This past week, leaders at a meeting of the Pontifical Council for Culture in Rome formally requested that Pope Francis lift the official disclaimer of the Catholic Church against the writings of the influential priest-scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).

Teilhard's writings were only published after the paleontologist's death in 1955. But by 1962, when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the monitum, or warning, his posthumous works had attracted a large following.

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Controversy has always surrounded Teilhard. He was not allowed to publish by his Jesuit superiors during his lifetime, and it was partly because of his ruminations on the implications of evolution for Catholic doctrines like Original Sin, that Pope Pius XII issued his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, reaffirming the necessity for Catholics to accept the belief that all human beings alive are descended from an historic Adam and not from a founding population of humans, which is the consensus of science today.

The same-sex marriage survey revealed a deep divide between Sydney’s western and eastern electorates. The nation and its states recorded an overwhelming yes and only 17 of 150 electorates voted no, but 12 of those were in Sydney’s west. The strongest no vote came from the electorate of Blaxland, where only 26% of people wanted marriage equality. Five other electorates in the area had less than 40% support.

These electorates are some of the most ethnically and culturally diverse in Australia, with high immigrant populations, and that factor has been strongly linked to the no vote.


But the factor that correlated most strongly with a no vote was religious affiliation, not overseas birth. It had a correlation of -0.8, implying a close to 1:1 relationship. The following graphs show the percentage of yes voters in every electorate in the postal survey, mapped against census data for each electorate.