Another Chance for a Reluctant Church

What have Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin in common? All three scientists suffered some bruising encounters with the Church authorities of their time. Each of them experienced extreme difficulties in having their scientific discoveries accepted. In 1988, conscious of this past ‘failure in dialogue’, Pope St John Paul II asked the participants of a conference in Rome this question: ‘Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear upon theology, the meaning of the human person as the imago Dei, and upon the development of doctrine itself?’

Current scientific discoveries are opening up new windows to the incarnate presence of God. Our universe is not static or anthropocentric; neither is our incarnate and dynamic God. The incarnation is not a one-off event in history; it holds the key to the true reality of all time and space, of all life as it evolves and grows towards final fulfilment. It is, in fact, a long love-story drawing us to cherish and transform our true cosmic home.

Palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ saw the evolutionary process of creation in the light of faith. To be Christian is to be in evolution; and to be in evolution is, in the words of scientist Sr Ilia Delio ‘to live from the centre of the heart and to reach out to the world with faith, hope and trust in God’s incarnate presence . . . The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the living word of God that continues to be spoken as the word of evolution . . .’  God creates, you could say, through evolution.

A true evolutionary consciousness reveals that all creation is God’s family. Creation is not only about humanity or about this world. All creatures are woven into one community by the common thread of God’s life, participating equally in the dynamism of divine Being. ‘Love is the very nature and shape of Being,’ writes Richard Rohr, OFM. ‘It is the essential energy of the entire universe from orbiting protons and neutrons to the orbiting of planets and stars’.

It is the story of Incarnation. Pope Francis quotes St Thomas Aquinas; ‘God cannot express himself fully in any one creature . . . for goodness, which in God is single and undifferentiated, in creatures is refracted into a myriad hues of being’. The world is sacramental because the divine Word of God is revealed in all dimensions of evolution.  Philosopher Simone Weil said that ‘the beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter’.

Real religion is about making us aware of that mystery. The Roman Catholic Magisterium needs to recover its wonderful, mystical but forgotten insight into the sacramentality of the world and of all creation. A renewed evolutionary understanding of Baptism and Eucharist will transform the community of hearts who still come, in hope, to our churches. Our young people will delight in the ‘New Universe Story’. ‘We do not teach it now’, said Delio, ‘we do not practise it; we do not ritualise it’.

A radical revision of the almost incomprehensible doctrine of original sin will open up the sacred space for developing a theology of evolution, carrying immense implications for bringing Catholicism into the cosmic framework of the new cosmology. Already there is an emerging paradigm shift from a closed religious system to an open sense of the immensity of incarnate mystery. Something beautiful within us is touched and catches fire when we realise that in terms of energy and genetics, we each are the core of the evolving universe. We are older, nobler and more essential to God’s plans than we ever suspected.

Yet our souls must die to many familiar and faded dualistic refrains if they are ever to divine the deep harmonies of God’s love at the centre of the world. We must train ourselves to truly see the shimmering of divinity in the process of unfolding evolution. ‘What we seek’ Delio writes, ‘is not the appearance of God in the world but the shining of God through creation, “a diaphany” of God radiating through a world that becomes transparent’.

This radical perceptual shift in our understanding of Incarnation demands the whole-hearted attention of our teaching Church. This vision is the key to a new world of peace, compassion and urgent environmental awareness. ‘A flourishing humanity on a thriving planet rich in species in an evolving universe,’ writes theologian Elizabeth Johnson, ‘all together filled with the glory of God: such is the vision that must guide us at this critical time of Earth’s distress’.

The miracle of evolution is happening within and around us. Cosmologist Brian Swimme wrote that ‘the earth was once molten rock – and now sings operas’. Without hearts on fire with a sacramental imagination this great voyage of wonder, empowering as it is extraordinary, will flounder in the shallows.  ‘If you want to build a ship,’ wrote Antoine de St Exupery, ‘don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’

Pope John Paul acknowledges the task facing those who try to ‘integrate the worlds of science and religion in their own intellectual and spiritual lives’. This task will lead to an exciting and challenging break-through for Roman Catholics today. Our imagination and faith are stretched with every new scientific discovery. Are there planets, for instance, with intelligent life out there? And if there are, a recent writer to the Tablet asked, do they all have their own incarnations? How big and beautiful a God do we believe in?

In her ‘Christ in the Universe’ British poet Alice Meynell imagines an extra-terrestrial gathering of the civilisations of countless constellations telling stories about their incarnations and eternities. And about the shocking uniqueness of ours!

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The million forms of God whose stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show them a Man.