Father Spadaro, Vatican official, pays tribute to Teilhard de Chardin
April 08, 2025
In a series of eight tweets (March 27, March 27, March 29, April 1, April 2, April 2, April 2, April 4), Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, highlighted the legacy of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the French Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist whose support for eugenics continued even after the Holocaust.
“Since he was a child he felt called to reach out towards the freshness of reality, to seek it, to find it everywhere,” Father Spadaro wrote in one tweet. “Teilhard has always known that at the bottom of things there is an incandescence that has pushed him to love matter for spiritual reasons. It is this welding between matter and spirit that has led him to perceive exuberance and boiling of energy, superabundance of life.”
In 2015, Father Spadaro wrote the preface to a new edition of The Priest, a 1918 work by Father Teilhard. Father Spadaro is also the author of the preface to a new edition of Father Teilhard’s autobiography, which will be published on April 18.
Between March 27 and April 7, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican publishing house, posted 25 tweets related to its own newly published biography of Teilhard. The biography, written by Mercè Prats, includes a preface by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. The prelate wrote:
A particularly significant aspect of Teilhard’s thought, which Prats explores with great sensitivity, is his profound optimism. At a time when progress is often associated with risks and dangers, Teilhard invites us to see evolution not only as a source of conflict, but also as an opportunity to grow as a species and as individuals. His optimism is not naive, but rooted in a deep trust in man’s ability to collaborate with the creative forces of the universe.
Another significant contribution of Teilhard is his reflection on love as a cosmic force. For Teilhard, love is not just a feeling or a moral virtue, but a fundamental force that drives evolution towards greater unity and complexity. This aspect of his thought, which Prats develops with great depth, offers a new perspective on the nature of love and its role in our personal and collective life.
The prelate’s preface was part of a remarkable two-page, six-article Vatican newspaper tribute to the controversial French Jesuit, who was the subject of a posthumous Holy Office monitum (warning) against his writings.
Over the past decade, Father Teilhard’s views on race and eugenics have come under increased scholarly scrutiny in varied publications, including the Jesuit journal America, and most extensively in “The Extent and Impact of Racism and Eugenics in the Writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.,” a 39-page article published by Cambridge University Press.
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