Ascension of Consciousness and Faith in Humanity: Teilhard de Chardin’s Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue and the Popes in Assisi

Abstract

With the aim of sharpening the understanding about and the reflection on religious plurality, the present article addresses the issues of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. For that purpose, it examines a two-page piece of writing about those topics composed by the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin in 1946. The very fact that his theory on those issues is not much known and that he even developed a very particular understanding as well as terminology raises questions and is worth investigating. Did Chardin’s vision cross the threshold of the Second Vatican Council, meeting with that of the popes in Assisi? Are the popes, through their speeches, the performers of that which Chardin had envisaged a few decades before? These questions shall orientate this investigation, and thereby point to the relational dimension of human beings, whose center of motion and attraction is love, the Omega-Christ. The method consists in comparing Chardin’s view with the papal  peeches in the interreligious meetings for peace in Assisi (1986, 2011, and 2016), in order to establish a relation between this pre-conciliar theory and the post-conciliar speeches in light of the Second Vatican Council itself.