Prophets are often resisted, or perhaps usually resisted, because they urge the People of God, the Church, to change. This applies to the great Teilhard de Chardin SJ who, after a lifetime of being silenced by the Church- he died in 1955- still awaits full recognition, acceptance and the promotion of his new vision of Christ for today’s world. His writing was never banned when it was published after his death by friends, but the Vatican placed a monitum over them, meaning, to be read with caution. This monitum has yet to be lifted.
The fact that St. John Henry Newman was declared a Doctor of the Church on 1st November 2025 gives me hope for Teilhard, because one of Newman’s important convictions was that doctrines can develop and take on a new form, without betraying the past, but in creative fidelity to it. Such flexibility is much needed if the Church is to offer a more meaningful version of its central dogmas for people today, and such a version is just what Teilhard offered to the Church.
Christology, the understanding of Christ, takes on a whole, exhilarating breadth and depth in the hands of Teilhard, as he gives Christ his cosmic robes, for the first time since St Paul and St John. “His purpose he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph 1, 9-10) Through a lifetime of prayerful reflection, in tandem with his work as a renowned paleontologist, Teilhard drew the worldviews of faith and science together in a unique vision.
When we see the whole of reality as a single great story of evolution, from a star to a flower, as science has now revealed, we must ask what Christ’s role is in this new super-story. To ignore this question, as the official teaching of the Church still continues to do, is to leave the faith in a bubble of its own, dangerously unconnected to reality as we now know it.
Strongly aware of the dangers of this situation, Teilhard’s great missionary heart reset the classical mysteries of Christ in a way that gives new hope for the Church in the face of modern unbelief or indifference. Evolution, if it does not contradict itself, can only eventually reach an Omega point,- God, for Christians- and Christ is the leader who gathers into his great heart the whole evolutionary process, to guide it to its fulfillment. Love is the great evolutionary energy that seeks to transform our world into the Kin-dom of God.
For a fuller explanation of Teilhard’s wonderful vision, see my article The Cosmic Christ, at this website: @teilharddechardinforall.com
Seeing whole 
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