Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In this newsletter, I will conclude my argument that Fr. Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer to God to confirm the truth of his evolution-based “new Christianity” by having him die on Easter Sunday was answered in the negative, in spite of the fact that he is reported to have died at 6 p.m. on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955. On the contrary, I will show that in God’s time, in liturgical time, Fr. Teilhard died after the Sunday liturgy had ended, when the Vespers prayers for Easter Monday were being (or had already been) completed.
The Liturgical Beginning and Ending of the Day in the Catholic Church
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article on “Vespers” demonstrates that the Biblical timing of day’s end coincides with the Church’s liturgical timing, for the fifteen-hundred-year period from the time of St. Benedict up to and including the year of Fr. Teilhard’s death.
In the sixth century the Office of Vespers in the Latin Church was almost the same as it has been throughout the Middle Ages and up to the present day. In a document of unquestionable authority of that period the Office is described as follows: The evening hour, or vespertina synaxis, is composed of four psalms, a capitulum, a response, a hymn, a versicle, a canticle from the Gospel, litany (Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison), Pater with the ordinary finale, oratio, or prayer, and dismissal (Regula Sancti Benedicti, xvii). The psalms recited are taken from the series of psalms from Pss. cix to cxlvii (with the exception of the groups cxvii to cxxvii and cxxxiii to cxlii); Pss. cxxxviii, cxliii, cxliv are each divided into two portions, whilst the Pss. cxv and cxvi are united to form one. This disposition is almost the same as that of the "Ordo Romanus", except that the number of psalms recited is five instead of four. They are taken, however, from the series cix to cxlvii. Here, too, we find the capitulum, versicle, and canticle of the "Magnificat". The hymn is a more recent introduction in the Roman Vespers; the finale (litanies, Pater, versicles, prayers) seems all to have existed from this epoch as in the Benedictine cursus. Like the other hours, therefore, Vespers is divided into two parts; the psalmody, or singing of the psalms, forming the first part, and the capitulum and formulæ the second. Vesper time varied according to the season between the tenth hour (4 p. m.) and the twelfth (6 p. m.). As a matter of fact it was no longer the evening hour, but the sunset hour, so that it was celebrated before the day had departed and consequently before there was any necessity for artificial light (Regula S. Benedicti, xli). . . .
The series of hymns consecrated to Vespers in the Roman Breviary also form a class apart and help to give us some hints as to the symbolism of this hour. The hymns are very ancient, dating probably, for the most part, from the sixth century. They have this particular characteristic--they are all devoted to the praise of one of the days of the Creation, according to the day of the week, thus: the first, "Lucis Creator optime", on Sunday, to the creation of light; the second, on Monday, to the separation of the earth and the waters; the third, on Tuesday, to the creation of the plants; the fourth, on Wednesday, to the creation of the sun and moon; the fifth, on Thursday, to the creation of the fish; the sixth, on Friday, to the creation of the beasts of the earth; Saturday is an exception, the hymn on that day being in honour of the Blessed Trinity, because of the Office of Sunday then commencing (emphasis added).
This 1871 painting of “Vespers in the Church of St. Francis in Assisi” by Mikhail Botkin beautifully illustrates the common liturgical practice of the Roman Rite up to and including the time of Fr. Teilhard’s death. No candles illuminate the church, and the light at the entrance to the sanctuary reveals that it is late afternoon or early evening, bringing the liturgical day to an end well before sunset.
“Thoughts of Time” and “Error Past”
St. Benedict established the liturgical rhythm of the Roman Rite, observed throughout the entire world for 1500 years up to and including the year of Fr. Teilhard’s death which occurred at the conclusion of Vespers when the second day of Easter Week, Easter Monday, had begun. We should also recall that each of the Vesper hymns in the Roman Breviary during that same period, up to and including the year of Fr. Teilhard’s death, recalled what the Creator had done on the day just ended—except for the hymn for Saturday which, as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, honors the Blessed Trinity at the beginning of Sunday, the “first day of the week.“ The hymn that would normally have been chanted before sunset at the close of the liturgical day on Sunday, contains a striking prayer for deliverance from “error past” arising from “thinking but the thoughts of time.” This is a fitting description of Fr. Teilhard’s erroneous theology, which tried to explain the supernatural work of the Eternal God in terms of temporal, material processes, just as a host of pagan philosophers had done in ages past.
Blest Creator of the light
Who mak'st the day with radiance bright.
And o'er the forming world didst call
The light from chaos first of all;
Whose wisdom joined in meet array
The morn and eve, and named them Day:
Night comes with all its darkling fears;Regard Thy people's prayers and tears.
Lest, sunk in sin, and whelmed with strife,
they lose the gift of endless life.
While thinking but the thoughts of time,
They weave new chains of woe and crime.
But grant them grace that they may strain
The Heavenly gate and prize to gain:
Each harmful lure aside to cast
And purge away each error past.
The “forming world” refers to the Earth—which Moses tells us was “formless and void” on the first day of the Hexameron. The Vespers hymn that sums up the work of Monday, the second day of creation, the day on which, liturgically speaking, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin met his Maker, underscores the fact that God had created the Earth at the very beginning, on Day One, and includes these words:
Pour forth now, most gracious Lord,
The gift of Thy never-failing grace,
Lest by the misfortune of some new deception
The old error should overwhelm us.
The words in bold appear remarkably prophetic in relation to Fr. Teilhard’s errors, since, as anyone who reads St. Irenaeus’s second-century work Against Heresies can attest, the evolutionary account of the origins of man and the universe is a very “old error” indeed and was widespread in the days of the Apostles and Church Fathers. Thus, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the prayer of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin was definitely answered—in the negative!
Even the Rabbis Would Agree that Fr. Teilhard Died After the Lord’s Day had Ended
According to Henri Daniel-Rops in his work Daily Life in the Time of Jesus:
The Sabbath started at twilight on Friday. Legally it began “with the night”: but when was the beginning of the night?? When three stars appeared in the sky, replied the rabbis. “Between the first and the third star,” the hazzan went up on to the roof of the highest building in the neighbourhood, taking with him the “trumpet of the Sabbath” . . .
The people would have their supper at about five o’ clock, but not without having blessed the light, the wine, and the herbs three times, and the evening would go on until the trumpet gave the sign that the Sabbath was over.
What may not be obvious at first glance is that the rabbis counted planets as stars. As the Chabad.org website explains:
The three "stars" are actually [two] planets and a star. To determine it is night we look for stars. But the first "star" to appear is actually the planet Venus. The second is Jupiter. The third to appear is really a star. So after you see all those three you can be sure it is night.
The moon was 92% full, with maximum visibility of ten miles at the time of Fr. Teilhard’s death on April 10, 1955. Under those conditions the rabbis’ criteria for declaring the day at an end would have been fulfilled long before sunset. In answer to the question, “Are there ever any planets visible from Earth during daytime?” Karl Erik Andrews, a former navigator with the U.S. Coast Guard, answered: “I have seen Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Near twilight, I have seen Mercury and Saturn [with the naked eye].” Thus, not only would Venus be visible to the naked eye, but Mars, Jupiter, and before nightfall Mercury and Saturn as well, and the shofar would surely have sounded before Teilhard’s death at 6 p.m., when the Vespers hymn for Sunday would normally have finished recalling the Creator’s geocentric first-day-work of Creation.
Teilhard’s Upside Down Cosmology Refuted by the Sacred Liturgy
It is important to acknowledge that Fr. Teihard’s confidence in his evolution-based “new Christianity” rested primarily on his erroneous conviction that natural science had falsified the traditional Catholic geostatic-geocentric model of the universe thus requiring a complete revision of Catholic doctrine in the light of the “irrefutable conclusions of natural science.” In his book Christianity and Evolution, published in 1969 (fourteen years after his death), he writes:
It is not only, in fact, a few palaeontological discoveries which are forcing the Church to lose no time in modifying her ideas about the historical evidence of human origins. The whole new physiognomy of the universe, as disclosed to us for some centuries now, is introducing an intrinsic imbalance into the very core of the dogma; and we cannot escape from this except through an extensive metamorphosis of the notion of original sin.
As a result of the collapse of geocentrism, which she has come to accept, the Church is now caught between her historico-dogmatic representation of the world’s origin, on the one hand, and the requirements of one of her most fundamental dogmas on the other – so that she cannot retain the former without to some degree sacrificing the latter.
In earlier times, until Galileo, there was perfect compatibility between historical representations of the Fall and dogma of universal redemption – and all the more easily, too, in that each was modeled on the other. So long as people believed as St. Paul himself did, in one week of creation and a past of 4000 years – so long as people thought the stars were satellites of the earth, and that animals were there to serve man – there was no difficulty in believing that a single man could have ruined everything, and that another man had saved everything. Today we know, with absolute physical certainty, that the stellar universe is not centered on the earth, and that terrestrial life is not centered on mankind…. With the end of geocentrism, what was emerging was the evolutionist point of view. All that Galileo’s judges could distinctly see as menaced was the miracle of Joshua. The fact was that in consequence the seeds of decomposition had been introduced into the whole of the Genesis theory of the fall: and we are only today beginning to appreciate the depth of the changes which at that time were already potentially completed.
It is fitting that the denial of Fr. Teilhard’s prayer for divine confirmation of his upside-down theology should be confirmed by the sacred liturgy. Indeed, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, it is the sacred liturgy in every tradition within the Catholic Church that bears the most eloquent witness to the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis—that fundamental truth, in which, as Fr. Teilhard himself acknowledged, St. Paul himself believed. In his Letter to the Galatians, St. Paul warned the Galatians and all believers until the end of time:
Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema (Gal. 1:8).
By his own testimony, quoted above, Fr. Teilhard rejected the Gospel that St. Paul preached and substituted his own evolution-based anti-gospel, thus calling down upon himself the dreadful anathema of God.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of St. Paul, and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost free us from all deception and grant us a pure and spotless faith!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. For anyone new to the Kolbe newsletter and unfamiliar with the scientific evidence for the traditional geocentric-geostatic model of the universe, I recommend the introductory presentation by aerospace engineer Eric Bermingham which is Talk #9 at this link. Talk #10 at the same link describes how modernists within the Vatican manipulated the Pope 200 years ago into allowing the publication of heliocentric books by Catholic authors without any reference to the authoritative seventeenth century Magisterial condemnations of heliocentrism. The talk brings to light some of the dire consequences of this grave error of prudential judgment which elevated fallible human science above the Word of God as it had been understood in the Church from the time of the Apostles.
