[Catholic Caucus] The Holy See Legitimizes Panentheism: A Heresy Against the Creator

On August 21, the International Theological Commission published a document entitled “Caring for Our Common Home: A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Trinitarian God.”

This document sets out the context in which theological texts have been produced at least in recent months. Within it, however, numerous extremely problematic aspects are presented. The most problematic aspect is certainly the clearing for acceptance of pantheism in its soft variant, namely panentheism.

Before dwelling on this specific problem, however, let us briefly list the other problematic points of the document.

First of all, the document proposes the theological structuring of the category of “sin against creation and against the Creator,” defining it as disobedience to the divine mandate to care for the earth.

In reality, classical Catholic morality already considers gratuitous cruelty toward the non-human world (plants, animals) a grave sin that can take various forms and can involve different kinds of sin: for example, if an arsonist sets fire to a forest, he commits a series of mortal sins against temperance and against justice: impiety toward God the Creator (cf. S.Th. II-II, q. 64-66), damage to any private property belonging to others, scandal through contempt for the law. And perhaps more.

Therefore, the proposal of a new sin must be understood differently, within that great project initiated by Bergoglio of politicizing and secularizing Catholic morality, shifting the center of gravity from personal sin and eternal salvation toward increasingly socio-political issues.

Indeed, the Commission’s discussion of this “new” sin is accompanied by constant references to scientific data on the climate, pollution from microplastics and – above all – the ecological objectives of the UN.

Secondly, in paragraph 107, we read: “The human being offers the creation to God in Christ and, in return, implores God’s blessing in Christ for all things. Christ is thus the axis of the world’s maturation.” In note 184 at the end of this text, the document reveals the key with which these words are to be interpreted. It reads: “In this perspective, the contribution of P. Teilhard de Chardin should be welcomed.”

Namely, the contribution of one of the most consistent neo-Modernist heresiarchs of the last century. Teilhard’s idea of the maturation and recapitulation of the world in Christ is precisely one of the Jesuit theologian’s most heretical theses.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) attempted to reconcile Catholic doctrine with modern science, believing that the distance between the two had by then become irreconcilable. The authors of the Commission are, in fact, of the same opinion: “These discoveries have radically redefined the notions of matter, energy, particles and antimatter. They call into question many of the assumptions on which both the religious and materialist understanding of the universe had been based” (p. 46).

Teilhard de Chardin reformulated (and denied) fundamental dogmas such as creation ex nihilo, monogenism, the original perfection of the progenitors, and the historicity of original sin. Instead, he proposed an immanentist and pantheistic cosmology in which God is the same Universe in Evolution, directed toward a total, collective, and self-conscious unity of everything that exists. This unity is called by the Jesuit thinker the “Omega Point.”

Christ’s return is therefore interpreted by Teilhard de Chardin as the attainment of this highest collective self-consciousness that will transform man into a “Ultra-Human” being.

Through this direct reference to the neo-Modernist Jesuit, the authors of the International Theological Commission clearly intended to legitimize two precise concepts. First, to support the idea that man, by acting upon the material world through work and technology, transforms it into “something that is more than its natural state, perfecting it by continuing God’s creative work.” Human work is thus elevated to an immanent continuation of cosmic evolution.

Second, by invoking Teilhard, the document describes creation as an evolutionary process open to the future. This serves to justify a “relational ontology” in which “everything is connected” and in which the universe is conceived as an immanent “interweaving of relationships” and as a “Eucharist,” that is, a great act of gratitude. This normalization of Teilhard’s theology is obviously functional to support an “ecological conversion” of the entire Church that is wholly horizontal and politicized.

The culmination of the document, however, is reached at the point where it openly clears pantheism for acceptance in a particular version that goes by the name of panentheism.

The difference between the two visions of God can be stated simply. According to pantheism, God and the universe coincide. According to panentheism, the universe is part of God, but God is not exhausted by the universe. Consequently, both pantheists and panentheists affirm that the universe possesses a divine nature or, if one prefers, that God is not pure spirit – and therefore is not pure act, as classical theology maintains.

According to the authors of the document, panentheism “offers an interpretive framework for understanding how God can be intimately present in every aspect of reality without determining it coercively” (p. 52). As if that were not enough, the document itself explicitly recognizes that this approach moves “in contrast to classical theism, which often emphasizes the distinction between God and creation.”

The First Vatican Council infallibly condemned pantheism and its derived forms. In the dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, it is taught that God is “eternal… infinite in intellect, will and every perfection… absolutely simple and immutable spiritual substance… distinct from the world… ineffably exalted above all things that are and that can be conceived outside Him… [B]y His most free decision, from the beginning of time, [He] produced from nothing both creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, simultaneously.”

In the Doctrinal Canons attached to the aforementioned Constitution we read: “If anyone shall say that the substance or essence of God and of all things is one and the same: let him be anathema”; and again: “If anyone shall say that… the divine essence by its manifestation and evolution becomes all things: let him be anathema”; and again: “If anyone shall say that… God is a universal or indefinite being, which by determining itself constitutes the universe of things: let him be anathema.”

Consequently, both pantheism and its variants such as panentheism are condemned as erroneous forms of thought. For Catholic theology, classical theism is the only admissible theological model. Presenting panentheism in a positive light as a valid alternative that corrects or supplements the limitations of classical theism is a genuine doctrinal capitulation.

At this point, however, it is necessary to reflect on the strategy adopted by the neo-Modernists. The distinction between pantheism and panentheism is an artificial construction, logically fallacious in itself, conceived to make acceptable what Catholic doctrine has already condemned.

It is maintained that pantheism identifies God with the world, whereas panentheism includes it without being exhausted by it. But this difference is merely terminological: on the ontological level, both visions deny God’s absolute transcendence and dissolve creation ex nihilo into an immanent evolutionary process. Panentheism, in fact, does not correct pantheism, but rather refines it.

It preserves its root: the idea that the universe has a divine substance. The addition of a formal “transcendence” does not save the doctrine, simply because authentic transcendence is not compatible with substantial immanence.

The strategy at work is the same one used by Bergoglio and his associates to normalize socialism within Catholic social teaching after the condemnation of liberation theology. Instead of openly clearing the latter for acceptance, they decided to adopt the theology of the people, that variant of liberation theology which preserves the ideological root of liberation theology while rejecting its extreme political consequences.

Thus, panentheism preserves the pantheistic premise – the divinity of the cosmos – and adds a relational language that creates the illusion of preserving the distinction between Creator and creature. In both cases, the error is not corrected: it is absorbed and reformulated in order to make it compatible with contemporary sensibilities.

Pantheism is the theological premise most consistent with the environmentalism and the socialism defended by the new social teaching of the Church as it was shaped by Bergoglio. In turn, pantheism and socialism are two cornerstones of the Gnostic thought dominant in modernity. Indeed, Gnosis is founded on the claim that man can save himself through knowledge, rejecting the “limits” of his own nature and Revelation.

Not believing in original sin and in God’s absolute transcendence, the Gnostic man reduces science to the ultimate end of existence and ends up identifying divinity with the cosmos itself, inevitably slipping into pantheism. The entire universe is thus divinized and conceived as a single great organism in evolution, where matter itself participates in the divine substance, and where every real distinction between Creator and creature is dissolved.

Socialism represents the direct political translation of this theological vision. If the universe is a divine and indistinct “Whole,” then the individual loses all centrality and ontological dignity, being sacrificed in favor of the absolute primacy of the collective.

The State rises to the status of an earthly divinity and the sole source of morality, imposing from above a forced equality that aims to weaken or destroy the three great natural obstacles to its realization: private property, the natural family, and the Catholic Church, which have historically been the guardians of freedom and real dignity of human beings.

Finally, contemporary environmentalism crowns this immanentist system, in effect divinizing material nature as a whole, as a system (precisely: an eco-system), and presenting it as an absolute to which the human being must entirely submit. The Commission’s text in fact proposes “the human person as… the servant of creation,” thus overturning the Traditional view according to which man is the apex and lord of the created universe.

Furthermore, the text defines the Traditional interpretation of the mandate of Genesis 1:26-28 as “exaggerated and distorted,” asserting in a wholly ideological manner that such interpretation would have “led people to believe that human beings were granted despotic and unlimited dominion over all creation. We cannot ignore, with shame and repentance, the weight that this distortion of the profound meaning of the biblical text has had in exploiting and mistreating creation.”

According to the Commission’s document, panentheism explains that “the world exists in God, while God, at the same time, transcends it.” One must pay attention to the words. According to these theologians, the expression “in God” therefore no longer assumes the meaning of classical theology. For the latter, in fact, this expression denotes a relationship of dependence and participation.

When St. Paul declares, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), he is not saying that humanity has divine substance, but that God continually sustains every creature in existence. Human life depends on this ongoing act of divine conservation, yet the creature remains ontologically distinct from the Creator. In this verse, the Apostle affirms the dependence of all things on God while rejecting the pantheistic idea – common in certain Greek philosophies – that the world and God are one and the same.

However, as clearly emerges from this Commission document, when these theologians in power use the expression “in God,” they do not intend to refer to the classical meaning of the expression, but to its pantheistic meaning.

Now, it is interesting that, precisely at the beginning of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of Leo XIV, there is a seriously erroneous statement from a theological point of view: “In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness.”

Leaving aside the serious problem whereby humanity – understood as a human collective, and not as human nature and certainly not as Christ’s human nature – cannot be the Way, the Truth and the Life for each of us, it is quite clear that the expression “in Jesus Christ” is also being used in a pantheistic sense. This Commission document has now made it clear that this is the authentic interpretation.

Indeed, nowhere in the encyclical is the reality of original sin addressed (which nevertheless ought to be central given the subject) or the necessity of grace for salvation.

Grace is instead an external aid that God sends us to improve ourselves, precisely as Pelagius taught: “When we embrace the possibility of transcending ourselves through God’s grace, we do not deny our nature, nor do we become less human” (p. 128); and further on we read: “The memory of the saints, righteous people and the oft-forgotten peacemakers, show us that grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good” (p. 211).

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the Holy See would have theologically legitimized pantheism, but I did not think it would do so in such an explicit manner. This unfortunately definitively confirms what I said at the time about the neo-Pelagian matrix of Magnifica Humanitas, which, among other things, explicitly (and coherently) defends a radical vision of statism.

If there is a direct link between Gnosis, pantheism, environmentalism and socialism, there is also a profound logical link – albeit an indirect one – between pantheism and Pelagianism. They are obviously not the same thing, but they share an anthropological and theological matrix that makes them compatible and often convergent in contemporary doctrinal deviations.

If the universe is, in fact, ontologically divine, then the universe is already holy and does not require further sanctification. Thus the doctrine of original sin disappears, man has no need for redemption, and Christ is reduced to a moral teacher, the model par excellence. Thus the purpose of the Church must also be reconsidered, because there is nothing left to save, since everything is already sanctified by nature. All of this is also consistent with the cultural project pursued by certain sectors of the Vatican aimed at “demythologizing” the biblical account of original sin.

This, then, must be clear: the Holy See’s legitimization of panentheism does not represent an innocuous pastoral update, but rather the coherent culmination of that centuries-old Modernist drift that aims to dissolve Redemption into Gnostic pantheism and Grace into Pelagian self-sufficiency.

If the cosmos is declared intrinsically divine and humanity self-redeems itself through the becoming of collective evolution, the Cross loses its tragic necessity and the Church is reduced to a courtesan of history, a useless social-services agency devoted to the agendas of the world.

Against this subtle Gnostic parody of the faith, which deifies matter only to conceal the wound of original sin and diminish the Divine Majesty, Catholics are called today more than ever to the duty of resistance.

It is necessary to educate oneself and firmly reaffirm the absolute transcendence of the Creator, the dramatic reality of the Fall, and the perfect sufficiency of Christ’s Sacrifice. In this way every faithful person can contribute to overcoming the grave crisis of Petrine authority that the Church is experiencing today, with the unshakable certainty that, despite the temporary betrayals of its hierarchies, the gates of Hell will not prevail.

The culmination of the document, however, is reached at the point where it openly clears pantheism for acceptance in a particular version that goes by the name of panentheism.

Vatican document revives the heretical ideas of Teilhard de Chardin

'Caring for Our Common Home' endorses 'panentheism' as a new way to understand God’s relationship with the world, an idea previously rejected by the Church.

John XXIII and Teilhard de Chardin, Germany

There has been an explicitly panentheistic hymn printed in major Catholic hymnals for decades.

“God is in the sun that warms the earth
God is in a mother giving birth
God is in the birds that sing
God is in everything”

I was in college when we came upon that chestnut.

One of my classmates decided to add verses consistent with the main idea:

God is in Hell, St. Augustine says so ...
God is in Edgar Allen Poe

AND

God is in a far east Buddhist Temple
God is in a young teenager’s pimple.

You can go on and on

Panentheism preserves the pantheistic premise—the divinity of the cosmos—and language that creates the illusion of preserving the distinction between Creator and creature.

Not exactly.

In Pantheism, Creator and creation are identical. In Pannetheism, God is in all, as ll, through all, and all creation is part of the Divine Oneness, but God is more than this ceation. God is all there is.

"We believe in God, the Living Spirit Almighty; one, inestructible, absolute and self-existent Cause. This One manifests Itself in and through all creation, but is not absorbed by Its creation. The manifest universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self-knowingness of God."

This makes a certain degree of sense if you believe in a God who is Omnipotent and Omniscient. For that to be true, God would need to be Omnipresent, else there would be a way to get out of God's sight and away from God's power. Omnipresence implies Infiniteness. So all that is must then be absorbed with God.

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[Catholic Caucus] The Holy See Legitimizes Panentheism: A Heresy Against the Creator

A new Vatican document praises panentheism, a heresy that blurs the essential distinction between Creator and creation. This seemingly subtle theological shift actually strikes at the very foundations of Creation, Original Sin, Redemption, and the necessity of Christ’s Cross.

The culmination of the document, however, is reached at the point where it openly clears pantheism for acceptance in a particular version that goes by the name of panentheism.

Vatican document revives the heretical ideas of Teilhard de Chardin