From silence to vindication: Teilhard de Chardin & the Holy Office.

In 1924, a relatively unknown Jesuit scientist was summoned by his religious superior to a meeting in Lyon, France. The priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, had earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne two years before and was teaching at Paris's Institute Catholique. The Lyon meeting was the start of difficulties with ecclesiastical authorities that would end only with his death in 1955.

The 1924 Lyon meeting was precipitated by a paper written two years earlier at the request of a friend. It treated tentative approaches to a new understanding of original sin. Mysteriously, the essay had found its way to Rome, some say through a student anxious to prove his own orthodoxy to church authorities. The Holy Office initially asked Teilhard to promise in writing that he would "never say anything against the traditional position of the church on original sin." Teilhard thought the demand too vague, believing that he had the right to explore the meaning of church doctrine in light of modern science. So he suggested an alternative: he would not disseminate or argue for the ideas in the disputed paper. Rome would have none of it, and on the advice of friends, Teilhard reluctantly signed the Roman document.

Teilhard's initial reaction to the ban was one of seeming total faith: "At heart I am at perfect peace," he said. Yet the following year he wrote a friend: "What I feel inside is something like a death agony or a storm." He even considered the suggestion, made by professional colleagues, that he leave the Jesuits and the church to work more freely as a scientist, but he rejected this course: "People would think that I am straying from the church ... I must show by my example that if my ideas appear in the light of an innovation, they make me as faithful as anyone else to the attitude in which I was formerly seen. ... But even now, the shadows fall."

The shadows continued to fall for the rest of Teilhard's life, causing him great personal suffering and conflicts of conscience. He was compelled to give up teaching at the Institute Catholique, and, confined to scientific research, he kept his theological speculation private: "Nothing spiritual or divine can come to a Christian or to one who has taken religious vows, except through the church or his order. ... I believe in the church as the mediator between God and the world and I love it. ... But I don't yet see the reforms which are desirable."

At his own request, Teilhard was sent to China in 1926, putting geographical and psychological distance between himself and the scene of the crisis. For the next four years, he experienced the depths of a struggle between faith in the church and a persistent temptation to abandon both church and priesthood: "In a way, I no longer have confidence in the exterior manifestations of the church. I believe that through it the divine influence will continue to reach me, but I no longer have much belief in the immediate and tangible value of official directions and decisions. Some people feel happy in the visible church; but for my own part I think I shall be happy to die in order to be free of it--and to find our Lord outside of it."

During this period, Teilhard wrote what would later become perhaps his most popular book, The Divine Milieu. While waiting for permission to publish it, he circulated the manuscript privately and employed a pseudonym to publish articles in professional journals. Because of church restrictions, his more visionary writings never received the benefit of public scrutiny by his peers, a fact that may explain some of the lifelong misunderstandings he encountered with church authorities.

In early 1929, Teilhard learned that the Jesuit censors at Louvain had finally approved The Divine Milieu, and that it would soon be printed. But by that December there was still no official word. Meanwhile, diocesan censors in Belgium had kept another article from publication and Teilhard's frustration overflowed in a letter to a friend: "This tenacious and persistent obstructionism is infinitely wearing." The church will "waste away," Teilhard warned, if it does not escape the rarified world of academic theology and devotionalism, and reincarnate itself "in the real aspirations of mankind."

Keenly aware of the paradoxes of his situation, Teilhard nevertheless strove to abide by his vow of obedience. He would not publish without an imprimatur, and while he argued his case as strongly as possible, he never did so publicly. Abbe Paul Grent, a close friend, described Teilhard as "an obedient but stubborn son of the church." Another Jesuit colleague, Pere d'Quince, said that Teilhard's religious superiors could always count on his obedience and docility, but that "he never left them in any doubt of whatever he thought unduly rigorous in their decisions, and right up to the end ... he asked for a revision of a policy of prudence which seemed contrary both to his own interior vocation and to the interests of the church."

In 1932, Teilhard returned to France and Jesuit communal life. While he acknowledged that he now felt more at home in a lay milieu, he accepted his place in the ecclesiastical framework: "I keep telling myself that if I were less deeply inserted within the church, I would be less equipped for the work of setting her free."

Meanwhile, an unrevised manuscript of The Divine Milieu had found its way to Rome and was under study by Vatican theologians. His hopes for imminent publication were dashed, and The Divine Milieu was eventually published in 1957--two years after his death--and still lacking an imprimatur.

During the winter of 1934, complaints about Teilhard continued to find their way to Rome. He toyed with the idea of going there personally, to explain his views, but his Jesuit superior in Lyon advised against it. Two years later he again considered a trip to Rome, but only if he could go "without a rope around his neck."

Following his return to France, Teilhard quickly became known as an influential thinker. Still, when he was invited to a conference in New York in 1940, Rome forbade his participation. In June 1941, he completed a revision demanded by Rome of The Phenomenon of Man, but three years later was informed the Roman censors found it unacceptable and forbade its publication. In 1946, he was criticized in L'Osservatore Romano by the influential French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, a high-ranking member of the Holy Office. When confronted with charges that Teilhard was a pantheistic heretic, however, the papal nuncio in Paris at the time, Angelo Roncalli, pushed the accusations aside. Later, as Pope John XXIII, he would remark that "in France, ideas are born with wings. Without a touch of holy madness, the church cannot grow."

Teilhard's Jesuit superior general, John Baptist Janssens, finally invited Teilhard to Rome in 1948. Teilhard hoped to accomplish several things: he had been nominated for a professorship at the prestigious College of France and wanted permission to accept the honor; and he wanted the imprimatur for publication of The Phenomenon. But these hopes were not met during his visit, although he was won over by Janssens's "honest, direct, and human approach." While in Rome, he also had a chance encounter with Garrigou-Lagrange. "There is the man who would like to see me burnt at the stake," he told a friend at a reception. According to Teilhard, when the two were finally introduced, they smiled amicably and spoke pleasantly of Auvergne, the region of France from which they both hailed. During his Rome visit, Teilhard had hoped to meet with the pope, Pius XII, but was unable to gain an audience. Pius, however, seems to have been aware of him. After hearing of Teilhard's scientific research in China, he is reported to have remarked that although a great scientist, Teilhard was no theologian. Yet, Pius told a French politician that as long as he remained on the papal throne, Teilhard would not be condemned. And he kept his word.

Teilhard returned from Rome empty-handed, but he was determined to continue his work as best he could. He found ways to circumvent some of the limitations placed on him, and sent off a packet of pamphlets to the English Jesuit C. C. Martindale, remarking that "You will know how to make discreet use of it. The people up high are not so keen on my circulating these things, and after all, one must preserve a little obedience."

In 1950, Pius XII published the encyclical Humani generis, which some saw as an implicit rebuke of Teilhard's theory of evolution. Progressive Catholics were discouraged by the tone of the encyclical, and Teilhard tried to console them: "For an encyclical titled Humani generis [The Human Race] ... it would be difficult to present a narrower view of humanity ... 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." For himself, he planned to "continue quite simply along my own way in a direction that Rome wants and is asking for."

Teilhard judged from the reaction to the encyclical that it would be good for him to disappear for a time. He was becoming an embarrassment to church authorities. "It would be better to give Rome the impression that I am delving back into what people down there call `pure science,'" he said. Ironically, despite continued restrictions and forced exile in New York, the following year he was able to say that he felt himself "more irremediably bound to the hierarchical church, to the Christ of the gospel than I have ever been at any moment of my life."

In 1954, Teilhard was given permission for a three-month visit to France. It was to be his last. By the end of July, he received word that Rome had denied his request to publish a response to a prominent critic of the church, Jean Rostand, and he was ordered to return to New York as soon as possible. Few realized the emotional toll these experiences took on him. Following his death, a close friend revealed something of that suffering: "He bore with patience, it is true, trials that might well have proved too much for the strongest of us, but how often in intimate conversation have I found him depressed and with almost no heart to carry on. ... But calling on all the resources of his will, he abandoned himself to ... Christ as the only purpose of his being; and so hid his suffering and took up his work again, if not with joy, at least in the hope that his personal vocation might be fulfilled."

Rome's intransigence continued to plague Teilhard during his last, relatively peaceful years in New York. In 1955, he was invited to participate in a paleontological symposium sponsored by the Sorbonne, but Rome forbade it. In another intervention, Rome stopped a project instigated by Jesuit friends at Louvain to publish a selection of his articles in German. Still, negative reactions to his thought from church authorities seemed to energize him: "Resistance of this kind strengthens me," he declared, "because I am so very sure that I am saying what is really in the mind and heart of everyone."

Teilhard had prayed that he would die on Easter Sunday, and that wish was granted. He died of heart failure on Easter, April 11, 1955, and was interred in the cemetery of the Jesuit novitiate on the Hudson River, north of New York City. Less than a decade later, at Vatican II, Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne created a stir when he openly criticized the Holy Office, "whose methods and behavior do not conform at all to the modern era and are a cause of scandal to the world. No one should be judged and condemned without having been heard," said Frings to applause in Saint Peter's, "without knowing what he is accused of, and without having the opportunity to repair what he can reasonably be reproached with." Paul VI reportedly telephoned Frings to express his approval.

At the third session of Vatican II, in 1964, Archbishop Denis Hurley of South Africa spoke approvingly of Teilhard's vision as "at once religious, scientific, evolutionary, and eschatological." In even stronger terms, Bhopal's Archbishop Eugene D'Souza, responding to the misgivings voiced by some council fathers to schema 13 (which was to become the basis of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes, [The Church in the Modern World]), said: "As if the scandal of Galileo was not enough, we have since had the cases of Lamennais, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and more recently, Teilhard de Chardin. Their works, not without error, were fighting for the very things that our schema recognizes and yet their works were indiscriminately condemned." Several commentators found traces of Teilhard's positive, evolutionary view of the world in some council documents, including Gaudium et spes, which acknowledges that "the human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one."

A friend once asked Teilhard if he found any consolation in seeing the growing influence of his teachings. Teilhard replied that his work would be fulfilled only when others went beyond him. As for the intransigence of church authorities, he said he attempted to meet it with serenity--and, at times, with a sense of humor: "I am prepared to go on," he said, "and with a smile, if possible."

The Reverend Robert Nugent, a Salvatorian priest, lives in New Jersey and is engaged in pastoral ministry and Vatican II adult education.