by
Damien F. Mackey
“The whole world is ascending towards Christ the
King, even the irresistible surge of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon
and sun . . . His [Teilhard de Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain
heaven through the fulfillment of earth. Christify matter”.
Fulton J. Sheen
For some of my highly unfavourable views concerning
père Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955), see e.g. my articles:
Teilhard de
Charlatan
Teilhard de
Chardin a “giant gnostic snake”
(5) Teilhard de
Chardin a "giant gnostic snake"
Teilhard de
Chardin’s genocidal eugenics ideas
(5) Teilhard de
Chardin's genocidal eugenics ideas
Reading Teilhard
de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens
(5) Reading
Teilhard de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens
Now, I was aware that Archbishop Fulton
Sheen, about to be beatified (today, in fact, 24th September, 2026) –
and whom I have greatly admired for many years – had flirted with
Teilhardianism.
Here the Kolbe Center recalls just how
serious that regrettable situation was (September 19, 2026): Archbishop Sheen and the
Teilhardian Deception – Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Pax Christi!
Our Lord Jesus Christ warned that toward the end of
the world, many false prophets would arise and seduce many:
And
then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate
one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. And
because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. But he
that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. And this gospel of the
kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations,
and then shall the consummation come (Matthew 24:10-14).
This Thursday, September 24, Venerable Archbishop
Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis,
Missouri. Archbishop Sheen is rightly revered for the many contributions he
made to the life of the Church, most especially through his promotion of daily
Eucharistic Holy Hours for priests through retreats that he gave all over the
world. For the honor and glory of God, however, we believe we are obliged to
use this newsletter to show how even a man as gifted and devout as Venerable
Archbishop Sheen was deceived by the arch-deceiver Satan through his chosen
instrument, the anti-theologian Fr. Teilhard de Chardin—may God have mercy on
him! We trust that the Venerable Archbishop would be the first to want us to
bring his deception to light, as a warning to all of us to be on our guard
against the seductive errors of theistic evolution.
The Young Fr. Fulton Sheen Rejects Theistic Evolution
Archbishop Sheen’s eventual embrace of Teilhardian
errors is all the more astonishing in view of his earlier writings in which he
thoroughly rejected them. As a young theologian, he wrote an extensive review
of modern philosophy which had seen “the birth of a new notion of God”:
It is
God in evolution . . . God is born by successive creations. As the world
progresses, He progresses; as the world acquires perfection, He acquires
perfection. [Moreover,] man is a necessary step in the evolution of God. Just
as man came from the beast, God will come from man.
In one of his early works, Love One Another, Sheen
mocked the notion that one could derive the great commandment of Christ to
“Love one another as I have loved you” from an evolutionary struggle for
existence over millions of years:
“Man
came from the beast; therefore, he ought to love his fellowman.”
How
silly that sounds! Everyone knows that the law of the survival of the fittest
can never evolve into love, nor can the struggle for existence develop into
human brotherhood. If we come from the beasts, then we may appropriately be
expected to act like beasts.
After completing a 300-page survey of modern
philosophy, the young Fr. Sheen concluded:
The
wisdom of the ages and the epitome of our experience is given in the simple
truth understood by the simple and forgotten by many a philosopher, that we are
not “God-makers but God-made.”
Archbishop Sheen and
“Evolution’s Greatest Triumph”
Archbishop Sheen’s “conversion” to theistic
evolutionism must be understood as part of what the German anatomist and
Darwinian apologist Ernst Haeckel called “evolution’s greatest triumph,” the
conversion of the Catholic intellectual elite to the conviction that they had
to reconcile the microbe-to-man evolutionary hypothesis with the Catholic
Faith—in spite of the clear condemnation of the thesis that “evolution can be
reconciled with Christian doctrine” by the Congregation of the Index in 1878,
the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission upholding the special
creation of Adam and Eve and the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-3, and
the condemnation by Pope St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane in
1907 of the proposition that the condemnations of the Congregation of the Index
could be taken lightly.
Darwin had argued that similarities in structure among
diverse life forms proved that they had all evolved from a common ancestor.
According to Haeckel, the existence of similarities in embryos of various kinds
of organisms proved that the higher life forms “recapitulated” their
evolutionary history before birth and that they had all descended from a common
ancestor. To make this “proof” more compelling for his contemporaries, Haeckel
doctored drawings of the embryos of fish, salamanders, chickens, turtles,
rabbits, pigs, and human beings to exaggerate their similarities and minimize
their differences. Although Haeckel’s fraud was discovered and exposed during
his lifetime, the evolutionary hypothesis demanded common descent, and the
concept of embryonic recapitulation continued to exert a profound influence on
the study of embryology for many decades. In the United States, the renowned
scholar Fr. John Augustine Zahm at Notre Dame University, devoted more pages of
his influential book Evolution and Dogma to “embryonic
recapitulation” than to any other “proof” for Darwin’s hypothesis.
When, on the centenary of the publication of Origin
of Species in 1959, the world’s leading evolutionist scientist Sir
Julian Huxley pontificated that “embryology” as displayed in Ernst Haeckel’s
drawings provided “the most striking proof of evolution,” his
evolution-believing colleagues had enjoyed control of almost all of the
universities and research centers in the Western world for more than half a
century. Yet “embryonic recapitulation” was, by his own admission, the best
proof that they could come up with.
In 1950, Pope Pius XII in Humani generis had
exhorted Catholic experts to “examine” the evidence for and against the
evolutionary hypothesis, but it was apparent that hardly any Catholic scholars
subjected Huxley’s pontifications to rigorous examination. For example, in
Germany pro-abortion activists:
skillfully
exploited the disunity of the German Catholic intellectuals to bring their
demands for the legalization of abortion to the legislature. … Karl Rahner, who
was in the forefront of the fight over [the loosening of] paragraph 218, wrote
in Naturwissenschaft und Theologie (brochure 11, page 86,
1970):
“I
think that there are biological developments which are pre-human,
but these developments are still aimed in the direction of man. Why cannot
these developments be transferred from phylogeny to ontogeny?” (emphasis added)
With these words, the most influential Catholic
theologian in the German-speaking world formulated an Haeckelian evolutionary
rationale for abortifacient contraception and abortion by affirming that human
beings passed through all the stages of evolution in their mothers’ wombs. To
this day, biology textbooks all over the world argue that similarities between
embryos of fish, amphibians, reptiles, humans and lower mammals constitute
evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. Typical of examples too many to cite
is the caption that accompanies drawings of embryos of various life-forms from
a widely used American biology textbook published in 2002. Entitled “Embryonic
development of vertebrates,” it states:
Notice
that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking
resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different
classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start
out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether
these characteristics are retained in the adult.
The statement gives the impression that human
embryos—as members of the vertebrate phylum—possess gill slits. But this is
patently false. The pharyngeal arches in human embryos have no connection with
gill slits whatsoever but develop into the outer and middle ear, and into the
neck bones, muscles, nerves, and glands. Moreover, after the discovery of DNA,
confidence in the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis led many evolutionary
biologists to predict that similar body parts in diverse organisms would be controlled
by the same genes. This, however, proved to be false, as embryologists have
discovered that the realization of the same body plan—such as five digit
extremities—in diverse organisms (such as whales and humans) is controlled by
different genes and is achieved through totally different embryonic pathways.
In spite of the fact that the myth of “embryonic recapitulation” had no
scientific basis, however, it would appear that Archbishop Sheen was as badly
deceived as Fr. Rahner—because we find him eight years after Humani
generis rhapsodizing confidently about Teilhard’s writings on the
evolution of life from non-life:
For
Teilhard there is a continuity between an animal seeking food and a magnet
pointing to the north; between a male and a female uniting in the act of
generation and two atoms uniting to form a chemical compound. The meaning is
not the same in each instance, but there is more than a mere figure of speech
in this unification. Atoms are not alive, it is true, but they have what might
be called pre-life.
The Deadly Deception of Archbishop Sheen
Without knowing all the inner workings of Archbishop
Sheen’s mind, it is easy to see that his conviction that molecules-to-man
evolution was no longer an absurdity but a “fact of science” must have had
terrible consequences. His apparent belief that the Church’s traditional
doctrine of creation could be replaced by theistic evolution in light of the
new “science” of evolution certainly helps to explain his enthusiasm for the
ideas of John Courtney Murray at the Second Vatican Council and for the replacement
of the traditional vision of a Church-centered Catholic society with the ideal
of religious liberty as practiced in the United States.
In reality, it is no more possible to “evolve” the
ideal of American-style religious liberty with its separation of
Church and state from the traditional ideal of the Catholic union of
Church and state than it would be to evolve the life of a one-celled organism
from the “pre-life” of atomic particles.
Writing in 1967, Sheen echoed and
embraced the Teilhardian vision of matter evolving to the Omega Point. He
wrote:
The
whole world is ascending towards Christ the King, even the irresistible surge
of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon and sun . . . His [Teilhard de
Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain heaven through the fulfillment
of earth. Christify matter.
An elderly priest friend of mine whose life overlapped
with Teilhard’s commented on Fr. Teilhard’s reputation for kindness, and it is
true that a belief in the Christification of matter might motivate a person to
show kindness to all people and to all things because of the divine element
within all of them. But this is a false kindness if it fails to acknowledge the
divinely-created hierarchy of goods in the universe—the transcendence of God;
the creation of man in God’s image and likeness; man’s dominion over creation;
the infinite superiority of supernatural goods to natural ones; and the moral
imperative to do good and avoid evil.
In Teilhard’s system, as revealed in his pivotal
spiritual experience as a young man, when he encountered “a presence” he
described as “the combined essence of all good and all evil,” the divine energy
drives all of the activity in the universe, thus making it impossible to
distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, the good and the evil,
insofar as Teilhard’s divinity manifests through them all.
The conflation of the order of grace with the order of
nature occupied so central a place in his “new Christianity” that the kindly
Teilhard forgot his manners when Dietrich Von Hildebrand cited the writings of
the Doctor of Grace, St. Augustine, against his evolutionary doctrine. “Don’t
speak to me of that unfortunate man,” he protested violently. He “spoiled
everything by introducing the supernatural.” True to their master, the
Teilhardians of today find the “divine element” even in pagan religions and in
immoral sexual behavior which objectively separates souls from communion with
the living God. Yet Archbishop Sheen was so convinced of the fact of
molecules-to-man evolution and of the credibility of Teilhard’s doctrine that
he predicted the eventual elevation of Fr. Teilhard to the honors of a Doctor
of the Church by 2017:
It is
very likely that within 50 years when all the trivial, verbose disputes about
the meaning of Teilhard’s ‘unfortunate’ vocabulary will have died away or have
taken a secondary place, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St.
Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century.
….
