Yesterday, I had Part I of the article from Southern California Public Radio on Fr. Christian Mondor, the 88-year old Franciscan surfer priest. Today, we have the second part of the interview with Fr. Mondor, where he talks about the influence of Teilhard on this theology:
“We evolved from a lower species that first began its life in the ocean. We have a natural affinity for the ocean,” Father Christian Mondor said. It’s not always easy to tell from a radio story, but Father Mondor had a way of talking, where one thought would blend seamlessly into the next. I interviewed him for my “God is in the garden” series.
“In this way he leaped into the connections between faith and science. ‘I think [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin, the great French Jesuit theologian and paleontologist, saw in evolution a marvelous new way to understand the gospels: that we are indeed evolving, and it’s going on all the time,’ Father Mondor told me. ‘We are evolving into the divine, without, amazingly, losing our humanity.’
“By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us,” Teilhard wrote. “We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” [The Divine Milieu]
You can read the entire article here, including an audio interview with Fr. Mondor.
