In his last months, he lived in a drab New York City hotel room, forbidden by his superiors in the Roman Catholic Church to work in his beloved Paris, surrounded by few friends. He died at 73, on Easter Sunday, in 1955. The earth at the cemetery near Poughkeepsie was still frozen; when he was finally buried, only gravediggers were in attendance. Yet the gaunt figure of this French priest in exile, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, looms large over the intellectual history of 20th century Catholicism.
At his death Teilhard was known to the public largely as the "missing link" priest, the handsome, aristocratic paleontologist who helped to analyze the Peking Man and other protohuman skulls unearthed in China. But there was also a hidden Teilhard: the writer-mystic who integrated his scientific and spiritual passions into a grandly eccentric philosophy of the evolutionary progress of mankind. During his lifetime, only a narrow Catholic elite was aware of this private Teilhard. Wary of his ideas, and prodded by Vatican censors, the Society of Jesus, Teilhard's then deeply conservative religious order, forbade him to publish his books, severely restricted his lecturing and kept him away from his native Paris as much as possible.
Shortly after his death, however, friends arranged for the publication of his major work, The Phenomenon of Man. Other hitherto suppressed books soon followed. Teilhard became a theological sensation just as the Catholic Church was entering the period of intellectual freedom stirred by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. Since then, the Teilhard boom has waned considerably, though he continues to have a strong following—a cult, some would say —in many areas, notably France and the U.S.
Omega Point. The Jesuit priest-scientist's following may expand with the publication of Teilhard (Doubleday, 360 pages, $10), the first full-scale biography of him in English in a decade. The book, by Freelance Writers (and sisters) Mary and Ellen Lukas, is not the full-dress exposition of Teilhard's thought that English Actor-Author Robert Speaight achieved in his 1967 Life of Teilhard de Chardin. The Lukases' reportage tells of the man behind the legend, providing much new material culled from ten years of interviewing Teilhard's friends and acquaintances.
Teilhard is still widely celebrated among Catholics as one of the church's major doctrinal martyr figures in the decades prior to Vatican II. His then unpublished writings were deemed so threatening that they were implicitly attacked in Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical against dangerous opinions about the evolution of mankind. In 1962 the Vatican went so far as to publicly censure Teilhard by name in a so-called monitum (warning).