“You can’t say that Fulton Sheen wasn’t seriously wrong about Teilhard de Chardin.” Mark Lambert of Catholic Unscripted on the question hanging over Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s beatification: what do we do when a man we love praised a writer Rome warned against?
In 1962 the Holy Office issued a formal warning (monitum) on the works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Five years later, in Footprints in a Darkened Forest, Sheen wrote that Teilhard would come to be seen as “the spiritual genius of the twentieth century.” Joe and Mark take that head on. Mark’s answer: beatification is not the canonization of every opinion a man ever expressed. The question is whether his life, taken as a whole, showed heroic fidelity to Christ, and on that the evidence is overwhelming: his Eucharistic devotion, missionary sacrifice, defense of the divine law, and preaching of sin, judgment and grace to a mass audience. We can reject his judgment of Teilhard and still recognize the sanctity of the man. A robust Catholicism has to be capable of doing both.
