Nuns’ leaders in the United States have fallen out with the Vatican over ‘conscious evolution’. A leading exponent of the idea explains it to Christopher Lamb and rejects claims that its advocates are pantheists
When Cardinal Gerhard Müller met the superiors of female Religious from the United States earlier this year, there was something worrying him. It was not the number of vocations, or anything connected to the sisters’ work in schools and hospitals, but a rather obscure theory called “conscious evolution”.The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) apologised to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for being “blunt” but told them during their meeting in the Vatican that he was worried about
26 June 2014, The Tablet
‘The cosmos is our home’
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User Comments (3)
I've had similar thoughts to Clifford. Fr. Adrian Smith takes up the idea in several books ( eg the God Shift, The Creative Christian, and Tomorrow's Christian) under the idea of Emerging Christianity, I think. His writings are a bit easier to read than Teilhard de Chardin! It would be interesting to read the full Q&A transcript.
where is the promised full transcript?
I read with interest the article about Sr Ilia Delio’s interview in the 28th June issue of the Tablet. I read (or tried to read) Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘Phenomena of Man’ in my 20’s but with the pressures of family life, interest waned, but was reactivated recently and I read parts of his ‘Christianity and Evolution’ which confirmed for me the importance of ‘Evolution of consciousness’ theology. Strangely I had been thinking similar thoughts based around St Peter’s words “ - - and on top of this put love” – meaning for me that love was a decision and that it is relatively unimportant how ‘good’ we are – it is how we behave. That, together with the message from Jesus that “your kingdom come” and that we will one day live in paradise, suggests we need to consciously behave in a particular way and that will bring in the Kingdom.
Science has proven the existence of evolution and so it is likely that in humans (evolved from primates) evolution is continuing. “God made man in his image” and existence is God’s creation – not a completed task clearly (that is probably the end of time); and so creation is still happening meaning we are still evolving – presumably evolving into God’s image.
So it seems to me that Jesus’ message was to consciously act in a way that he taught us so that evolution would result in that behaviour becoming natural. He didn’t need to learn how to behave – he has already evolved into what we are destined to become.
So in our case evolution is driven from the future – our view of the future, i.e. heaven.