Fr. Teilhard Pierre de Chardin::
Re-Reading” the Faith to accommodate Alien Belief
Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's book "Only Man Bears his Image" with permission
Fr. Teilhard Pierre de Chardin: the “Synthesis of All Heresies” Supplies the ET-Theology Premises
“[Teilhard de Chardin’s writings] are a cesspool of errors, the synthesis of all heresies.” —Pope Pius XII [258]
Unlike Karl Rahner, Teilhard Pierre de Chardin did not merely dissent on a number of Catholic teachings; he sought to completely rob Christianity of its essence and replace it with a “better” religion. He declared:
What increasingly dominates my interests, is the effort to establish within myself and define around me, a new religion (call it a better Christianity, if you like) where the personal God ceases to be the great monolithic proprietor of the past to become the Soul of the World which the stage we have reached religiously and culturally calls for.[259]
De Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, theologian, and scientist who became extremely popular in the early 20th century for his Darwinism-inspired theology. Many of his teachings were condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1962; unfortunately, this did little to mitigate his influence, and a major effort is now afoot in the Church to formally rehabilitate his heretical legacy.
In 2017, a cardinal formally requested that Pope Francis lift the restrictions placed upon his writings after the members of the Pontifical Council for Culture voted unanimously to approve a similar request. More troubling still, this same movement urges—with a growing petition behind it—that de Chardin be named a Doctor of the Church due to his “prophetic vision.”
If de Chardin was a prophet he was this type of prophet, wearing the guise of science.
... the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God...We trust the first pagan prophet we see who speaks to us in some newspaper, and we run behind him and ask him if he has the formula for true life... [doubt has] entered through the windows that should have been open to the light: science.” —Pope St. Paul VI. June 29, 1972
Advocates of de Chardin's rehabilitation argue that,
“The time is ripe to introduce Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to a new generation—the man...whose relentless effort to reframe his beliefs in the light of evolution led to a paradigm shift in the relationship of science and religion.”[260]
While de Chardin sought to “reframe” (read: demolish) Christianity in light of evolution, Catholic ET promoters seek to similarly “reframe” the Faith in light of extraterrestrials, using de Chardin’s principles as a guide. Scholars dedicated to examining the relationship between religions and extraterrestrials have not missed the relevance of this Jesuit.
The astrophysicist, Professor David Weintraub, even wrote a book dedicated to the topic, and in examining Catholicism’s relationship to aliens, he focuses on the teachings of Fr. Teilhard.
Dr. Weintraub made a fatal mistake in supposing the de Chardin’s musings represented Catholicism’s actual teachings (in dismissing the CDF’s still-in-force condemnation, Weintraub quotes another Jesuit, Fr. Federico Lombardi, who—absurdly—claimed in 2009 that, “By now, no one would dream of saying that Teilhard is a heterodox author...”)
But he was not mistaken in estimating the enormous influence this priest had on the question of ETs and Catholicism. Professor Weintraub explains Fr. Teilhard’s take:
In the first half of the 20th century, Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested that original sin didn’t arise from the errors of two humans on Earth, but instead permeates the entire universe. He also suggested that Christ on Earth offers no redemptive value for any other beings anywhere else in the cosmos, and so aliens visiting Earth would not benefit from embracing Christianity. But Teilhard believed that Christ could become incarnate on different worlds, in forms appropriate for those places and beings. These other saviors could establish Christian-like local belief systems that provide opportunities for the redemption and salvation of those alien populations.[261]
As we can see, Fr. de Chardin manages to get every possible detail wrong on this question. In fact, it is a dogma that Original Sin did indeed arise from Adam and Eve — not before, and not in some other manner. And the value of Christ’s Redemption is infinite (if we for a moment pretend that aliens did exist and did come to earth, then we would have to evangelize them).
Finally, the notion of multiple Incarnations of God (as we saw in Part One) is blasphemous and fallacious in every respect. A party-line Darwinist, however, de Chardin obediently rejected anything that smacked of “anthropocentrism,” [humans are the most important creature] which he denounces as “geocentrism.” Accordingly, Fr. Teilhard declared:
The idea of an earth chosen arbitrarily from countless others as the focus of Redemption...is one that I cannot accept...There were worlds before our own, and there will be worlds after it. ... Christ has still to be incarnate in some as yet unformed star ... [but] there are times when one almost despairs of being able to disentangle Catholic dogmas from the geocentrism in the framework of which they were born...[262]
De Chardin’s Antichristic teachings, therefore, are not only a rotten fruit of belief in extraterrestrial intelligence but also a rotten branch of that tree—perhaps even constituting an entire limb—for from it, innumerable other rotten fruits have emerged.
Among de Chardin’s theses was his teaching that so-called “conscious evolution” would inevitably lead to an “Omega Point” (referred to by others as “The Singularity”) and a “Planetary Superorganism.” This is New Age esotericism, the false religion of scientism, and a re-branding of ancient Gnosticism.
In 2014, the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller rightly denounced these teaching in the strongest possible terms:
The fundamental theses of Conscious Evolution are opposed to Christian Revelation and, when taken unreflectively, lead almost necessarily to fundamental errors regarding the omnipotence of God, the Incarnation of Christ, the reality of Original Sin, the necessity of salvation and the definitive nature of the salvific action of Christ in the Paschal Mystery ... acceptance of things such as Conscious Evolution seemingly without any awareness that it offers a vision of God, the cosmos, and the human person divergent from or opposed to Revelation evidences that a de facto movement beyond the Church and sound Christian faith has already occurred ... the futuristic ideas advanced by the proponents of Conscious Evolution are not actually new. The Gnostic tradition is filled with similar affirmations and we have seen again and again in the history of the Church the tragic results of partaking of this bitter fruit. [263]
Of particular importance is the Cardinal’s insight that when one adopts such views as “Conscious Evolution” (and similar ones inextricable from ET belief), he has de facto apostatized from Christianity. The exceeding danger is found in that this real (de facto) apostasy is nevertheless unnoticed, for the trappings of Christianity are maintained.
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self ... holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people.”—2 Timothy 3:1-2,5
I can imagine no clearer fulfillment of St. Paul’s prophecy here relayed in Scripture. The followers of de Chardin, giddy about the extraterrestrials whom they are sure exist and surpass us due to “Conscious Evolution,” still hold the form of religion, but have done everything they can to empty it of its power.
Perhaps the most stinging critique of the teachings of Fr. Teilhard come from the Catholic physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, Dr. Wolfgang Smith, who professed in his book, Teilhardism and the New Religion:
Show critique
Teilhard is not after all the champion of a besieged Christianity, but the founder of a new religion ... to supplant the old ... the new cult is not anything like the Christianity of bygone days. It is so radically different, in fact, that Teilhard refers to it at one point as “a hitherto unknown form of religion—one that no one could as yet have imagined or described, for lack of a universe large enough or organic enough to contain it.” ... the true founder of the new cult is not Yahweh or Christ, but Charles Darwin. One cannot but wonder whether the French Jesuit was playing square with us when he declared that “This is still, of course, Christianity.”...The trend [today] is unmistakable: Christianity ... has begun to turn in the direction mapped out by Teilhard de Chardin. ...
Teilhard tells us: “... grace represents a physical supercreation. It raises us a further rung on the ladder of cosmic evolution. In other words, the stuff of which grace is made is strictly biological.” ... [this] affirms very much the opposite of what Christians had always believed: for it belongs to the very essence of grace to be, not a natural attainment, but a supernatural gift.
What Teilhard has actually done under the pretext of interpreting the term is to deny that such a thing as grace exists. His “grace” is actually a non-grace...It is literally true that Teilhard has deified evolution. ...not until Teilhard stepped upon the stage did Evolution find its full-blown prophet. ... At Teilhard’s hands the Darwinist theory has been transformed into a full-fledged religion...One sees that even the Pater Noster has become reversed: henceforth it is no longer “Thy will,” but ours, that is to be done. ... [this] newly-hatched anti-creed has come to be accepted by millions as the true Christianity. In the eyes of the “liberated” it is indeed perceived as the ultra-Christianity which Teilhard declared it to be... His central complaint, to be sure, is that (traditional) Christianity is not “scientific,” ... It is therefore “staticist” and needs to be revised ...
At this point, it should not be surprising to hear that de Chardin’s teachings are so severely opposed to the very core of Christian Faith that, if and when they are succumbed to, they truly do open up a portal to demonic entry.
Fr. Malachi Martin, in his book, Hostage to the Devil, even extensively recounted the (true) story of a certain Rome-educated priest, theologian, and exorcist who himself—due to his belief in Fr. Teilhard’s teachings—became demonically possessed.
Now, perhaps relatively few will find that to be their own fate. But ultimately, that matters little. The Devil is not especially interested in possessing people; he is interested in seducing them into hell. And that is usually much more effectively achieved through diabolical deceptions that stop well short of full-blown possession. Although Darwinism specifically, and the religion of scientism more broadly, is de Chardin’s central theme, what he proposes nevertheless conveys (almost verbatim) the ET promoters’ insistence that we “re-read” Christianity in light of aliens.
Whoever doubts this influence need only defer to the writings of the ET promoters themselves.
Dr. Robert John Russell—a prominent Christian theologian and physicist who promotes belief in extraterrestrials—wrote:
Suppose ET is not that different from us after all ...Will God provide a pathway of healing, a means of “saving grace” for ET as God has done for us on Earth? This is, of course, the horizon-breaking image of the “cosmic Christ,” as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called it. ... I’m willing to go out on a limb and make what I consider to be a genuinely empirical theological prediction. ... I predict that when we finally make contact with intelligent life in the universe ... it will be a lot like us...I predict that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will “hold a mirror up” to us ...We may come, then, to a point where we at last feel truly at home in the cosmos. What a wondrous event that would be![264]
“When” we contact the extraterrestrials, Dr. Russel says, we will essentially have a mirror held up to ourselves, and we will experience the workings of the “cosmic Christ” in their lives, which will enable us to “at last feel truly at home in the cosmos.” As we can see, it is not only the worldly who anticipate glorious revelations from contacting aliens, but also the Christian theologians—formed by the teachings of de Chardin. Here as everywhere we look in ET promotion, we see the scene being set for a Great Deception the likes of which the world has never experienced.
Dr. Paul Thigpen is perhaps the most prominent of the Catholic ET promoters today. In his 2022 book arguing for belief in extraterrestrials, he acknowledges that de Chardin is “highly controversial,” before moving on to appear to endorse Fr. Teilhard’s teachings, or at least concede their importance in generating modern ET belief. He presents these heresies without any refutation, noting that:
[de Chardin’s] speculations about extraterrestrial intelligence are not surprising ... Teilhard redefined original sin as “the essential reaction of the finite to the creative act” ... If sin understood in this way is a universal attribute of the entire creation, Teilhard argued, God must offer redemption to all creatures as well. But humanity could not be the sole center of redemption, ... Teilhard proposed the activity of a third, “cosmic,” nature of Christ, a nature in addition to the divine and the human natures identified in Catholic dogma.[265]
Joel Parkyn is a theology professor at a Catholic seminary who also published a 2021 book arguing for belief in aliens, therein praising Fr. Teilhard’s teachings for lacking “rigidity” and moving beyond a “pre-scientific” outlook, before expounding upon the latter’s insistence upon multiple incarnations in support of ETs:
Roman Catholic and Anglican theologians ...who have speculated on the Christological implications of intelligent extraterrestrials in the twentieth and twenty-first century occupy the inclusive axis, such as Milne, Teilhard de Chardin, and Consolmagno, each having abandoned the rigidity of the pre-scientific classical solution offered by the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas...[266]
Lutheran theologian Ted Peters, who wrote a popular 2018 book arguing for extraterrestrials, also invoked Fr. Teilhard. The director of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Br. Guy Consolmagno, is another ET believer (though he does not think aliens are already on earth) who published a popular 2014 book entitled Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?, along with Fr. Paul Mueller. The latter repeatedly had recourse to Fr. Teilhard in his dialogues with Br. Guy; “clarifying” that he found a couple of things problematic in de Chardin’s thesis, but that Fr. Teilhard nevertheless got it “almost right.” (Recall that, in fact, Fr. Teilhard’s teachings are—as Venerable Pope XII said—a “synthesis of all heresies.” To claim de Chardin “got it almost right” is little better than a full-blown embrace of apostasy.)
Theologian and ET belief promoter, Dr. David Wilkinson, also draws from de Chardin in his 2013 book, Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, writing:
One of the most imaginative thinkers in the Catholic engagement of science and religion was of course Teilhard de Chardin... he saw evolution happening in religious and cultural terms drawn forward by a future Omega Point... his view of cosmic redemption wanted to see the work of God on a much larger scale... Although we are focusing on deception in the Church in the present chapter, it is worth nothing that secular ET promoters are even more open in admitting how essential Fr. Teilhard’s heresies have been in forming contemporary Ufology. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials explains:
“In the evolution of the human mind simple consciousness was first produced; then self-consciousness; and lastly...Cosmic Consciousness.” This theoretical model of human awareness emphasizes those changes in human consciousness that occur as a result of UFO encounters, and the personal and social transformations that develop around the meaning and significance of UFO experiences. ... This model is based on the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Julian Huxley, and the emerging theories of a holigraphic universe.[267]
The teachings of Fr. Teilhard Pierre de Chardin are the anti-Midas—everything they touch only rots. And they have touched almost all of the teachings of those who, in the Church today, promote belief in extraterrestrials.