Vatican newspaper editor sees ‘convergence’ between Teilhard and Pope Francis

April 28, 2025

In a front-page editorial in Vatican newspaper’s April 25 edition, Andrea Monda, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, reflected on what he described as a “convergence” between Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Pope Francis.

Teilhard—the French Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist whose support for eugenics continued even after the Holocaust—was the subject of a posthumous 1962 Holy Office monitum (warning) against his writings. In recent months, he has been the subject of several Vatican tributes.

“‘Everything that arises converges,’ said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest, theologian and brilliant scientist, for whom the adjective ‘prophetic’ would not be out of place,” Monda wrote in his editorial, “Tutto nasce per fiorire“ [Everything is born to blossom]. “This man’s last wish was granted: he had prayed to die on Easter Sunday and on a beautiful sunny morning on Easter Sunday he died in New York, on April 10, 1955.”

After discussing references to Teilhard’s phrase in works by Flannery O’Connor and Nick Cave, Monda said:

But this is not what I would like to talk about, but about another “convergence.”

Seventy years after Teilhard’s death, at dawn on Easter Monday, April 21 of this year, another Jesuit died, another for whom that adjective, “prophetic,” would not be out of place at all. We do not know if he too had prayed to die on Easter, but seeing how his whole story went, especially in the finale, if that were the case, we would not be surprised.

There is a phrase, among many, that Pope Francis said that is very similar to those words of his French confrère: on September 20, 2017, during a Wednesday catechesis, he said “Everything is born to blossom in an eternal spring. God also made us to blossom.”

This exquisitely Teilhardian phrase of Francis was recalled a couple of days ago by a Roman singer-songwriter, Jovanotti, during his concert in Rome, in a delicate and moving memory of the Pope, whom he defined as “a poetry enthusiast, a priest, a priest from the peripheries, his name was Francis. We loved him a lot. And he loved us too.” And he concluded that in life “we fall and get up again, like flowers do.”

Monda concluded:

Francis’s bud has finally blossomed and now, open, wide open, can rise again, rise and finally converge in the direction of that “sun” towards which he has always been stretched out as if in response to a call. We are left with his perfume that can now spread even more freely and powerfully than before.

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