes present. But this is a far cry from the Teilhardian-inspired use of such terms as “altar of the world”, “Mass on the World”, or “altar of the earth” to connote a process of universal becoming by which the earth itself is to be seen as a “living host” being transfigured by an evolutionary processes which will culminate with all its creatures “resplendently transfigured” and “taken up into the heavenly feast”. Rightly we may view such a liturgy as being offered on the pantheistic altar of Satan.
The encyclical Laudato Si was promulgated on May 24, 2015. One year later, on March 19, 2016, the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia was published. What might be called the “theological agenda” of Amoris Laetitia is succinctly formulated very early in this document. In paragraph 3, we encounter the following:
“Since ‘time is greater than space,’ [bold emphasis ours, quotation marks are Francis’], I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral, or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us towards the entire truth (cf. Jn. 16:13), until he leads us fully into the mystery of Christ and enables us to see all things as he does. Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs. For ‘cultures are in fact quite diverse and every general principle…needs to be inculterated, if it is to be respected and applied’.”
Now, any honest assessment of this paragraph should produce profound bewilderment. The subjects we are dealing with in Amoris Laetitia– marriage, family, the impossibility of divorce and remarriage, the intrinsic evil of homosexuality, and the prescription against those living in adultery receiving the Eucharist – all these subjects are doctrinal “places” which are not subject to evolution, change, growth, or inculteration. The notion that doctrinal truths can be “inculturated” with different “solutions” in various cultures is simply a prescription for relativism. Further, there can be no unity of teaching and practice where these doctrines are violated. And finally, if questions regarding such doctrines need not now to be “settled by intervention of the magisterium”, it is only because they have been settled by the magisterium and by the Gospel from its inception. In other words, every sentence in paragraph 3 is redolent with error and deception.
We do indeed have not only the right, but also the obligation, to reject this concept that “time is greater than space” in regard to anything to do with Catholic truth. And we should be left with a very disturbing question as to exactly what Francis is trying to do with this strange notion that “time is greater than space”.
Amoris Laetitia is not the first time that Francis has used this phrase or concept. Those who read Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium may have been puzzled that in fact an entire subsection of this document was titled “Time is Greater than Space”. There we read:
“A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.”
On the contrary, the Catholic Faith is not established upon a “horizon which constantly opens before us”, but upon what is within us now:
“Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there. For lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)
It has nothing to do with a utopian future, but with the “now” of our response to God’s grace and truth:
“And we helping do exhort you, that you receive not the grace of God in vain….Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:1-2).
It is this now which has been the crucial and saving moment for each individual soul from the creation of Adam down to the last man. It is this now which has been the source of all that is good in human history; for it is here that God’s Rule is either accepted or rejected, this in turn determining whether true love, peace, justice, compassion, and mercy are either accepted or rejected in societies and nations.
Pope Francis indeed seems to make “time” the very source of revelation and salvation. In his interview with Anthony Spadaro, he said the following:
“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes. We must initiate processes, rather than occupy spaces.”
This, of course, is all very reminiscent of Joseph Ratzinger’s statement concerning the temporality of the universe, “which knows being only in the form of becoming”. This is absolutely contrary to Catholic doctrine and Thomistic metaphysics which rightly sees each created thing as possessing a substantial form determining a specific substantial being in itself. Such “beings” or “kinds” of being do certainly experience accidental change, but they cannot cease to be “what they are” without total corruption (in the case of living things this entails their death) of their substantial form. This of course eliminates all possibility of one thing evolving into another. The notion, therefore, that created things “know being only in the form of becoming” is the great philosophical lie of our age. It is the lie which gives credence to all forms of evolutionary theory. Nor is it a lie which affects only temporal realities. The human soul can only find God in the” now” of God’s immutable Life and Truth, which is the source of his own being, and which is constant in the midst of all the changing vicissitudes of his or her life.
Space, therefore, for Pope Francis, is simply a euphemism for what we are in possession of now – in other words, what we traditional Catholics believe to be the fullness of God’s Immutable Revelation, Rules, Dogma, the Infallible Magisterium, and the reality that we each possess a substantial human nature and soul, requiring the same fundamental choice now as was true of the first man.
Time is proposed by Pope Francis as being greater than Space because “becoming” is more real than God’s Supreme Being, and takes precedence over the Revealed Truths which are the fullness of that Being. It is therefore quite easy to see why, in the mind of Pope Francis, an apparent universal mercy trumps immutable dogma – why the divorced and remarried may receive Holy Communion, why we must be “inclusive” towards practicing homosexuals (who must certainly also be admitted to Sacramental Communion if such a “mercy” holds true), and why, in fact, we must be inclusive towards everyone (except, apparently, rich capitalists, the Mafia, and possibly Traditionalists). It is the Journey into the future which is everything. There can be no Now which demands conversion to any Absolutes, and such conversion cannot be a requisite for being included within the sacramental and supernatural life of Christ’s Mystical Body.
If Time triumphs over the “Space” of God’s Immutable Truth, then we float, untethered, until the life of God’s Revelation is left behind. The world, of which Satan is the Prince, has for some time rejected all Absolutes, and prostrated itself before the goddesses of evolutionary progress. The Catholic Church was somewhat slower to join this dark pilgrimage. But the “explosive chain-reaction” which Teilhard predicted was to come from the union of false theology with Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theory which has now violently invaded the Church. It has proven most seductive because it has flooded over our consciousnesses from a direction which could not be anticipated: the Papacy. It began not with conscious or willful heresy. It began, rather, with a friendship with this world which believed that man’s reductive science was compatible with the Truth of God. It was born in the permission of Pius XII to take seriously the possibility of the bodily evolution of man; it gained acceptance in John Paul II’s statement that such evolution was more than a hypothesis; it proliferated wildly in the dark mansions of Benedict XVI’s theology; and it is now coming to fruition in the pastoral engines of Francis’ papacy.
For all eternity there has existed a “place” for those who truly seek a refuge from the savagery of Satan’s delusional offer to Adam and Eve that they would “become as Gods”. It is a Garden Enclosed – free from the ravages of Time. It is Mary’s Immaculate Heart. It is here where God’s Being triumphs over the becoming of man:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything from the beginning….All that hate me love death. (Proverbs 8).
Any sort of evolutionary view of either God or man masks a love of death in the human heart.
There is no doubt that the current “pandemic” is being used as an extraordinarily effective weapon in the war of the spirit of Antichrist against the Church. This has been especially evident in the surrender of the vast majority of the hierarchy to the principle that salvation from the destructive effects of this disease depended upon the surrender of Catholic worship and the sacraments to the power and demands of the State and their organs of Public Health. St. James writes, “Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration.” (James 1:17). Whether we consider the surrender of the hierarchy, or whether we consider the degree to which this surrender to the world has worked its way into the vast majority of the hearts of the Catholic faithful, there is no question that the Church has failed to believe this.
It will be very tempting to view the reopening of our Churches, with the access it will allow to Mass and the other sacraments, as a sort of triumphant return to normal. But if we view what is happening as a chastisement from God, we must surely also believe that any return to “normal” would be a crushing failure to have understood what is occurring, and to act upon this Wisdom.
First, it became fully evident that a pre-eminent goal of secular powers during this “pandemic”was the shutting down of religious life and practice; and that the Catholic hierarchy submitted, most often even in an anticipatory manner, to this subjection.
Secondly, this crisis is not over. The warfare conducted by the enemy is almost always dialectical – two steps forward, one step backward. And he now has a very large foot in the door. Any return to a “normal Church” will almost certainly prove to be a situation in which the coronavirus spreads more vehemently. And if not this particular virus, some other virus, or some other excuse which the enemy will use for the door to be forced open even further. If the virus does continue its work, this will certainly prove to be an excuse for the powers that be to impose even more draconian measures than they have to date. The Church, and its worship, is already perceived by many to be the primary enemy of human progress. What we are witnessing is only the first worldwide (“pan”) salvo to shut down the Catholic Church permanently.
It might be contended that what is stated in the paragraph immediately above constitutes in itself a lack of faith in God and His grace. We wish to make it emphatically clear, however, that we fully believe that the only hope for both the Church and the world lies in an extraordinary intervention by God. We only question whether a return to “normal” Catholic life and worship will merit this grace or this intervention. As examined in the many articles on this website, we believe that what has been viewed as “normal” for a long time is precisely the reason for God’s chastisement.
We believe that any extraordinary intervention by God on a collective level – and this is certainly our only solution now – also requires an extraordinary collective act on the part of mankind.
Beginning with Moses and the plague of serpents, continuing with Nineveh and its threatened destruction, and coming down through the centuries of Christian civilization, we can witness many historical situations in which God intervened to end severe chastisements, including wars, plagues, and famines. Interestingly enough, several of these have been mentioned in various articles in the traditional Catholic media, but there are many more. Many do not know, for instance, that there are number of miraculous images, statues, etc. in various shrines of Mexico, other than Our Lady of Guadalupe, associated with such deliverance.
But there are two truths which become very clear in regard to these extraordinary acts of God.
The first truth is that such deliverance, especially in regard to plagues and famine, most often comes after much devastation. The lesson is not easily learned by man – he only seems to learn his lesson after much destruction and death.
The second, and most important truth, is that deliverance only comes through a united effort of prayer and penance offered in the spirit of the prophet Daniel: We have sinned, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly, and have revolted: and we have gone aside from thy commandments, and thy judgments.” (Dan. 9:5). We may presume that at any time during any of these historical incidents that there were many who were individually praying for deliverance from these plagues, wars, famines, etc. But such was not sufficient. One of the most startling facts about most of these incidents is that God seems to intervene only where there is the collective act of a city, nation, or the Church itself (such as at Lepanto).
As detailed in all that is examined above, the Plague (spiritual even more than physical) that threatens us now is like nothing that has ever occurred in the history of the Church. We cannot expect therefore that a return to normal Catholic life will either call down God’s extraordinary graces for an end to this crisis, or protect us from anything –whether it be the virus itself, or those powers which seek our total subjugation and destruction. As discussed extensively in our examination of the Gift of the Holy Spirit called Fear of the Lord and its corresponding Beatitude Poverty of Spirit, what has been considered “normal” in the Catholic Church for centuries deeply embodies what St. Thomas called an “impurity of mixture” with the world (especially in regard to living the Beatitudes) which will finally call down that Final Conflagration which will precede the Final Judgment. At some time in the history of the world, this “impurity of mixture” will become so profound as to create a blindness so pervasive as to make it virtually impossible for mankind to return to that self-knowledge necessary for conversion. Mankind, collectively, will be like the man in St. James’ epistle who “beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was.” We pray that we are not yet there.
We therefore ask all readers to carefully consider what we have written in our Original Proposal , and to implement what it asks. The Feast Day – the Feast of the Purification and Presentation – which is proposed for the collective act which we have titled Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church – might at first seem arbitrary. We hope that after reading our Proposal, it will seem on the contrary singularly appropriate. Most important, we implored readers to begin now to beseech their priests and bishops to implement this Rosary effort for the purification of the whole Church, beginning with ourselves. If we think about it seriously, we have no idea what will happen between now and next February 2nd.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
- James Larson
It is the Catholic Monitor's honor to post Catholic scholar James Larson's article. Larson is an American independent scholar who resembles the British independent scholar Christopher Dawson in depth of analysis as well as learning. He is much better known in England than in the United States.
This is an essays on the heretical nature of the Teilhard de Chardin theory which proposes human evolution and well as other evolution theories by my friend Jim Larson.
Before we get into his piece, it's is important to explain that even a true pope can fall into error according to the First Vatican Council:
Vatican I expert Fr. Chad Ripperger, PhD, in his book Magisterial Authority explains that "saying that the pope is infallible regardless of conditions" could be "proximate to heresy":
"[T]reat[ing] ALL papal statements as if they are infallible... is proximate to heresy because it rejects the precise formulation of the conditions of infallibility as laid out in by Vatican I... by essentially saying that the pope is infallible regardless of conditions... "
"... Worse still, those who were to follow a pope who was in error in a non-infallible teaching which is taught contrary to something that is infallible is not, therefore, excused."
(Magisterial Authority, Pages 5-14)
http://rosarytotheinterior.com/
Pope Pius XII’s Surrender to Evolution:
The Church Pivots Radically Towards the World
“For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone.” (Pope Pius X: Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici – On the Study of Thomistic Philosophy in Catholic Schools).
In studying the Gift of Knowledge and its corresponding Beatitude of Mourning, we have been dealing precisely with that knowledge of created things, and our proper relationship to them, which is absolutely necessary if we are to be able “to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed God and to God alone”, thereby establishing ourselves in that true relationship to God which makes us receptive to His grace. This is why we are devoting several articles to this subject – in order to help us acquire that understanding which will liberate us from those false forms of knowledge which now ensnare us and suffocate the life of the Holy Spirit in our souls.
The form of false knowledge which has been the most powerful cultural force for establishing the modern world in that false understanding of creation which makes impossible a true knowledge of God is the theory of evolution. On the one hand, it is the most effective “engine of destruction” employed by atheists and others who directly seek the destruction of the Catholic Faith and the Church. It is integral to all those ideologies and philosophies which seek to promote man’s becoming at the expense of the submission of man’s mind and heart to God Who has revealed Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is therefore the foundation of all such ideologies as Secular Humanism, Transhumanism, Socialism, Messianic Democracy (the rule of the people), and Communism.
There is possibly no better testimony to this truth than that found in a little booklet titled The Surrender to Secularism (1967 – Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation), written by Most Rev. Cuthbert M. O’Gara, former bishop of Yuanling, China. He relates the following:
“When the Communist troops over-ran my diocese they were followed in very short order by the propaganda corps – the civilian branch of the Red forces – an organization, if anything, more disciplined, more zealous, more fanatical, then the People’s Army of Liberation itself. The entire population, city and countryside, was immediately organized into distinctive categories – grade school and high school pupils and teachers (Catholic, Protestant and pagan), merchants, artisans, members of the professions, yes, and even the lowly coolies. Everyone, for a week or more, was forced to attend the seminar specified for his or her proper category and there, willy-nilly in servile submission, listen to the official Communist line.
“Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the indoctrinees? One might have supposed that this would have been some pearl of wisdom let drop by Marx, Lenin or Stalin. Such however was not the case. The first, the fundamental, lesson given was man’s descent from the ape – Darwinism! …. Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the after-life. Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and the end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created. In the Red prison in which I was held, the slogan, ‘Bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end’, was hammered into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony. Nothing but a groveling holocaust of the human person can satiate the lust for dominance of Peking’s Red Regime.”
In service to this proposed evolutionary destiny, Communism tortured and murdered (outside of war, and of course not including abortion and contraception), approximately 15,000,000 people in the 20th century. Communism, however, is only one aspect of this engine of destruction. Bishop O’Gara goes on to state, and offer evidence for the fact, that all forms of atheism, including the militant forms of secularism which rule our modern societies, demand this holocaust of the human person. It matters little whether we are dealing with Communism, Socialism, Nazism, abortion, sex-education, the whole secular culture of perversity and death, the exclusion of God from public education, the crisis within the Church, or a whole host of other individual and social agendas – all are intimately related, and have as a powerful causative factor, belief in Darwinian Evolution.
We need therefore to emphasize that the destructive effect of evolutionary theory is not only manifested by its effect upon man’s concept of himself as simply a glorified animal (with all the degrading consequences that this implies), but also in terms of “Social Darwinism” which, in one form or another, now perceives the evolutionary future to be manipulable and controllable by man himself. The 20th century was strewn with hundreds of millions of victims of such plans for “social engineering” (Communism, Nazism, the world-wide agenda of Planned Parenthood, the abortion and birth-control holocaust in the United States and other nations, 400 million murdered babies under China’s one-child policy, and the population policies of the UN). And the 21st century opened with the prospect and reality of such technology now being applied to the deepest structures of human genetics and life.
But equally important, we must realize that belief in evolution comprises that poison of self-contradiction and duplicity in the minds and hearts of most Catholics which constantly eats away at the supernatural foundations of our faith, and consequently renders us helpless before the spirit of Antichrist which is increasingly coming to dominance in the world. It is therefore a primary causative factor in that prostitution of the Church to the world which has now rendered the Church largely impotent in regard to possessing that power of the Holy Spirit absolutely essential to spiritual combat against the forces of evil invading our lives and the lives of our families.
The almost universal capitulation of the Church hierarchy to the idea that the protection of our health and welfare from the ravaging forces of the present pandemic requires almost total suppression of the Sacraments, while at the same time requiring a “religious” subjection of mind and will to the “wisdom” and “science” of governments and their Health Boards or Institutes, is only the most recent sign of such impotency and prostitution of the Church before the world. As we have pointed out repeatedly, the ultimate source of this prostitution lies in an intellectual surrender to the world of reductive science, and a consequent taking precedence of man’s evolutionary becoming over the Being and Grace of God. We rightly consider this it to be an ominous sign of much worse things to come. But we also need to understand that what is now occurring within the Church, and with the hierarchy, is not something which is radically new and unexpected. St. Peter writes, “Dearly beloved, think not strange the burning heat which is to try you, as if some new thing happened to you.” (1 Pet. 4: 12). St. Peter is here speaking of all the suffering and persecution that is destined to come upon us, and the necessity of shouldering these crosses in our following of our Christ. But this passage would also seem singularly appropriate for helping us to understand that the present crisis in the Church is not a “new thing’, but rather is something which has very specific historical causes. As the popular saying goes, “it is a case long in the making”.
When we consider the specific issue of the submission of the minds and hearts of Catholics to evolutionary theory, and especially the submission of members of the hierarchy to such errors, we necessarily come face to face with Pope Pius XII’s teaching concerning evolution in his encyclical Humani Generis. It is conventional wisdom among those who seek to be orthodox Catholics that Pius XII’s teaching in this encyclical amounted to a very balanced and meritorious approach to the question of the evolution of the human body. Following is paragraph #36 from Humani Generis, which contains the relevant teaching on this matter:
“For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussion, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith. Some however rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the fact which have been discovered up to now, and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.”
The “bottom line” of Pope Pius XII’s teaching in the above paragraph is that the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid research and discussion in regard to the question concerning the evolution of the human body from pre-existent matter. In addition, this paragraph does indeed amount to a mandate for such research and discussion to occur, a mandate which recognizes that it is not only permitted, but necessary, that evidence and arguments for both sides of this question be presented.
It is our position, however, that such permission and mandate are in themselves in contradiction to already-defined Church dogma, and as such constitute a surrender and submission to reductive evolutionary science. If this be true – that any belief in the bodily evolution of man be in contradiction to already defined doctrine – we would not be amiss, for instance, in comparing this to a permission and mandate to provide arguments from both sides in regard to any other defined doctrine of the Catholic Church. Such permission and mandate would not only result in a deep confusion and scandal to the faithful, but would also constitute in itself justification for entertaining doubt about already defined dogma. This, of course, is precisely the aftermath which ensued from Pope Pius XII’s statement in paragraph 36.
This is not the only case, in recent times, of such a “permission” and “mandate” coming from Popes which has resulted in immense scandal and detriment to faith among Catholics. It may indeed be aptly compared to the equally destructive aftermath of Pope John XXIII and Paul VI’s permission and mandate for studying the question of birth control. By the time the Catholic Church emerged from this permission, 80-90% of Catholics were to be found believing that artificial contraception was permissible in at least some cases.
The Catholic dogma which is contradicted by Pope Pius XII’s permission and mandate is that which was defined by the Ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311-12). It states the following:
“”Whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic.”
This dogma was repeated by Lateran Council V (1512-1517).
To say that the human soul is in itself and essentially the form of the human body is to say that the human body cannot exist without this form. Period. The soul is not merely something in “addition” to the body. Rather it is the soul which actualizes and makes existent the human body. Thus, the following statements from St. Thomas work The Soul (Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, Book II, Chapter I):
#225-226: “We must not think, therefore of the soul and body as though the body had its own form making it a body, to which a soul is superadded, making it a living body; but rather that the body gets both its being and its life from the soul….Therefore, when life departs the body is not left specifically the same; the eyes and flesh of a dead man, as is shown in “Metaphysics’, Book VII, are only improperly called eyes and flesh. When the soul leaves the body another substantial form takes its place; for a passing-away always involves a concomitant coming-to-be.”
#233: “…the soul is the primary actuality of a physical bodily organism.”
#234: “the soul is the form of the body….form is directly related to matter as the actuality of matter….the body gets its being from the soul, as from its form.”
If “the body gets both its being and its life from the soul”, and if the soul is the actual “form of the body”, and “the body gets it being from the soul, as from its form”, then their can never possibly exist a pre-existing body (ape or otherwise) to which a soul is added or infused in order to make it a human being.
Pope Pius XII’s permission and mandate for studying of the possibility of the evolution of the human body from pre-existent matter was thus clearly in direct contradiction to defined Catholic Dogma. Paragraph #36 of Humani Generis therefore represents not some sort of courageous call for caution in regard to consideration of the question of the possibility of the bodily evolution of man, but rather a profound capitulation to the false theories of modern reductive science, and a surrender of the entire Catholic world to uncertainty in regard to already defined doctrine. It therefore represents a pivotal historical moment in the surrender of the collective Catholic consciousness to reductive science.
We also need add that any proposal that the human body could be a product of evolution is not only in direct contradiction to Catholic Dogma (as we have examined above), but also amounts to a deep assault upon the “sense of the faithful” in regard to the goodness of God’s creation and the integral dignity of the human person, created body and soul in the image of God. It is therefore profoundly ironic, at least from Satan’s perspective, that Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis on August 12, 1950, less than 3 months before he defined the Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven on November 1, 1950. In other words , in almost the same breath, Pius XII opened up to the world the legitimate consideration of the possibility of Mary’s immaculate body being ancestrally derived from apes, while at the same time affirming that it possessed that spotless purity worthy of eternal glorification. One might almost hear Satan laughing.
The Catholic world had, of course, already been long in preparation for this capitulation to evolutionary theory. “Theistic Evolution” became the norm in Catholic intellectual circles, with virtual total disregard for “the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure” which was called for by Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis, and in which he demanded careful consideration of evidence from both sides of the alleged “question”.
In the beginning of this catapult into embrace of evolutionary theory, most “theistic evolutionists” were found to embrace the very crude and embarrassing notion that God somehow used evolution to finally produce an advanced ape body, and then infused a human soul into this creature. Such a view was of course rightly open to the coarsest ridicule. One might well imagine a newspaper cartoon with a Michelangelo-like God-figure grasping an ape by the neck with one hand, booting out an ape-soul with a large foot, while injecting this creature with a syringe clearly labeled “Human Soul”.
However, around the same time that Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis was issued, the written works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (died 1955) were gaining in popularity. Here we encounter a form of evolutionary theory (Teilhardian Cosmic Evolution) vastly different from the grossly naïve version mentioned above. In one short sentence (to be elaborated upon below), Teilhard taught that what we call spirit in a human being is not the result of infusion of a distinct soul, but rather the fruit of a long evolutionary process of the development of matter itself, through a process of complexification, all the way from the simplest cell through the plant and animal kingdoms, and finally culminating in man.
By 1967, America’s most popular Catholic personality, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, having embraced Teilhard’s central concepts and terminology, would write in his work Footprints in a Darkened Forest that in 50 years it would be very likely that Teilhard de Chardin “will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century” (Meredith Press, p. 73). This was only a sign of the times. By 1960, the writings of Teilhard (especially his book The Phenomenon of Man) had become popular fare, especially on college campuses.
It should have been no surprise, therefore, that in an October, 1995 letter released to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting in Rome, Pope John Paul II declared: “fresh knowledge leads to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.”
However, in order to understand the depths of Catholic intellectual surrender to Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theory, we need first to examine the life and work of Teilhard himself. We shall than proceed to examine the fulsome embrace of his ideas in the writings and thought of Pope Benedict XVI and in the environmental encyclical Laudato Si of Pope Francis. What the reader will encounter below was also part of our article on the Third Sorrowful Mystery in our series on the Rosary. We consider it very necessary to also cover these subjects again here. We especially ask the reader to persevere through what he might at first be tempted to dismiss as the “nonsense” of Teilhard de Chardin. As will be seen, this nonsense has been deeply embraced by both Benedict XVI and Francis. It has become the Papal norm, and we shall not be able to engage the battle for a return to Catholic sanity unless we first see the enemy.
Teilhard de Chardin
In the following analysis, we will be dealing with three short works of Teilhard de Chardin. They are all to be found in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin: The Heart of Matter (Harcourt, 1978). All page references to quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this edition.
The first is titled The Heart of Matter. It was written in 1950, and is considered the last of his major works. It is autobiographical, and contains a summation of his thought and the personal history of his spiritual development. Therefore, it is a singularly important work for understanding the man and his completed system.
The second, titled The Christic, was written one month before his death in 1955. It contains his culminating thoughts on Christ as the Omega Point of Evolution.
The third work, The Mass on the World (originally titled The Priest), was begun in 1918, and it became a project which he worked on for the rest of his life. It is here that we find his most darksome prayer to a Christ for Whom the Consecrated Bread and Wine are only symbols of what Teilhard considered to be the real consecration of the whole world through evolutionary transformation and ascent to the Omega point.
During the following analysis, we ask the reader to continually keep in mind the extraordinarily perverse statement, as quoted at the beginning of this section, that “it is Christ who is saved by Evolution” (p., 92)
Teilhard’s Spiritual Journey to the New Age
A memory? My very first! I was five or six. My mother had snipped a few of my curls. I picked one up and held it close to the fire. The hair was burnt up in a fraction of a second. A terrible grief assailed me; I had learnt that I was perishable… What used to grieve me when I was a child? This insecurity of things. And what used I to love? My genie of iron! With a plow hitch I believed myself, at seven years, rich with a treasure incorruptible, everlasting. And then it turned out that what I possessed was just a bit of iron that rusted. At this discovery I threw myself on the lawn and shed the bitterest tears of my existence!” (From a 1938 edition of The Heart of Matter, translated by Claude Cuenot).
In his autobiography, The Heart of Matter, Teilhard begins by stating that the “axis” which gives continuity to his whole life is the innate “Pleromic Sense” which has been with him since earliest childhood – the appetite for some “Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.” (p. 16-17). He describes a mental state as a child in which, although he was devoted to the child Jesus, “In reality, however, my real ‘me’ was elsewhere….I withdrew into the contemplation, the possession, into the so relished existence of my ‘Iron God’….nothing in the world was harder, heavier, tougher, more durable than this marvelous substance apprehended in its fullest possible form…Consistence: that has undoubtedly been for me the fundamental attribute of Being.”
In other words, at an age when healthy children “relish” in the love of mother, father, and siblings, Teilhard withdrew into a contemplative relationship with the iron “lock-pin of a plow.” (p. 18-19).
Having been betrayed by the rusting lock-pin, Teilhard moved on to rocks (they don’t rust), and especially quartz. This passion stayed with him the rest of his life. He writes, “The truth is that even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter…” (p. 20).
The problem in all of this, of course, is what to do with living things. Teilhard writes that, “Because of its apparent fragility…the living World greatly worried and disconcerted me as a child.” On the one hand he was drawn to it by his “Pleromic Sense,” (there is, after all, a certain obvious plenitude of being in living things that is not in rocks); on the other he was repulsed and terrified by their inconsistency and fragility. He admits that, because of this conflict, “I had at that time [28 years old] come to a standstill in my awakening to Cosmic Life, and I could not start again without the intervention of a new force or a new illumination” (p. 23-24). In other words, at the age of 28, he was still looking for a justification for relishing the living over the dead.
It is interesting that at this stage of development (if we care to grace it with such a term), Teilhard was tempted by Eastern Mysticism. Having found no real object in this world to answer his quest for “Plenitude,” he was tempted to go entirely beyond this world into the formless Monism of Eastern Philosophy and Mysticism. He states that such would have been the case “had it not been that just at the appropriate moment the idea of Evolution germinated in me, like a seed: whence it came I cannot say.” (p. 24).
Evolution became for our philosopher a “magic word…which haunted my thoughts like a tune: which was to me like an unsatisfied hunger, like a promise held out to me, like a summons to be answered….” (p.24). It was in fact Evolution which enabled Teilhard to transfer his Sense of Plenitude from the “ultra-material” (iron and rocks) to the “ultra living.” He writes:
“You can well imagine, accordingly, how strong was my inner feeling of release and expansion when I took my first still hesitant steps into an ‘evolutive’ Universe, and saw that the dualism in which I had hitherto been enclosed was disappearing like the mist before the rising sun. Matter and Spirit these were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff….” (p. 26).
It was Paleontology which provided the key for Teilhard:
“By its gravitational nature, the Universe, I saw, was falling – falling forwards – in the direction of Spirit as upon its stable form. In other words, Matter was not ultra-materialized as I would at first have believed, but was instead metamorphosed into Psyche. Looked at not metaphysically, but genetically, Spirit was by no means the enemy or the opposite of the Tangibility which I was seeking to attain: rather was it its very heart [Spirit, in other words, is the Heart of Matter].” (p.28)
“Matter is the matrix of Spirit. Spirit is the higher state of Matter.” (p. 35).
According to Teilhard, matter itself is under pressure everywhere by a directional spirit and energy which is “an extraordinary capacity for “consolidation by complexification.” It is this “complexification” which eventually produces living organisms in the “Biosphere,” and it is further “complexification” which eventually produces the critical point at which living organisms become conscious and reflective:
“Reflection, the ‘cosmic’ critical point which at a given moment is inevitably met and traversed by all Matter, as soon as it exceeds a certain degree of psychic temperature and organization.” (p. 35).
But this is by no means the end of the evolutionary process.
The Evolution of the Noosphere
“The irresistible ‘setting’ or cementing together of a thinking mass (Mankind) which is continually more compressed upon itself by the simultaneous multiplication and expansion of its individual elements: there is not one of us, surely, who is not almost agonizingly aware of this, in the very fibre of his being. This is one of the things that no one today would even try to deny: we can all see the fantastic anatomical structure of a vast phylum [social, psychic, informational, etc.] whose branches, instead of diverging as they normally do, are ceaselessly folding in upon one another ever more closely, like some monstrous inflorescence – like, indeed, an enormous flower folding-in upon itself; the literally global physiology of an organism in which production, nutrition, the machine, research, and the legacy of heredity are, beyond any doubt, building to planetary dimensions [one can only imagine the ‘fuel’ which the Internet would have provided for Teilhard’s ‘Great Vision’]….Writing in the year 1950, I can say that the evolution of my inner vision culminates in the acceptance of this evident fact, that there is a ‘creative’ tide which (as a strict statistic consequence of their increasing powers of self-determination) is carrying the human ‘mega-molecules’ towards an almost unbelievable quasi ‘mono-molecular’ state; and in that state, as the biological laws of Union demand, each ego is destined to be forced convulsively beyond itself into some mysterious super-ego.” (p. 37-38). [We might well imagine the delight of any sort of Antichrist figure at the prospect that he has both divine and evolutionary sanction to “convulsively force” all men into “some mysterious super-ego.”]
Thus, we have reached what Teilhard considers the Omega point of Natural Evolution. This, however, is not the end of the story. Parallel to Natural Evolution, there must also be seen in the Teilhardian system an “axis” of Evolution of the Divine.
The Christic
“It is Christ, in very truth, who saves, – but should we not immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by Evolution? (p. 92)
Teilhard teaches a double evolutionary movement in the universe, and a final convergence between what he calls the “God of the Ahead” and the “God of Above.” The God of the Ahead is the result of natural evolution from the geosphere (inanimate matter), to the biosphere (living things), to the noosphere (consciousness), and finally to the collective “Super-Mind” in the Omega Point. But the “God of the Above” also entails an evolutionary process by which God, through natural evolution, incarnates Himself in order to draw all things into final union with the Christic, which is something more than the historical Christ. Teilhard writes:
“On one side – in my ‘pagan’ ego – a Universe which was becoming personalized through convergence [Natural Evolutionary Complexification leading to consciousness, next to the building up of the Noosphere, and finally to unity in the ‘Super-Mind or Omega Point].” On the other side – in my Christian ego – a Person – the Person of Christ – who was becoming universal through Radiation.” By each of these two roads, that is to say, the Divine was joining itself, through all Matter, to all the Human, in the direction of the infinity of the ages lying ahead… (p. 44).
“Classical metaphysics had accustomed us to seeing in the World – which it regarded as an object of ‘Creation’ – a sort of extrinsic product which had issued from God’s supreme efficient power as the fruit of his overflowing benevolence. I find myself now irresistibly led – and this precisely because it enables me both to act and to love in the fullest degree – to a view that harmonizes with the spirit of St. Paul: I see in the World a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself.” (p.54).
“…the Christ of Revelation is none other than the Omega of Evolution.” (p.92).
All of this obviously demands an entirely new view of Christianity, of the Church, of Revelation, of Christ, and of our sanctification in Him. It also demands a “New Mass.”
A Cosmic Liturgy and Transubstantiation
“And then there appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the Eucharistic mystery itself, extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation, in which the words of the Consecration apply not only to the sacrificial bread and wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the Convergence of the World as it progresses.” (p. 94)
The first sentence of The Mass on the World reads as follows:
“Since once again, Lord – though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the stepes of Asia – I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself [Note: there is no way that Teilhard could use these words, and make this juxtaposition if he believed in the substantial, Real Presence of Christ after the Consecration]; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.” (p. 119).
And, a little further on, he elaborates:
This restless multitude, confused or orderly, the immensity of which terrifies us; this ocean of humanity whose slow, monotonous wave-flows trouble the hearts even of those whose faith is most firm: it is to this deep that I thus desire all the fibres of my being should respond. All the things in the world to which this day will bring increase; all those that will diminish; all those too that will die: all of them, Lord, I try to gather into my arms, so as to hold them out to you in offering. This is the material of my sacrifice; the only material you desire.
Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to slake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming.
Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which your whole creation, moved by your magnetism, offers you at this dawn of a new day. (p. 121)
Such is the “Living Liturgy,” the “Great Vision,” of Teilhard de Chardin. It is now largely dominant within the Church, including the minds of both Popes Benedict XVI and Francis. It necessitates the dissolution of all things truly Catholic.
The Teilhardism of Joseph Ratzinger
Having analyzed the philosophy and theology of Teilhard de Chardin , the above-quoted words of a reigning Pope should take on immense, and immanently frightening, significance for any orthodox Catholic.
It is, of course, almost a knee-jerk response for any good Catholic to instinctively diffuse the import of such an outrageous statement (quoted above) made by a reigning Pope. Somehow, we think, he does not really mean it – he does not understand Teilhard, and has not read him in depth. The fact is, however, that the opposite is true. In his book Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004), Joseph Ratzinger quotes from five of Teilhard’s works, including The Heart of Matter which we made the principle subject of analysis of his thinking. He has read Teilhard, he understands Teilhard, and he has accepted, with minor qualifications, the “Great Vision” of Teilhard.
In order to be able to understand Benedict XVI’s “Teilhardism”, we need to do some preparatory examination of his particular evolutionary views. Again, we tend to have a “diffused” view concerning the evil involved in the acceptance of evolutionary theory, and especially the consequences attendant upon having a Pope who is a convinced evolutionist. This is fostered by a number of factors.
We tend, for instance, to think of all so-called Christian evolutionists as coming from that camp of “Theistic Evolutionists” who believe that at a certain stage of physical evolution, God infused a soul into a being who was hithertofore an animal. Joseph Ratzinger absolutely rejects such a view. His evolutionary view is very different, and as we shall see, much more destructive to the Catholic Faith.
We also tend to minimize the evil of evolutionary belief because of all the prominent Catholics who have believed in evolution: As we have already seen, Bishop Sheen was an evolutionist, had read Teihard de Chardin, and embraced his central concepts and terminology. He even went so far as to say that in 50 years it would be very likely that Teilhard “will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century”. Leaving judgment of Bishop Sheen to others, or to other times, we must yet note that it is now 53 years since Bishop Sheen made this prediction, and with recent Papacies, we do now indeed appear to be on the cusp of its fulfillment.
Let us, first of all, establish absolute certainty as to Joseph Ratzinger’s embrace of evolution.
The year 2009 saw the publication by Ignatius Press of a book of essays written by Joseph Ratzinger titled Credo for Today: What Christians Believe (translated from the original 2006 German version). The essays are taken from various works published between the years 1971-2006. Credo for Today contains a chapter titled Creation: Belief in Creation and the Theory of Evolution (taken from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1972 work Dogma and Verkündung (Preaching or Proclamation)). It is devoted to an attempt to reconcile the Christian view of creation with the scientific theory of evolution. Here we read the following:
“…the pre-Darwinian idea of the invariability of the species had been justified in terms of the idea of creation [and, of course, by taking the Bible seriously] ; it regarded every individual species as a datum of creation that had existed since the beginning of the world through God’s creative work as something unique and different alongside the other species. It is clear that this form of belief in creation contradicts the idea of evolution and that this expression of the faith has become untenable today.”(p. 34)
And, further:
“We have established that the first aspect, that is, the concrete form which the idea of creation had taken in practice, has been abolished by the idea of evolution; here the believer must allow himself to be taught by science that the way in which he had imagined creation was part of a pre-scientific world view that has become untenable.”(p.36)
The first thing we must realize, therefore, is that Joseph Ratzinger is not merely “influenced” by evolutionary thinking. He has embraced it in its depths. And this embrace has necessitated what, in the very first sentence of his article, he calls “a revolution in our world view that was no less thoroughgoing than the one that we associate with the name Copernicus.”
Secondly, the fundamental component in this “revolution in our world view” consists in the fact that, in the light of what Joseph Ratzinger considers the indisputable truth of evolution, the concept of “being” does not indicate any sort of fixed substantial nature, but rather that “being is time; it does not merely have time. Only in becoming does it exist and unfold into itself.” (Ibid, p. 42). This evolutionary “becoming” is meaningful, according to Joseph Ratzinger, because, contrary to the view of materialistic evolutionists, it is directed by “Mind” or “Creative Reason,” and has a “forward” momentum. All this is in deep agreement with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. The latter in fact specifically defends himself against the charge of being a pantheist because he believes in the ultimate goal of evolution as being union with “some pre-existent being.”
This “becoming” is fully explored by Joseph Ratzinger in his book Introduction to Christianity. It is in the passages of this work that one sees both his endorsement of Teilhard’s system as a whole and his adoption of its specific terminology.
As we have seen, the key “scientific” term which facilitates Teilhard’s system of evolutionary growth towards the Omega Point is “complexification.” Joseph Ratzinger seems enamoured of this term – there are eleven uses of the terms “complexity” or “complexification” in 10 pages of his treatment of the thought of Teilhard de Cardin. Following are several examples:
“In the background is the idea that in the cosmos, alongside the two orders or classes of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, there is a third order, which determines the real drift of evolution, namely, the order of the infinitely complex. It is the real goal of the ascending process of growth and becoming….” (p. 237)
“But let us return to man, He is so far the maximum in complexity. But even he as mere man-monad cannot represent an end; his growth itself demands a further advance in complexity.” (Ibid.)
“From here it is possible to understand the final aim of the whole movement as Teilhard sees it: the cosmic drift moves ‘in the direction of an incredible ‘mono-molecular’ state, so to speak, in which…each ego is destined to attain climax in a sort of mysterious superego’.” (p. 238).
“From here onward faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single ‘body’ the man to come.”(p. 239).
“From this perspective the belief in the second coming of Jesus Christ and in the consummation of the world in that event could be explained as the conviction that our history is advancing to an ‘omega’ point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability that seems to us to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter; that, on the contrary, the real, firm ground is mind. Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality: it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist. That there is such a thing as this process of ‘complexification’ of material being through spirit, and from the latter its concentration into a new kind of unity can already be seen in the remodeling of the world through technology.” (p. 320-321).
And, in order to demonstrate that this sort of Teilhardian cosmology is not just a momentary aberration in a single work, we also have the following from Joseph Ratzinger’s book titled Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life:
“We left the question of the materiality of the resurrection at the point to which Thomas Aquinas had brought it. The fundamental insight to which Thomas broke through [the real unity of soul and body) was given a new twist by Rahner when he noted that in death the soul becomes not acosmic [having nothing to do with the physical world] but all-cosmic. This means that its essential ordination to the material world remains, not in the mode of giving form to an organism as its entelechy [thus, out the window goes the teaching of the Council Vienne that the soul is the substantial form – the entelechy – of the body], but in that of an ordering to this world as such and as a whole. It is not difficult to connect this thought to ideas formulated by Teilhard de Chardin. For it might be said in this regard that relation to the cosmos is necessarily also relation to the temporality of the universe, which knows being only in the form of becoming [this is gibberish in light of Thomistic metaphysics], has a certain direction, disclosed in the gradual construction of ‘biosphere’ and ‘noosphere’ from out of physical building blocks which it then proceeds to transcend. Above all it is a progress to ever more complex unities. This is why it calls for a total complexity: a unity which will embrace all previously existing unities….The search reaches the point of integration of all in all, where each thing becomes completely itself precisely by being completely in the other. In such integration, matter belongs to spirit in a wholly new and different way, and spirit is utterly one with matter. The pancosmic existence, which death opens up would lead, then, to universal exchange and openness, and so to the overcoming of all alienation. Only where creation realizes such unity can it be true that ‘God is all in all.”( p. 191-192).
The quotes given above should be sufficient in order to establish with absolute certainty the extraordinary degree to which Joseph Ratzinger has embraced both the specific terminology and general cosmology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It is interesting that at the beginning of his discussion of Teilhard, he mentions a “not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” in Teilhard’s approach to these subjects, but then immediately states that he “nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly….” We shall examine further on wherein this “objectionable tendency” lies. The reader will be justly horrified.
For now, we continue with our examination of the depths of Joseph Ratzinger’s embrace of Teilhardian theology.
The problem in all this, as Joseph Ratzinger fully admits, is the question as to how we explain the rise of man, and the fact that we believe that he possesses a spiritual “soul.” As noted earlier, he categorically rejects the position of some “Theistic Evolutionists” who basically conceive of a God Who “waits in the wings,” and at the opportune moment in evolutionary history, infuses a spiritual soul into an animal body. He dismisses such a solution as being “intolerable” to both the evolutionist and the theologian (Credo For Today, p. 38).
It is here that he again has recourse to Teilhard. After quoting a rather dense passage from his writings, Joseph Ratzinger offers us the following exposition:
“Certainly one can debate the details in this formulation; yet the decisive point seems to me to be grasped quite accurately: the alternative: materialism [the view that “spirit” and consciousness are ultimately only an accidental phenomenon of matter] or a spiritually defined world view, chance or meaning, is presented to us today in the form of the question of whether one regards spirit and life in its ascending forms as an incidental mold on the surface of the material world…or whether one regards spirit as the goal of the process and, conversely matter as the prehistory of the spirit. If one chooses the second alternative, it is clear that spirit is not a random product of material developments, but rather that matter signifies a moment in the history of spirit.” (Credo For today, p. 45).
It is clear here that Joseph Ratzinger’s thinking is in striking accord with “the decisive point” of Teilhard de Chardin in regard to the evolution of spirit and mind. Many traditionalists are in confusion in regard to Benedict’s evolutionary views because he rejects “meaningless evolution.” (as he did in his 2011 Easter Vigil Homily). But to reject meaningless evolution is not at all the same as rejecting evolution. Teilhard de Chardin also totally rejects meaningless evolution.” In both men’s thinking there is in fact so much significance and meaning to evolution that it is the primary vehicle by which God deals with man, and by which man’s spirit arises.
Lest we are tempted to think that Teilhard is a theologian with whom Benedict XVI is not really in essential agreement, we have the following matter-of-fact conclusion from Joseph Ratzinger’s pen in regard to the appearance of spirit in a human being:
“This would then lead to the insight that spirit does not enter the picture as something foreign, as a second substance, in addition to matter: the appearance of spirit, according to the previous discussion, means rather that an advancing movement arrives at the goal that has been set for it….The clay became man at that moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought ‘God’. The first ‘thou’ that – however stammeringly – was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed.” (Ibid, p. 46-47).
One can only surmise that Adam’s next act after his initial dim and stammering thought of God was a puzzled grunt. There is here no Adam and Eve created in the fullness of sanctifying grace, possessing the infused gifts, both natural and supernatural, necessary for what has traditionally been known as the state of “Original Justice.” There can be no loss of this state through Original Sin. There can be no real moral responsibility for a human mind and will living in such dimness and stammering. There is only evolution and becoming.
Joseph Ratzinger in fact rejected the Church’s dogmatic teaching (Council of Trent) on the nature of original sin. The following is taken from his book In the Beginning…A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (William B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1995):
“In the story that we are considering [Ch. 3 of Genesis], still a further characteristic of sin is described. Sin is not spoken of in general as an abstract possibility but as a deed, as the sin of a particular person, Adam, who stands at the origin of humankind and with whom the history of sin begins. The account tells us that sin begets sin, and that therefore all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin’. What does this mean? Nothing seems to us today to be stranger or, indeed, more absurd than to insist upon original sin, since, according to our way of thinking, guilt can only be something very personal, and since God does not run a concentration camp, in which one’s relatives are imprisoned because he is a liberating God of love, who calls each one by name. What does original sin mean, then, when we interpret it correctly?
In the above passage, Joseph Ratzinger is simply denying that original sin was something which resulted in the passing on, through generation, of a fallen nature to all men. He in fact mocks this absolutely essential Catholic truth by comparing it to the idea that God runs a concentration camp which punishes all subsequent men born into this world for the sins committed by Adam. His answer (which is to be found in the long paragraph which followed the above quote) consists in asserting that “original sin” is not inherited at conception through generation, but is picked up by us through damaged relationships after conception and birth. He in fact uses some form of the word “relation” or “relationship” thirteen times in this paragraph in order to try to hammer home this new version of original sin. Again, success in such an enterprise destroys the Catholic Faith. And such is an absolute necessity of the evolutionary view of man and God.
An Evolutionary Christ
It is, of course, traditional Catholic teaching that Christ’s Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection brought a radical change into the world. Christ’s Advent, and the resultant conversion of millions from a state of original sin to one of sanctifying grace, resulted in an ontological change in millions of souls, which in turn radically changed social realities, and created a Christian civilization. The teachings of many previous Popes contain stirring testimonies to this radical “ontological” change which ensued from Christ’s Advent. As Pope Leo XIII wrote:
“Then man, as though awakening from a long-continued and deadly lethargy, beheld at length the light of the truth, for long ages desired, yet sought in vain. First of all, he realized that he was born to much higher and more glorious things than the frail and inconstant objects of sense which had hitherto formed the end of his thoughts and cares. He learnt that the meaning of human life, the supreme law, the end of all things was this: that we come from God and must return to Him. From this first principle the consciousness of human dignity was revived: men’s hearts realized the universal brotherhood: as a consequence, human rights and duties were either perfected or even newly created, whilst on all sides were evoked virtues undreamt of in pagan philosophy. Thus men’s aims, life, habits and customs received a new direction. As the knowledge of the Redeemer spread far and wide and His power, which destroyeth ignorance and former vices, penetrated into the very life-blood of the nations, such a change came about that the face of the world was entirely altered by the creation of a Christian civilization.” (Encyclical Tametsi – on Christ Our Redeemer).
Such radical, ontological change and restoration is, of course, impossible in the world of Teilhardian evolution. The Incarnation, according to Teilhard de Chardin, is not to be seen as a one-time event which restored salvation to mankind, but only the beginning of an ages-long process of evolutionary incorporation of the human into the divine, and of the incarnation of the divine into the human, reaching final convergence at the Omega Point of the Christic. This Teilhardian rejection of the traditional understanding of Christ’s Advent is perfectly expressed by Joseph Ratzinger in the following passage from his book Being Christian:
“This week we celebrate with the Church the beginning of Advent. If we think back to what we learned as children about Advent and its significance, we will remember being told that the Advent wreath, with its candles, is a reminder of the thousands of years (perhaps thousands of centuries) of the history of mankind before Christ. It reminds all of us of the time when an unredeemed mankind awaited salvation. It brings to our minds the darkness of an as yet unredeemed history in which the light of hope was only slowly kindled until, in the end, Christ, the light of the world, came and freed mankind from the darkness of condemnation. We learned also that those thousands of years before Christ were a time of condemnation because of original sin, while the centuries after the birth of our Lord are ‘anni salutis reparatae,’ years of restored salvation. And finally, we will remember being told that, in Advent, besides thinking back on the past to the period of condemnation and expectation of mankind, the Church also fixes her attention on the multitude of people who have not yet been baptized, and for whom it is still Advent, since they wait and live in the darkness of the absence of salvation.
“If we look at the ideas we learned as children through the eyes of contemporary man and with the experiences of our age, we will see that we can hardly accept them. The idea that the years after Christ, compared with those before, are years of salvation will seem to be a cruel irony if we remember such dates as 1914, 1918, 1933, 1939, 1945; dates which mark periods of world war in which millions of men lost their lives, often in terrifying circumstances; dates which bring back the memory of atrocities such as humanity has never before experienced. One date (1933) reminds us of the beginning of a regime which achieved the most cruel perfection in the practice of mass murder; and finally, we remember that year in which the first atomic bomb exploded on an inhabited city, hiding in its dazzling brilliance a new possibility of darkness for the world.
“If we think about these things, we will have difficulty in distinguishing between a period of salvation and one of condemnation. And, extending our vision even further, if we contemplate the works of destruction and barbarity perpetrated in this and the preceding centuries by Christians (that is to say by us who call ourselves ‘redeemed’), we will be unable to divide the nations of the world into the redeemed and the condemned.
“If we are sincere, we will no longer build up a theory which divides history and geography into zones of redeemed and zones of condemned. Rather, we will see the whole of history as a gray mass in which it is always possible to perceive the shining of a goodness which has not completely disappeared, in which there can always be found in men the desire to do good, but also in which breakdowns occur which lead to the atrocities of evil.”
It is immensely ironic and tragic that Joseph Ratzinger does not realize that the 20th Century atrocities which he lists in no way provide evidence against the traditional view of Christ’s Advent, or against such doctrines as original sin, sanctifying grace, or the necessity for implementing the Social Kingship of Christ. Rather, they provide profound confirmation of the inevitable consequences of a decay of traditional Christian orthodoxy and civilization, and the resultant ascension to power of forces, ideas, individuals, and movements (Communism, Nazism, and secular-messianic democracy) at total war with Christianity. Nor does he realize what atrocities the dark horizons of the future hold in store as a consequence of his own betrayals of this Tradition, and his embrace of Teilhardian evolution.
In his most comprehensive work on theology, Principles of Catholic Theology, Joseph Ratzinger offers the following assessment of Teilhard de Chardin’s influence upon Vatican Council II:
“The impetus given by Teilhard de Chardin exerted a wide influence. With daring vision it incorporated the historical movement of Christianity into the great cosmic process of evolution from Alpha to Omega: since the noogenesis, since the formation of consciousness in the event by which man became man, this process of evolution has continued to unfold as the building of the noosphere above the biosphere.” (p.334).
There has existed a tremendous blindness among traditional Catholics in regard to the philosophy and theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. Largely this has been due to his Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, and the widespread permission it gave for offering the Traditional Latin Mass. But as we have seen in the case of Teilhard de Chardin and his ”Mass on the World” (which of course was the form of Mass offered exclusively during his time), the TLM in itself does not guarantee that it cannot be offered free of intentions which invert the entire Catholic Faith. This inversion is completely evident in a passage from Chapter 2 of Cardinal Ratzinger’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000):
“And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same—divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the ‘Noosphere’, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its ‘fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological ‘fullness’. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”
It needs to be added that it is frequently claimed that during the social “revolutions” of 1968, then Fr. Joseph Ratzinger underwent some sort of conversion from being a “liberal” to a “conservative”. But “conservativism” is not the same as Catholic orthodoxy. One can prefer Gregorian Chant and Mozart to Pop music, and still not be Catholic. One can love the beauty of the traditional liturgy, and find repulsive the banality of the way in which the Novus Ordo is usually offered, and still not really understand. One can be abhorred at the promotion of drastic, violent forms of evolution and revolution, while at the same time being an evolutionist and an agent of revolution. One can be a “cultural conservative”, while still expounding philosophy and theology which completely inverts the Catholic Faith.
By now the reader should not be too befuddled by Teilhard-Ratzinger newspeak. What is being said here is that the “daring” event that was Vatican II amounted to an “opening” (aggiornamento) and incorporation of the Church into the larger evolutionary movement of the entire world and all of its individual realities and forces. What this means, of course, is that all dogmas – both of Faith and Morals – which have kept the Church separate from the world and all of its aspirations, must now somehow be “essentialized”, subjected to a “hermeneutics of continuity” (the last two expressions were favorites of Pope Benedict XVI), diluted, de-emphasized, transformed into an ideal only attainable in some future Omega Point, or simply cloaked behind a wall of silence, in order to facilitate this evolutionary process. And this is where Pope Francis comes upon the stage.
Finally, we come to the question, posed earlier, as to what Joseph Ratzinger meant when he mentioned a possible “not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” in
Teilhard’s system of Cosmic Evolution. This certainly cannot have anything to do with Teilhard’s ideas concerning biological evolution culminating in the appearance of consciousness and “spirit” through a process of biological “compexification”. As we have seen from his writings, Joseph Ratzinger completely embraced this “biological approach”.
Almost certainly therefore, Joseph Ratzinger’s reference to “a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach” refers to Teilhard de Chardin’s embrace of eugenics as something we are absolutely obligated to embrace as a means of gaining control of the evolutionary process..
The earth itself, in Teilhard’s cosmology, being part of the collective process of evolution from matter into spirit and beyond, plays an enormous part in this process. Teilhard in fact calls the earth a “thinking planet”. In itself, being a finite surface upon which millions of reflective hominids have proliferated, the earth is a primary factor in the cosmogenic “heat” or “pressure” which cause the compression and convergence (through social communication, etc.) which generates the Noosphere. By the very fact that mankind now is being forced by modern science, technology, and communications beyond himself into some sort of super-ego which is an evolutionary precursor to the Ultra-Human, and because this clearly negates any notion that the question of salvation must focus on the individual soul and its relation to God, then it becomes quite clear why the people like Pope Francis are now so intent in uniting the Church with the secular agenda of integral ecology. The Instrumen Laboris for the Amazonian Synod described the Amazonian indigenous people as not only those who live in communion with the earth, but also as those who live in “intercommunication with the entire cosmos”, for whom “the land is a theological place by which the faith is lived”, and a “unique source of God’s revelation”. It therefore provides the perfect venue for promoting a “spirit of this world”, undermining the vertical dimension of Catholic belief and practice, in order to institute this new religion which will come from the evolutionary pressure and “heat” which is now rising and converging from below and within. Teilhard writes:
“It is unmistakably apparent (as all of us can see) that at this moment we are irretrievably involved in a rapidly accelerating process of human totalization. Under the combined force of the multiplication (in numbers) and expansion (in radius of influence) of human individuals on the surface of the globe, the noösphere has for the last century shown signs of a sudden organic compression upon itself and compenetration. This is without any doubt the most massive and the most central of the events the earth has experienced in our day.”
Teilhard then proceeds to tell us that all of this places an extraordinary demand upon us to “make up our minds and get down to work, quickly, and immediately”. And he continues:
“For, if it is really true that an ultra-human [destiny] can be distinguished ahead of us, to be attained by ultra-evolution, it is equally true that this ultra-evolution, operating henceforth in a reflective medium, can only be (at least in its most seminal and central axis) an auto- or self-evolution: in other words, it must be a consciously and passionately willed deliberate act. If the totalization of the noösphere is to be biologically successful, it cannot be simply instinctive and passive. It looks to us for an active and immediate collaboration, for a vigorous drive, based on conviction and hope. For evolution will not mark time.”
In other words, according to Teilhard, we now must choose for the belief that mankind is evolving into the “Ultra-Human”, and act upon it. Again, Teilhard writes:
“That is the precise point upon which mankind is obliged to divide itself (as, indeed, we can see for ourselves it is actually doing) into two irreconcilably conflicting blocs. And, we can confidently predict, only that portion of mankind which has made the correct choice will survive—and super-live.”
Teilhard here makes an extraordinary proclamation, deserving of our most profound reflection. He flatly states that mankind is dividing itself into “two irreconcilably conflicting blocs”. Clearly, he is here contrasting those who agree to participate in his evolutionary agenda towards the Ultra-Human, with those who refuse. And also, clearly, anyone who believes according to the traditional Catholic Faith in a truly Supernatural God falls under the second category, and must be numbered among those who cannot survive.
Why is this so? It is because traditional Catholicism embodies that “static” and “rigid” presence in this world which clings to the notion that human fulfillment lies not in man’s evolutionary transformation into some future Ultra-human state, but rather in the fundamental act of faith by which he surrenders his mind and will to a God of infinite Truth and Love Who has fully revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. This places all faithful Catholics in the category of those who refuse to “move” and “act” in cooperation with Teilhard’s evolutionary mandate.
The “need to act now”, according to Teilhard, is absolutely imperative, and what is more, it also demands eugenics:
“the duty and clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (radical no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere. Simultaneously, too, the necessity of drawing up as soon as possible the main lines of a spiritual energetics devoted to the study of the conditions under which the human zest for auto-evolution and ultra-evolution – which at the moment is dissipated in any number of different forms of faith and love – may be in a position to form a compact group [a One-World Teilhardian religion?], to safeguard itself and to intensify – to meet the requirements, and through the influence of, the new regime we have just entered: that of a world in a reflective state of self-transformation.”
As is the case with all such utopian programs (Gnosticism, Communism, etc.) which promote man’s becoming over God’s Being, this new regime will be in the hands of an elite. Teilhard writes:
“It is a matter of bringing together a large number of minds that are sufficiently open and in tune with influences of the cosmic order to perceive, record and amplify [through eugenics] a movement of the noosphere in relation to itself. Such an enterprise, it is evident, can profitably be undertaken only after a very considerable preliminary work of discussion and tentative inquiry conducted by physicists and biologists.
But such eugenics will not confine itself merely to those such as traditional Catholics who refuse to cooperate with Teilhard’s evolutionary “vision”. It will also be applied to those peoples and races who are deemed to be “unprogressive”. Again, from Teilhard:
“Now eugenics does not confine itself to a simple control of births. All sorts of related questions, scarcely yet raised despite their urgency, are attached to it. What fundamental attitude, for example should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? [We do well here to pause, and consider what Teilhard’s view of the “indigenous” peoples of the Amazon would have been]. The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving what is so often no more than one of life’s rejects? Something profoundly true and beautiful (I mean faith in the irreplaceable value and unpredictable resources contained in each personal unit) is evidently concealed in persistent sacrifice to save a human existence. But should not this solicitude of man for his individual neighbor be balanced by a higher passion, born of the faith in that other higher personality that is to be expected, as we shall see, from the world-wide achievements of our evolution? To what extent should not the development of the strong (to the extent that we can define this quality) take precedence over the preservation of the weak? How can we reconcile, in a state of maximum efficiency, the care lavished on the wounded with the more urgent necessities of battle? In what does true charity consist?” (Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, p.131-132).
All of this would seem very relevant to the current “pandemic”. In line with Teilhard de Chardin’s statement that “mankind is obliged to divide itself” and “only that portion of mankind which has made the correct choice will survive”, the Catholic Church, and her source of sacramental graces, has been suppressed. Further, parallel with Teilhard’s denigration of “care lavished on the wounded [or weak], we read that 40-50% of deaths from the coronavirus are among those in nursing homes and assisted living. And in correspondence with his proposal for weeding out “unprogressive ethnical groups”, statistical analysis claim that death rates among blacks and Latinos are 2-3 times higher than among the white population. George Soros, financier of abortion, euthanasia, population control, same-sex “marriage,” and transgenderism around the world, and certainly to be counted among the elite of the new regime called for by Teilhard de Chardin, has claimed that this current situation represents a “revolutionary moment” for social change not possible under “normal” conditions. Whether or not we believe that this virus was engineered by man for such purposes, it certainly is now being employed for such an agenda as Teilhard proposed. We might therefore justly believe that the most appropriate name for what is happening is not “pandemic”, but rather “Paneugenics”.
Having examined Teilhard’s eugenics, it should be a matter of horror to us that Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI found in Teilhard writings only “a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach”. As we have clearly demonstrated, it is quite clear that he indeed fully embraced the Teilhardian “biological approach” which proposes “matter as the prehistory of spirit” and the emergence of spirit and the human soul as a result of biological complexification leading to the consciousness, the noosphere, and finally to the “Super-human”. It would therefore seem difficult for us not to conclude that it is Teilhard’s eugenics to which he refers. If so, his silence in regard to this aspect of Teilhard’s thought is not merely “objectionable”, but also fully “unconscionable”, especially in the face of the worldwide secular agenda which has now clearly been manifested for quite some time.. For a man who bothered to detail all the atrocities of “social engineering” of the twentieth century which we quoted above from his horrendously distorted writing concerning the meaning of Christ’s Advent, his blindness or silence in regard to Teilhardian evolutionary eugenics should indeed seem unconscionable.
Pope Francis
On the other hand, I cannot fail to feel around me – if only from the way in which ‘my ideas’ are becoming more widely accepted – the pulsation of countless people who are all – ranging from the border-line of belief to the depths of the cloister – thinking and feeling, or at least beginning vaguely to feel, just as I do. It is indeed heartening to know that I am not a lone discoverer, but that I am, quite simply, responding to the vibration that (given a particular condition of Christianity of the world) is necessarily active in all the souls around me…..Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. These two components are everywhere ‘in the air’; generally, however, they are not strong enough, both at the same time, to combine with one another in one and the same subject. In me, it happens by pure chance (temperament, upbringing, background) that the proportion of the one to the other is correct, and the fusion of the two has been effected spontaneously – not as yet with sufficient force to spread explosively — but strong enough nevertheless to make it clear that the process is possible — and that sooner or later there will be a chain-reaction. (The Christic, p. 101-102).
The “chain-reaction” of which Teilhard de Chardin spoke in the above passage has taken sixty years to materialize (and we might also keep in mind Bishop Fulton Sheen’s prophetic statement quoted earlier). His work was censured by various Church officials for decades, culminating in the 1962 Monitum of the Holy Office exhorting “all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers”. As late as 1981, the Holy See issued a communiqué reaffirming this warning.
Teilhard’s Evolutionary Gnosticism has now been blessed with both the voice and the vehicles empowering it to be mainstreamed. The voice is that of Pope Francis, and the vehicles which he has employed are his encyclical Laudato Si, and his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
Just as uniting the concept of evolution to Christology provided the theological key to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of all matter evolving towards the Omega Point of the “Christic” (this constituting his concept of a “Cosmic Liturgy”), so the ecological movement is now providing the necessary chemistry for the “explosion” of this poisoned theology and spirituality within the minds and hearts of millions of Catholics. Laudato Si is rightly seen as the manifesto of this revolution. Following are passages from this encyclical which speak of the universal transfiguration of all created things upon the evolutionary “altar of the world”.
- The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things.[53] Here we can add yet another argument for rejecting every tyrannical and irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator.
- It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation…. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours….Indeed the Eucharist is in itself an act of cosmic love: ‘Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world’.[166]” (the quote at the end of this passage is from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia).
Three more examples:
237. On Sunday, our participation in the Eucharist has special importance. Sunday, like the Jewish Sabbath, is meant to be a day which heals our relationships with God, with ourselves, with others and with the world. Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, the “first day” of the new creation, whose first fruits are the Lord’s risen humanity, the pledge of the final transfiguration of all created reality.
243.Jesus says: “I make all things new” (Rev 21:5). Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.
244.In the meantime, we come together to take charge of this home which has been entrusted to us, knowing that all the good which exists here will be taken up into the heavenly feast.
In order to see the grievous error represented in these passages from Laudato Si, we need only consult Holy Scripture, and the many passages from both Old and New Testaments which clearly reveal that the earth will totally perish and cease to be, that the world is not our lasting home, and that Christ’s assurance that He will “make all things new” in no way signifies a final transfiguration of any created thing, living or dead, which does not have a spiritual soul:
“With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.” (Isaiah 24:3)
“For behold, I create new heaven, and a new earth: and the former things shall not be in remembrance, and they shall not come upon the heart.” (Isaiah 65:1.)
“Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass. “(Matthew 24:35).
“But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men.” (2 Peter 3:7)
“But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief, in which the heavens shall pass away with great violence, and the elements shall be melted with heat, and the earth and the works which are in it, shall be burnt up. Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness? Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat? But we look for new heavens and a new earth according to his promises, in which justice dwelleth.” (2 Peter 3:10-13).
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone, and the sea is now no more,” (Apoc. 21: 1).
The Teilhardian spiritualism implicit in Pope Francis’ concept of the altar of the world, and his concept of the final transfiguration of all created things, demands that the above scriptures be considered false. If “matter is the prehistory of spirit” (Joseph Ratzinger’s phrase), and if, as Pope Francis teaches, all creatures are to be “resplendently transfigured” and be present at the “heavenly feast”, then all creatures possess a dignity and sacredness that demands an imperishability which parallels that of human beings.
The “ecological spiritualism” proposed throughout Pope Francis’ Laudato Si therefore represents not just a lengthy and inappropriate descent of the Church into the science of this world, but is preeminently constituted as a manifesto for a totally radical change in Catholic theology and spirituality.
In the City of God, St. Augustine spoke of two Cities in combat for the souls of men: “These two Cities are made by two loves: the earthly City by love of oneself even to the contempt of God; the heavenly City by love of God even to the contempt of self.” (City of God, 14:2). Seventeen hundred years later, these two loves are now represented by two altars: the traditional Catholic altar which receives the Gift of Christ from above, and the Teilhardian altar of the world upon which man worships his own becoming, and the evolutionary ascent of all of creation.
There is, of course, a legitimate use of the expression “altar of the world”. Fatima has long been called the ‘Altar of the World” because pilgrims come from all over the world to worship at this place of Our Lady’s visitation. It is also true that the Mass itself might be considered the Altar of the World – wherever it is offered on this earth, God becomes present. But this is a far cry from the Teilhardian-inspired use of such terms as “altar of the world”, “Mass on the World”, or “altar of the earth” to connote a process of universal becoming by which the earth itself is to be seen as a “living host” being transfigured by an evolutionary processes which will culminate with all its creatures “resplendently transfigured” and “taken up into the heavenly feast”. Rightly we may view such a liturgy as being offered on the pantheistic altar of Satan.
The encyclical Laudato Si was promulgated on May 24, 2015. One year later, on March 19, 2016, the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia was published. What might be called the “theological agenda” of Amoris Laetitia is succinctly formulated very early in this document. In paragraph 3, we encounter the following:
“Since ‘time is greater than space,’ [bold emphasis ours, quotation marks are Francis’], I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral, or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us towards the entire truth (cf. Jn. 16:13), until he leads us fully into the mystery of Christ and enables us to see all things as he does. Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs. For ‘cultures are in fact quite diverse and every general principle…needs to be inculterated, if it is to be respected and applied’.”
Now, any honest assessment of this paragraph should produce profound bewilderment. The subjects we are dealing with in Amoris Laetitia– marriage, family, the impossibility of divorce and remarriage, the intrinsic evil of homosexuality, and the prescription against those living in adultery receiving the Eucharist – all these subjects are doctrinal “places” which are not subject to evolution, change, growth, or inculteration. The notion that doctrinal truths can be “inculturated” with different “solutions” in various cultures is simply a prescription for relativism. Further, there can be no unity of teaching and practice where these doctrines are violated. And finally, if questions regarding such doctrines need not now to be “settled by intervention of the magisterium”, it is only because they have been settled by the magisterium and by the Gospel from its inception. In other words, every sentence in paragraph 3 is redolent with error and deception.
We do indeed have not only the right, but also the obligation, to reject this concept that “time is greater than space” in regard to anything to do with Catholic truth. And we should be left with a very disturbing question as to exactly what Francis is trying to do with this strange notion that “time is greater than space”.
Amoris Laetitia is not the first time that Francis has used this phrase or concept. Those who read Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium may have been puzzled that in fact an entire subsection of this document was titled “Time is Greater than Space”. There we read:
“A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.”
On the contrary, the Catholic Faith is not established upon a “horizon which constantly opens before us”, but upon what is within us now:
“Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there. For lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)
It has nothing to do with a utopian future, but with the “now” of our response to God’s grace and truth:
“And we helping do exhort you, that you receive not the grace of God in vain….Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:1-2).
It is this now which has been the crucial and saving moment for each individual soul from the creation of Adam down to the last man. It is this now which has been the source of all that is good in human history; for it is here that God’s Rule is either accepted or rejected, this in turn determining whether true love, peace, justice, compassion, and mercy are either accepted or rejected in societies and nations.
Pope Francis indeed seems to make “time” the very source of revelation and salvation. In his interview with Anthony Spadaro, he said the following:
“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes. We must initiate processes, rather than occupy spaces.”
This, of course, is all very reminiscent of Joseph Ratzinger’s statement concerning the temporality of the universe, “which knows being only in the form of becoming”. This is absolutely contrary to Catholic doctrine and Thomistic metaphysics which rightly sees each created thing as possessing a substantial form determining a specific substantial being in itself. Such “beings” or “kinds” of being do certainly experience accidental change, but they cannot cease to be “what they are” without total corruption (in the case of living things this entails their death) of their substantial form. This of course eliminates all possibility of one thing evolving into another. The notion, therefore, that created things “know being only in the form of becoming” is the great philosophical lie of our age. It is the lie which gives credence to all forms of evolutionary theory. Nor is it a lie which affects only temporal realities. The human soul can only find God in the” now” of God’s immutable Life and Truth, which is the source of his own being, and which is constant in the midst of all the changing vicissitudes of his or her life.
Space, therefore, for Pope Francis, is simply a euphemism for what we are in possession of now – in other words, what we traditional Catholics believe to be the fullness of God’s Immutable Revelation, Rules, Dogma, the Infallible Magisterium, and the reality that we each possess a substantial human nature and soul, requiring the same fundamental choice now as was true of the first man.
Time is proposed by Pope Francis as being greater than Space because “becoming” is more real than God’s Supreme Being, and takes precedence over the Revealed Truths which are the fullness of that Being. It is therefore quite easy to see why, in the mind of Pope Francis, an apparent universal mercy trumps immutable dogma – why the divorced and remarried may receive Holy Communion, why we must be “inclusive” towards practicing homosexuals (who must certainly also be admitted to Sacramental Communion if such a “mercy” holds true), and why, in fact, we must be inclusive towards everyone (except, apparently, rich capitalists, the Mafia, and possibly Traditionalists). It is the Journey into the future which is everything. There can be no Now which demands conversion to any Absolutes, and such conversion cannot be a requisite for being included within the sacramental and supernatural life of Christ’s Mystical Body.
If Time triumphs over the “Space” of God’s Immutable Truth, then we float, untethered, until the life of God’s Revelation is left behind. The world, of which Satan is the Prince, has for some time rejected all Absolutes, and prostrated itself before the goddesses of evolutionary progress. The Catholic Church was somewhat slower to join this dark pilgrimage. But the “explosive chain-reaction” which Teilhard predicted was to come from the union of false theology with Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theory which has now violently invaded the Church. It has proven most seductive because it has flooded over our consciousnesses from a direction which could not be anticipated: the Papacy. It began not with conscious or willful heresy. It began, rather, with a friendship with this world which believed that man’s reductive science was compatible with the Truth of God. It was born in the permission of Pius XII to take seriously the possibility of the bodily evolution of man; it gained acceptance in John Paul II’s statement that such evolution was more than a hypothesis; it proliferated wildly in the dark mansions of Benedict XVI’s theology; and it is now coming to fruition in the pastoral engines of Francis’ papacy.
To Seminarians and Priests
In recent years it has become evident that, at least in some respects and in some areas of this country, there has been a turning towards orthodox Catholicism, and therefore a refreshing devotion to such orthodoxy among many seminarians and new priests. At the same time, however, it has also been noticeable that many of these seminarians and recently ordained priests have a strong inclination to try to accommodate Catholicism with evolutionary theory. We hope that all that we have written above will convince such young men that every effort in this direction will inevitably poison their priesthood and lead to mockery of all that Christ meant when He declared to Pilate that He was the King who came to give testimony to the Truth. This of course is precisely what such “accommodation” did to the priesthood of the Popes and their teachings we examined above, who, through silence, permission, or active acceptance and embrace of evolutionary thinking, are now largely responsible for the spread of this virulent poison among the faithful.For all eternity there has existed a “place” for those who truly seek a refuge from the savagery of Satan’s delusional offer to Adam and Eve that they would “become as Gods”. It is a Garden Enclosed – free from the ravages of Time. It is Mary’s Immaculate Heart. It is here where God’s Being triumphs over the becoming of man:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything from the beginning….All that hate me love death. (Proverbs 8).
Any sort of evolutionary view of either God or man masks a love of death in the human heart.
Conclusion: The Future
It will be very tempting to view the reopening of our Churches, with the access it will allow to Mass and the other sacraments, as a sort of triumphant return to normal. But if we view what is happening as a chastisement from God, we must surely also believe that any return to “normal” would be a crushing failure to have understood what is occurring, and to act upon this Wisdom.
First, it became fully evident that a pre-eminent goal of secular powers during this “pandemic”was the shutting down of religious life and practice; and that the Catholic hierarchy submitted, most often even in an anticipatory manner, to this subjection.
Secondly, this crisis is not over. The warfare conducted by the enemy is almost always dialectical – two steps forward, one step backward. And he now has a very large foot in the door. Any return to a “normal Church” will almost certainly prove to be a situation in which the coronavirus spreads more vehemently. And if not this particular virus, some other virus, or some other excuse which the enemy will use for the door to be forced open even further. If the virus does continue its work, this will certainly prove to be an excuse for the powers that be to impose even more draconian measures than they have to date. The Church, and its worship, is already perceived by many to be the primary enemy of human progress. What we are witnessing is only the first worldwide (“pan”) salvo to shut down the Catholic Church permanently.
It might be contended that what is stated in the paragraph immediately above constitutes in itself a lack of faith in God and His grace. We wish to make it emphatically clear, however, that we fully believe that the only hope for both the Church and the world lies in an extraordinary intervention by God. We only question whether a return to “normal” Catholic life and worship will merit this grace or this intervention. As examined in the many articles on this website, we believe that what has been viewed as “normal” for a long time is precisely the reason for God’s chastisement.
We believe that any extraordinary intervention by God on a collective level – and this is certainly our only solution now – also requires an extraordinary collective act on the part of mankind.
Beginning with Moses and the plague of serpents, continuing with Nineveh and its threatened destruction, and coming down through the centuries of Christian civilization, we can witness many historical situations in which God intervened to end severe chastisements, including wars, plagues, and famines. Interestingly enough, several of these have been mentioned in various articles in the traditional Catholic media, but there are many more. Many do not know, for instance, that there are number of miraculous images, statues, etc. in various shrines of Mexico, other than Our Lady of Guadalupe, associated with such deliverance.
But there are two truths which become very clear in regard to these extraordinary acts of God.
The first truth is that such deliverance, especially in regard to plagues and famine, most often comes after much devastation. The lesson is not easily learned by man – he only seems to learn his lesson after much destruction and death.
The second, and most important truth, is that deliverance only comes through a united effort of prayer and penance offered in the spirit of the prophet Daniel: We have sinned, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly, and have revolted: and we have gone aside from thy commandments, and thy judgments.” (Dan. 9:5). We may presume that at any time during any of these historical incidents that there were many who were individually praying for deliverance from these plagues, wars, famines, etc. But such was not sufficient. One of the most startling facts about most of these incidents is that God seems to intervene only where there is the collective act of a city, nation, or the Church itself (such as at Lepanto).
As detailed in all that is examined above, the Plague (spiritual even more than physical) that threatens us now is like nothing that has ever occurred in the history of the Church. We cannot expect therefore that a return to normal Catholic life will either call down God’s extraordinary graces for an end to this crisis, or protect us from anything –whether it be the virus itself, or those powers which seek our total subjugation and destruction. As discussed extensively in our examination of the Gift of the Holy Spirit called Fear of the Lord and its corresponding Beatitude Poverty of Spirit, what has been considered “normal” in the Catholic Church for centuries deeply embodies what St. Thomas called an “impurity of mixture” with the world (especially in regard to living the Beatitudes) which will finally call down that Final Conflagration which will precede the Final Judgment. At some time in the history of the world, this “impurity of mixture” will become so profound as to create a blindness so pervasive as to make it virtually impossible for mankind to return to that self-knowledge necessary for conversion. Mankind, collectively, will be like the man in St. James’ epistle who “beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was.” We pray that we are not yet there.
We therefore ask all readers to carefully consider what we have written in our Original Proposal , and to implement what it asks. The Feast Day – the Feast of the Purification and Presentation – which is proposed for the collective act which we have titled Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church – might at first seem arbitrary. We hope that after reading our Proposal, it will seem on the contrary singularly appropriate. Most important, we implored readers to begin now to beseech their priests and bishops to implement this Rosary effort for the purification of the whole Church, beginning with ourselves. If we think about it seriously, we have no idea what will happen between now and next February 2nd.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Comments
Thanks again.
In my opinion, there was ambiguity in their apparent errors and to my knowledge no one challenged them. With Pope Puis XII, I would probably take a milder approach than Mr. Larson. It a subject I need to research more. Pope Benedict XVI never, as far as I know, never attempted to impose on the Church he personal apparent errors as Francis with Communion for adulterers did. In my opinion, Francis is obviously a manifest heretic whereas Puis and Benedict are and we're not.
God bless and the Virgin protect you!