Like Arianism, bad ideas sometimes have a blossoming, like an outbreak of the flu. It has not yet run its course but appears to still be in full bloom. Modernism has become the view of the world and it eats away at the whole of Christianity in a way that, if it is not finally eradicated and a vaccine is not forthcoming, would, if it were to continue, destroy even the Gospels; no Original Sin and thus no need for Christ to become incarnate as man and offer Himself as the Lamb of God Sacrifice for the sins of mankind. To believe that we are all ‘becoming’, in an evolutionary sense, leads man to believe in ourselves rather than the efficacy of the Son of God for our salvation.

Though this was written primarily for Catholics, it has profound implications for all of Christendom. If you all remember, this was a subject that was so fraught with ideologues that it created the schism of contributors and authors here at AATW some time ago. But it is still a subject that will not go away and needs to be kept in mind if we are to ever find a cure for this plague of Modernism that has swept across the Western World.  After all, it has all but driven Christianity underground and transformed it into arm of politics that is all about ‘becoming’ (in an evolutionary senes) and has a euphoric, cosmic element that is the stuff of a modern model for a new 21st century utopian paradise. It is pure novelty at best.

There was nothing Catholic about Teilhard and one can argue that there was nothing Christian in his theology either. __ Scoop

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This Appeared at 1Peter5. Please read and discuss (if you find it interesting).

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Teilhard de Chardin: Model of Ambiguity for a Future Pope

 Peter Kwasniewski January 16, 2019

To a degree not yet as widely recognized as it should be, Pope Francis – Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. – is showing himself to be an admirable disciple of his Jesuit forerunner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955), the Piltdown paleontologist and “Omega Point” mystagogue, who exercised an enormous influence on the young Jesuit Turks of the twentieth century. Gerard M. Verschuuren, in his new book The Myth of an Anti-Science Church: Galileo, Darwin, Teilhard, Hawking, Dawkins – just released by Angelico Press, and worth reading for many reasons, but above all, because of the superbly written chapter on this controversial figure – tells us:

His greatest stature was reached when he became almost an oracle and icon to many of what a twentieth-century Jesuit should be. Teilhard had become their role model. In spite of ecclesiastical admonitions regarding Teilhard-the-Ideologue, his ideas kept spreading in the Society of Jesus. Not only has his way of thinking infiltrated – or infected, according to some – the thinking of Jesuits, but it would also become a major element of thinking in other Catholic groups. Many Jesuits and other theologians have adopted Teilhard’s evolutionary approach[.] (118)

I will assume, for the purposes of this article, that the reader has a basic sense of who Teilhard was: a scientist who contributed to a number of interesting (if not always above board) scientific enterprises and a writer of ponderous poetico-theologico-scientific tomes such as The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu that were roundly mocked by scientists and, on account of their palpable pantheism, landed him in deep trouble with his then conservatively-headed Jesuit order as well as with the Holy Office of the Inquisition (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).

In what follows, I am more interested in pointing out the striking parallels that emerge between him and his confrere, Bergoglio.

Verschuuren assembles an impressive series of quotations from across Teilhard’s whole career to show that he was, indeed, a card-carrying Modernist who perfectly fit the definition given by St. Pius X. First, let us consider how Modernism operates, according to Verschuuren (emphasis added):

What Modernism basically does is to harness religious belief and practice to the cultural modes and whims of civilization in any given era by asserting that there is no permanent datum of faith, no dogma, and no fixed belief in Catholicism. This means that, due to new developments in society and science, the Church can deny in one age what she had affirmed in a previous age as essential dogma. Modernism is the preservation of the formulae of doctrine emptied of their meaning, in order to adapt the Faith of the Church to the alleged requirements of modern society.

Not surprisingly, in the eyes of the Church, Modernism and Catholicism cannot possibly live in the same religious house. Catholicism acknowledges that what was true in Church doctrine yesterday cannot be false today, and what was immoral yesterday cannot be moral today. Modernists, in contrast, seem to have lost faith in their Faith and its orthodoxy; Charles Péguy called them people who no longer believe what they believe. Therefore, Modernism has been condemned by the Church on several occasions for trying to transform Catholicism from the inside. [i]

How strikingly the emphasized sentences describe the party in command of the Catholic Church today!

For his part, Teilhard de Chardin manifested both sides of the Modernist. On the one hand, he wanted to “aggiornamentize” or update Christian doctrine until, ceasing to be what it had been historically, it essentially turned into modern thought. His preferred medium for the transition was evolutionary scientism. He believed not only that the evolution of species had already been adequately demonstrated, but also that evolution is the paradigm for grasping the whole of reality, including its spiritual aspects. He argued that matter evolves into spirit and that spirit will evolve into the cosmic Christ. The general framework is a Hegelian progressivism in which, in spite of momentary setbacks and conflicts, the whole universe, with mankind at its crest, is gradually improving, rising, and achieving spiritualization.

As a result, Teilhard rejected the doctrine of the creation and fall of Adam and Eve and, more pointedly for the Holy Office, the doctrine of original sin, which he called “an absurdity.” For Teilhard, the first men (there were many of them) were prehistoric primates of weak intelligence, and the “fall” simply describes the alienation from God of insufficiently spiritualized beings. Thus, there is no place whatsoever for the doctrine of a sin attaching to human nature by way of natural generation from Adam – in spite of the fact that this was taught as a de fide dogma by the Council of Trent.

Teilhard’s views on polygenism and original sin were among those condemned in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950. Yet Teilhard’s reaction, while apparently submissive in the public forum, was fiercely contemptuous in private. He characterized Humani Generis in the following words: “A good psychoanalyst would see in it the clear traces of a specific religious perversion – the masochism and sadism of orthodoxy; the pleasure of swallowing, and making others swallow, the truth under its crudest and stupidest forms” [ii].

On the other hand – and this is a crucial point for understanding the general ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today – Teilhard, like many Modernists before and after him, refused to leave the Catholic Church, no matter how “badly” he felt he was treated by it. For him, the goal was to ride out the waves as long as possible, to influence and infiltrate, to make disciples, plant seeds, and publish (or, in his case, arrange for posthumous publications, since for the final period of his life, he was under strictures). He really believed he had the mission of changing the Church from within. Although he no longer professed the Catholic Faith – he once said to Dietrich von Hildebrand that St. Augustine “had spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural” (!) – the idea of being an ex-Catholic, sitting on the outside of the institution, held no appeal for him. It was as if he thought that only the Catholic Church provided the infrastructure necessary for the transmission of a synthetic, worldwide philosophy.

Thus, in a letter dated January 26, 1936, he wrote:

What increasingly dominates my interest is the effort to establish within myself, and to diffuse around me, a new religion (let’s call it an improved Christianity if you like) whose personal God is no longer the great Neolithic landowner of times gone by, but the Soul of the world … as demanded by the cultural and religious stage we have now reached.

In another letter about five years later, on March 21, 1941, he declared: “According to my own principles, I cannot fight against Christianity; I can only work inside it by trying to transform and convert it.” In response to a defrocked priest whom he refers to as “Fr. G.,” Teilhard wrote on October 4, 1950:

Basically I consider – as you do – that the Church (like any living reality after a certain time) reaches a period of “mutation” or “necessary reformation” after two thousand years; it is unavoidable. Mankind is undergoing a mutation, how could Catholicism not do the same?

His evolutionist-pantheistic-animistic point of view prompted him to admit: “I find I can’t but realize again (and even more profoundly) the size of the abyss which separates my religious vision of the World and the vision in the Exercises of Ignatius.” A Jesuit who can no longer embrace the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is not only not a Jesuit in reality; he is not even a Catholic. We are, accordingly, hardly surprised to read these words from 1934: “If by consequence of some internal upheaval, I came to lose successively my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, it seems to me that I should continue to believe in the World.”

Teilhard de Chardin was a lifelong believer in Marxism. With typical flair, he announced in a letter of August 14, 1952: “The Christian God on high and the Marxist God of Progress are reconciled in Christ. … As I love to say, the synthesis of the Christian God (of the above) and the Marxist God (of the forward) – Behold! that is the only God whom henceforth we can adore in spirit and in truth.” No wonder, as Verschuuren notes, “Teilhard is the only Roman Catholic author whose works were put on public display with those of Marx and Lenin in Moscow’s Hall of Atheism.”

In a homage to Teilhard that should send chills down our spines for its modern applicability, his disciple Henri Rambaud proclaimed:

[Teilhard] was perfectly sincere in calling himself a Christian and even a Roman Catholic since, in his own eyes, the only disagreement between himself and the Church arose from the fact that he was already thinking then what the Church did not yet know she would be thinking shortly. … [I]nstead of being in agreement with the Church of today, he is in agreement with the Church of tomorrow.

Read the rest of it here: https://onepeterfive.com/teilhard-chardin-ambiguity-pope/