kcstar | Are American nuns paying for the sins of a Jesuit priest who died in the 1950s?
It
might seem that way, given the ongoing showdown between doctrinal
hard-liners in the Vatican and leaders representing more than 40,000
U.S. sisters, with one of Rome’s chief complaints being the nuns’
continuing embrace of the notion of “conscious evolution.”
To many
ears, “conscious evolution” probably sounds like a squishy catchphrase
picked up after too much time in a New Age sweat lodge, and that’s
pretty much how Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, leader of the Vatican’s
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, views it.
The German theologian bluntly told the Leadership Conference
of Women Religious last month that the principles of “conscious
evolution” — that mankind is transforming through the integration of
science, spirituality and technology — are “opposed to Christian
Revelation” and lead to “fundamental errors.”
That’s tough talk, and Mueller warned them that if the nuns persist in pursuing such dangerous ideas, Rome could cut them loose.
Yet
those principles, and indeed the very term “conscious evolution,” also
lead directly back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French
Jesuit who was by turns a philosopher and theologian, geologist and
paleontologist.
It was Teilhard’s thinking about original sin and
humanity’s future evolution that got him in trouble with church
authorities, however.
Teilhard argued, for example, that creation
is still evolving and that mankind is changing with it; we are, he said,
advancing in an interactive “noosphere” of human thought through an
evolutionary process that leads inexorably toward an Omega Point — Jesus
Christ — that is pulling all the cosmos to itself.
“Everything
that rises must converge,” as Teilhard put it, a phrase so evocative
that Flannery O’Connor appropriated it for her story collection. This
process of “complexification” — another of his signature terms — and
Catholic theology could aid in that process if it, too, adapts.
