EVENT
Teilhard's Vatican Censorship
The 1920s–1962 suppression of Teilhard's writings by Jesuit authorities and the Holy Office—forbidding publication of theological works during his lifetime, issuing warnings after his death.
Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin's most ambitious intellectual work was systematically suppressed by his own religious order and the Vatican for over four decades. Beginning in the 1920s, Jesuit superiors forbade Teilhard from publishing or teaching theology, restricting him to paleontological science and exiling him to China (1923–1946) partly to remove him from the European intellectual scene where his ideas were spreading through private circulation. His major works—
The Phenomenon of Man,
The Divine Milieu,
The Future of Man—circulated in typescript and were published only after his death in 1955. In 1962, seven years posthumously, the Holy Office (precursor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) issued a
monitum warning Catholics that Teilhard's works "abound in ambiguities and grave errors" regarding original sin, Christ, and the supernatural order. The censorship was based on the synthesis of evolution and theology that made
Christogenesis central: the blurring of natural and supernatural, the suggestion that matter is sacred, the implication that God is becoming rather than eternally complete.