Hilda Geraghty

I recently came across the expression “We don’t do God” – a throwaway remark by Alastair Campbell in 2003 in reference to the British Labour party – a  nifty little phrase that set me thinking.  It has since passed into public parlance, as if ‘doing God’ were some hobby or minority activity.  I was wondering if there was something to be learnt from the expression, and from the growing agnosticism and atheism these days, as well as the distancing of people from formal religion.  Are we believers listening to these unbelievers enough?   Is there something to be learned here?

I then saw an article in The Tablet with the headline, No religion please, we’re British¹ in which the author commented on the lack of almost any reference to the human person as created in the image and likeness of God in the recent debate on Assisted Dying in the House of Commons.  Any reference to a value derived from faith was deemed ‘too sensitive to mention’.

Archaic?

‘It is now seen as archaic to hold Catholic values among the student body.’  These are the words of one teacher who voiced concern during a survey on bullying in Irish schools.’²

These instances suggest that, in today’s culture in western Europe, any reference to religion is becoming embarrassing.  The person showing their faith may feel uncomfortable, and those listening to them likewise.  There is an increasing inability to take a person of faith seriously, as if they are an anachronism of sorts, wearing the fashion of a bygone era. Religion is ‘old hat’.

It would be easy for believers to say that this is all part of the irreligiousness of the age, that today’s ‘sinners’ have turned away from God, and need to convert, to discover the joy and guidance of a personal relationship with Jesus, to rediscover Christianity.  But what if there is more to it?  Why is it that believing, practising parents are finding it increasingly hard to encourage their children into faith as they have experienced it?  The Church is seemingly unable to hand on the faith to its own upcoming generations, so that it is dying under our feet here in Ireland.  The answers are many and complex, of course, but is there not more to be learnt from people’s indifference or atheism?—and the possibly worn-out image of the God they abandon.  They are saying, in effect,  that the faith we are offering leaves them indifferent.  Can it really be taken seriously?  Does it look badly out of date?

The Divine Milieu

One of the reasons why Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ (.1881-1955) was such an original thinker within the Church was because, unlike most theologians, he spent most of his life among unbelievers, working as a scientist with and among them as an equal.  I credit much of his Christian inspiration to this contact with unbelievers, to whom he listened carefully.  He thought the Church needed to offer more to them, since they found belief tiresome in the way it continually deflected the energies of believers more to the next life than to this present one.  This led Teilhard to develop the life-engaging spirituality of The Divine Milieu, where he invites Christians to meet God within the world through eyes of faith, to work for God’s glory in the world with the same passion that unbelievers brought to it. Why should the Christian faith make us somewhat less human?  Could the Church not teach us to love the world the right way, and not hold apart from it in a kind of disdain?  Christ came to bring life to the full.

Referencing Teilhard, who achieved a feat of spiritual genius in drawing faith and science into a single inspiring vision, American theologian John Haught, wrote in 2021,

Separate Worlds

Could this not be one reason why faith is not getting through to educated young minds today?  Faith on the one hand, and human knowledge—science—on the other, are living in two separate ‘worlds’. People have a tendency to live in one world or the other, the one in which they feel more mentally comfortable. Faithful,  believing, educated Christians must learn to compartmentalise, rather than to integrate them. Catholicism still lives, to a considerable degree, within the bubble of its own creating and its own success, the religious culture of previous centuries.  Is there a way to make its core theology newly credible?

Obviously, it not at all easy to integrate the worldviews of faith and science. It took the genius of Teilhard, with his unique spiritual-scientific horizons, to uncover the vision that religion needed to offer to remain relevant.  He felt he had only created the scaffold for a great new building to house faith in Christ, a building that others would complete. Yet those able to combine both mind-sets are so rare, even to this day, that near the end of his life Teilhard wondered,

Silenced

Was it simply too big for others to see? Had Teilhard not been silenced, of course, he might have set off a whole new avenue of exploration for the faith among theologians. However, the Church held him back, perhaps understandably, out of fear—the responsibility of leading souls to God and the fear of leading them astray if the teaching is misleading.  Yet, like any other institution, fear can stultify the Church, dissuading it from adapting core dogmas in creative fidelity to both the past and the new understanding of the universe we live in.  One result of this may be our emptier churches, where what is celebrated can seem irrelevant, unconnected to reality as we now know it.

So, having grasped that the universe, biological and human life is one universal story of becoming, of evolution, Teilhard saw that there were huge implications for the understanding of Christ. ‘This [realisation] is a major event which must lead us to radically change the whole structure of our Thought and our Beliefs.’ ⁵ He began by focusing on one in particular.

The neuralgic point where faith and science clash is the doctrine of Original Sin, the literal understanding of the Genesis Fall story, now incompatible with our knowledge of how the universe works. Attempting to help the Church into the modern world, Teilhard offered a new and credible interpretation of the Genesis Fall story. A reinterpretation of this story is all that is needed, seen as a true and freshly relevant portrait of human nature, chronically unwilling to listen to its conscience/voice of God in the drama of life. The classical (mis)interpretation of myth as an actual historical event remains a stranglehold preventing the development of dogma into something newly credible.

Were the Genesis story freshly understood, the meaning of salvation could be magnificently renewed, freed from the supposed need to appease an offended God, above and beyond this world.  The notion of a God whose forgiveness is linked to the exaction of a penalty is an imperial God who inspires fear.  It overshadows the heart of the Christian faith as it continues to be celebrated daily. It fails to attract many people today.

Yet this image does not align with the God of Abraham who expressly rejected a human sacrifice, nor with the God of Jesus as shown in the counter-intuitive parable of the Prodigal Son. The sinner, returning home, finds not judgement and punishment as anticipated, but the warmest of fatherly embraces. This father has no issue about injured honour. The son now belongs in the family again, and that he may later find penitential ways to express his gratitude and make reparation is not the point.  

Restoring Relationships

Instead of a focus on paying a price to God, Christ’s death can be understood as the repairing and restoring of individual and collective relationships between self, others, world and God, brought about by Christ’s universal forgiveness from the cross.  Given that God’s love, as shown by Jesus, is unconditional, even and especially in the face of sin, God needs no reconciliation towards us sinners. It is only our repentance towards God that is needed.  “Repent and believe…”  Salvation, in this approach, is seen as the union in love of each and all in God and with each other, brought about by repentance-forgiveness, at all levels.  “May they all be one in us.” (Jn 17,21)  Such a positive interpretation of salvation—as opposed to simply ‘getting to heaven’ in the next life—would lift up hearts, inspiring them to tackle a very challenging world in the name of love.

Another area in great need of renewal is the language in which faith is expressed.  It needs to be more richly inspired to reflect our present cosmic understanding of the universe.  Christ needs to be acclaimed, in Teilhard’s terms, as the leader of evolution, the universal story of life on our planet, leading us towards unifying into a civilisation of love, centred on  Omega, God.  This God would no longer be simply ‘our Father who art in heaven’—never intended by Jesus to be the ultimate definition of God as an Old Man in the Sky.   In Teilhard’s words,

Faith as Excitement

True faith has an excitement about it, a cry, “We have found the Messiah!’ and quite a few have found it in Teilhard’s unifying vision.  Haught again:

Teilhard uniquely gives cosmic robes to the role of Christ in an evolving universe, as the leader and centre of its process.  Now such a renewed image can capture the  imagination, as it once did in earlier times.  This is a serious concern, because, as St. John H. Newman pointed out, the imagination is where faith is born.

The latest Synod session in Rome called on the Church to look outwards to mission, instead of being so focused on internal issues, but how is that to happen?  Mission is the entire purpose of the Church, but for it to reach out, it has to begin by being interested in where the world is at, where unbelievers of good will are at.  Theology needs to professionally interest itself in science, and to incorporate the findings of science into its dogmas, insofar as it affects them.  And affect them it does, because the culture in which they were originally formulated has changed out of all recognition.  Without a mutual nourishing of human knowledge and faith, it is faith that is losing out badly.  Speaking of humanity’s passion for knowledge, its drive to understand all things, Teilhard makes a heartfelt plea to the Church:

The Cry of the Earth

This prophetic warning has yet to be heeded.  Not every corner of the Church welcomed Pope Francis’ urgent call to take care of the earth—‘What has this got to do with religion?’ they wondered. The Church would do itself a great favour by acclaiming the treasure it has in Teilhard de Chardin, its faithful prophet silenced for a lifetime. While his writings were never banned, a monitum was placed on them when they were published by friends after his death, i.e. to be read with caution, a warning still to be lifted by the Vatican. Were his reputation in the Church to be fully restored, it would give theology a whole new inspiration, enabling it to speak more meaningfully to the people of today and tomorrow.  Much work would need to be done on the scaffold Teilhard created, but a boost would greatly push it forward.

Teilhard’s thinking is quietly gaining ground among quite a few of today’s Catholics.  His vision of the whole deeply inspired the American, Thomas Berry, to initiate the now world-wide ecological movement.  Berry is quoted by cosmologist, Brian Swimme, as telling him, ‘To see as Teilhard saw is a challenge, but increasingly his vision is becoming available to us.  I fully expect that in the next millennium Teilhard will be generally regarded as the fourth major thinker of the western Christian tradition.  These would be St Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard.’⁹

As things stand, there is talk of a turn of young people towards the Christian faith again, tired of the superficiality of much of today’s culture.  If they come knocking at the Church’s door, what will they find if they ask the really deep questions?

To conclude, the Church’s presentation of some core dogmas appears seriously out of date, out of touch with today’s world and its horizon-shattering discoveries.  It is offering ‘too small a Christ’, to use Teilhard’s expression, and too small a God, speaking out of a worldview too small for educated people of today.  This is one reason why it can be embarrassing to be a believer, perceived as still living in a mindset of the past.

Let us hope that in elevating St John Henry Newman to Doctor, the Church will open doors to a creative redevelopment of core dogmas.  We need a new St Paul, and he could be Teilhard de Chardin, faithfully recasting the Church’s teaching into terms that could speak to the culture of today’s ‘Gentiles’.  This would leave believers no longer embarrassed about their faith, but confident, enthused and inspired.

Hilda Geraghty

[Hilda Geraghty is a retired secondary school  teacher, living in Dublin, with post-graduate qualifications in Spirituality, Catechetics, and Applied Youth Ministry.  She is a member of the Teresian Association, a Private International Association of the Faithful, whose mission is to evangelise through education and culture. Her website: teilharddechardinforall.com ]

1. +Bijan Omrani, 3 May 2025
2. The Furrow, December 2021, Difficult times for Catholic students in second Level Schools?  The voices of RE teachers. p 698.
3. The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin, John A. Haught, p.13 Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 2021.
4. From his last essay, The Christic, in The Heart of Matter, p 100. A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. San Diego, New York, London, 1978.
5. The Future of Man, Collins, Fontana Books, 1969, a collection of essays grouped under this theme.
6. The Heart of Matter, p 212.
7. The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin by John F. Haught. 2021. P 32, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York.
8. The Divine Milieu, Harper Torchbooks p 154, Harper and Row, Publishers New York 1965
9. The Human Phenomenon, quoted in the Foreword, p xiv, a new edition and translation, Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, Chicago, Toronto, 2015.