Teilhard at Vespers

It has been a while snce I've posted anything to the blog. In doing this post I discovered that many of you had not been invited to participate. An oversight I hope that I've corrected.
The following editorial was published in the August 17-24, 2009 issue of America the Jesuit magazine. It is lengthy but good stuff.
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Teilhard at Vespers
The church seems forever to be embracing those she once held in suspicion. Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, is the most famous among them. But there are others, too, like Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc and Ignatius Loyola. The most recent candidate for rehabilitation is the Jesuit paleontologist, evolutionary philosopher and spiritual writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vatican watchers have taken note of Pope Benedict XVI's appeal to Teilhard during an evening prayer service he celebrated July 24 in Aosta, Italy, as a sign of re­appraisal of the priest and his thought. Citing Teilhard's `great vision;' Pope Benedict urged that "we consecrate the world, so it may become a living host;' a phrase reminiscent of the French Jesuit's eucharistic theology, in which all cre­ation becomes an offering to God.
Teilhard articulated his vision during an expedition to the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia in 1923. Lacking the elements of unleavened bread and wine to celebrate Mass, he composed a poetic prayer, "Mass on the World" (pub­lished in Hymn of the Universe; Harper, 1961), offering the whole of creation in its evolutionary history as a host to God. Pope Benedict has previously praised the sense of cos­mic liturgy in the Eastern church. His appeal to Teilhard adds the distinctive resonances of the Frenchman's vision: a cosmos evolved over time and increasingly known by scien­tific investigation; a spiritual process that comes to con­sciousness in humanity, a humanity whose spirituality is found in activity as well as passivity; and a humanity called not only to live in the world but also to transform it.
The pope's prayer in fact puts emphasis on our obliga­tion to "transform the world:" In adopting this theme, his thinking seems to have developed along the same trajectory as that of Pope John Paul II. After the Second Vatican Council, both expressed dismay at the optimistic, Teilhardian tone of the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World;' with its focus on the cosmic Christ and its affirmation of the transformative power of the resurrection in history. ....

The pope appears to acknowledge that the kind of sensibility Teilhard possessed belongs to the full flowering of our human nature. To an unexpected degree, he voices trust in the graced capacity of human beings to transform the world and in so doing make it a more fitting offering to God. ...

Like Teilhard, Pope Benedict reminds us that the world we transform by our labor, our learning and our inge­nuity contributes to Christ's great offering of the world to God. The pope has pointed to an array of problems await­ing solution and transformation: the protection of human life and the environment, the expansion of the "responsibil­ity to protect' to include provision of food and water for needy populations, and the creation of international struc­tures to regulate speculation in financial markets and gov­ern a global economy. Will American Catholics rise to the occasion, leading our fellow citizens to meet these chal­lenges by taking new initiatives on behalf of the human fam­ily? Or will we allow ourselves to fall back, enthralled by the idols of self-aggrandizement and self-amusement that so captivate our culture?Decline is our civilization's future if recovery from the global fiscal crisis returns to the consumerist pattern of the late 20th-century America. Consumption has its place in creating a floor of material well-being. But after a point it becomes debilitating to the soul and to society. The trans­formation of the world certainly involves the expansion of markets-not primarily among the affluent, however, but rather among the poor. Furthermore, human creativity needs to be directed by fuller aspirations than improvements in material welfare alone, because human beings are more and desire more: aesthetically, intellectually, athletically, eco­logically, religiously. In whatever field we endeavor to trans­form the world-science, engineering, communications, business, the arts-we must aim at promoting sustainable, fully human development at rising levels of well-being for all and for everyone. At the end, when this transformation has reached its fullness, as Teilhard wrote, "the presence of Christ, which has been silently accruing in things, will sud­denly be revealed-like a flash of light from pole to pole:"