Fulton Sheen's Beatification and the Teilhard Problem | Mark Lambert

Published 1 day ago

"You can't say that Fulton Sheen wasn't seriously wrong about Teilhard de Chardin." Mark Lambert of Catholic Unscripted on the question hanging over Archbishop Fulton Sheen's beatification: what do we do when a man we love praised a writer Rome warned against?

In 1962 the Holy Office issued a formal warning (monitum) on the works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Five years later, in Footprints in a Darkened Forest, Sheen wrote that Teilhard would come to be seen as "the spiritual genius of the twentieth century." Joe and Mark take that head on. Mark's answer: beatification is not the canonization of every opinion a man ever expressed. The question is whether his life, taken as a whole, showed heroic fidelity to Christ, and on that the evidence is overwhelming: his Eucharistic devotion, missionary sacrifice, defense of the divine law, and preaching of sin, judgment and grace to a mass audience. We can reject his judgment of Teilhard and still recognize the sanctity of the man. A robust Catholicism has to be capable of doing both.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is beatified on September 24, 2026, in St. Louis.

FULL CONVERSATION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYEorOrLzrQ

CHAPTERS
00:00 "Seriously wrong about Teilhard"
00:10 Beatification day in St. Louis
00:35 Churchmen who play with fire
01:12 "The Mass on the World" in an RCIA class
01:54 Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
03:19 Beatification is not canonizing every opinion
04:25 Is Sheen known beyond America?
05:11 He died before the Blessed Sacrament

SCRIPTURE & SOURCES
1 Thessalonians 5:21 · "But prove all things; hold fast that which is good."
1 John 1:8 · "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, Monitum on the works of Teilhard de Chardin, 30 June 1962
Fulton J. Sheen, Footprints in a Darkened Forest (1967)
Catechism of the Catholic Church 828 · canonization recognizes heroic virtue and fidelity to God's grace

MARK LAMBERT
Catholic Unscripted · https://catholicunscripted.com
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