The Roman Catholic Church Evolves And God Doesn’t Seem To Object
In recent weeks the Catholic Church has suffered a public relations nightmare in the rehabilitation of the schismatic bishops of The Society of St. Pius X. The televised rejection of the Jewish Holocaust by Bishop Richard Williamson brought an avalanche of negative attention to an already complicated and emotionally-charged return to full communion for the excommunicated members of SPXX.
The backlash was impressive as universal condemnation fell upon the Pope for pushing so hard to bring this revisionist priest back into the fold. People questioned whether or not the Vatican was stuck in the ancient past, when Jews were seen as the murders of Christ and fit for universal denunciation.
So it is a funny twist of fate that a statement by Pope Pius (the XII) may have saved the reputation of the Vatican. In 1950 this progressive pontiff referred to Darwin’s theory of evolution as “a valid scientific approach.” Apparently the idea of evolution has grown on the Vatican because Pope John Paul II later declared that evolution is “more than a hypothesis.” In 2009 the Vatican seems on the cusp of fully recognizing the tremendous contribution Charles Darwin made to human understanding of the biological world by embracing evolution.
Last week Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said he views Darwin’s theory of Evolution as complementary to Roman Catholic belief. It was then announced that there will be a conference called “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A critical appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species’” held in Rome in early March. This conference will be to evaluate the extent of compatibility between the scientific doctrine of evolution and the theology of Roman Catholic belief.
One of the more surprising decisions to come out of the conference is the Church’s refusal to hear a debate on Intelligent Design (ID) as a competing theory. There will be a presentation on ID, but it will be in the context of ‘cultural phenomenon’ and not serious scientific thought. ID posits that life is too complicated to simply have come about through evolution, though offers no scientific evidence to back up this claim.
This move has elicited cries of foul from the largely American-based ID community, but the Vatican seems deaf to their pleas. Father Marc Leclerc, professor of philosophy at the Gregorian University and an organizer of the conference, accepts that ID is “a phenomenon of an ideological and cultural nature,” but is most certainly not a scientifically rigorous idea.
Much to the pleasure of the Vatican this move to openly embrace modern science has been cast in very positive light by the media. While the slights and misunderstandings of the past are certainly not erased by this one act, this sort of progressive thinking from the Catholic Church might be a herald of more positive change in the future.
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