Evolution Officially Accepted
by Vatican
On October 23, 1996, the most
astounding religious creationist news of the decade was released: The
Vatican published a paper by Pope John Paul II, that the Catholic Church
now accepts all aspects of evolutionary theory!
Just as the Seventh-day Adventist
Church is evolving in its thinking about evolutionary theory, the papacy
is also. Here are a few statements and comments made at the time.
Reuter’s:
“Pope John Paul has lent his
support to the theory of evolution, proclaiming it compatible with
Christian faith.”—Reuter’s News Service, October 24, 1996.
CNN Interactive (via internet):
“Pope John Paul II has lent his
support to the theory of evolution, proclaiming it compatible with
Christian faith in a statement welcomed by scientists but likely to raise
criticism from the religious right.
“The pope’s recognition that
evolution is ‘more than just a theory’ came in a written message he
sent on Wednesday to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a
body of experts that advises the Roman Catholic Church on scientific
issues.
“It broke new ground by
acknowledging that the theory of the physical evolution of man and other
species through natural selection and hereditary adaptation appeared to be
valid. But the pope made clear he regarded the human soul as of immediate
divine creation, and not subject to the process of evolution.
“The theory of evolution, most
notably expounded by 19th century English naturalist Charles Darwin, had
until now been viewed by the Catholic Church as serious and worthy of
discussion but still an open question.”—CNN Interactive, October
24, 1996.
On the Catholic Information Center web
site, the following note was posted before John Paul II’s pronouncement:
“The Book of Genesis does not
teach astro-physics, it does not teach biology, it does not teach geology.
Leo XIII said this (in so many words) in Providentissimus Deus
(1893). Further, both Pope Pius XII and John Paul II have said that
evolution per se is not a philosophical problem for Catholics, so long as
divine causality is not excluded . .
“Also, regarding Adam and Original
Sin, please read Pius XII’s Humanae Generis (1950). We must
believe that God created a soul in the first man; we are not obliged to
believe that the biological formation of the first man could not include
some kind of antecedents. Why Athiests insist on reading the Bible like
Protestant fundamentalists is beyond me.”—Note preceding John Paul
II’s statement, Catholic Information Center web site.
What was that earlier statement, Humanae
Generis, by Pope Pius XII? Here it is:
“The Teaching Authority of the
Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human
sciences and sacred theology, research and discussion, on the part of men
experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of
evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as
coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith
obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”—Humanae
Generis, as released by the Catholic Information Center, quoted in Vance
Ferrell, Evolution and Society, 39 [1029].
Commenting on Pius XII’s statement,
John Paul II said this:
“ ‘Humanae Generis,’
considered the doctrine of ‘evolutionism’ as a serious hypothesis, is
worthy of a more deeply studied investigation and reflection on a par with
the opposite hypothesis . . Today, more than a half century after this
encyclical, new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution
more than a hypothesis . . The convergence, neither sought nor induced, of
results of work done independently one from the other, constitutes in
itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”—John Paul
II, Vatican Information Service Press Release.
This official Vatican statement went
farther than evolutionists! It said that evolutionary theory was more
than a hypothesis. That is equivalent to saying it is a fact.
“According to Owen Gingerich, an
evangelical professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
understanding the significance of the pope’s
words requires a look at the early sixteenth century, when the Catholic
church initially viewed as hypothetical the Copernican view that the Earth
revolves around the sun.
“ ‘The public generally
associates ‘hypothetical’ with the word mere.’ Gingerich
says. ‘The pope is essentially saying that evolution is not a mere
hypothesis. To the scientists, evolution has for some time functioned as
[only] a working hypothesisis. To the creationist, it is . . something
deserving of scorn.’ ”—Christianity Today, December 9, 1996
[italics theirs].
Here is another portion of John
Paul’s official statement, as quoted by Time.
“Pope John Paul II last week . .
made a statement on evolution: ‘Consideration of the method used in
diverse orders of knowledge allows for the concordance of two points of
view which seem irreconcilable,’ he wrote. ‘The sciences of
observation describe and meaure with ever greater precision the multiple
manifestations of life . . while theology extracts . . the final meaning
according to the Creator’s designs.’ ”—Time, November 4, 1996.
Whereas Pius XII maintained that Adam
had to be the first human being, John Paul, by avoiding a statement on
that point, essentially negated it.
“John Paul stopped short of
addressing a point on which Pius was emphatic: that a particular man named
Adam must have been our ancestor. Any other theory, Pious maintained, was
inconsistent with the doctrine of original sin. But here the teaching
about Adam has also been superseded, says Richard P McBrien, a liberal
theologian at the University of Notre Dame. ‘No Scripture scholar today
would say we are literally decended from two people.’ ”—Ibid.
Such a view accords with the Catholic
position that the Bible is poetic, not scientific.
“The [October 23, 1996 papal]
statement is unlikely to influence the curriculum of Catholic schools,
where evolution has been taught since the 1950s. Indeed, reading the
entire Bible literally has not been a dominant practice among Catholics
through much of the 20th century. Asked about the Pope’s statement,
Peter Strvinska, said, ‘It’s esentially what Augustine was writing. He
tellls us that we should not interpret Genesis literally, and that it is
poetic and theological language.”—Ibid.
So, officially, Roman Catholicism is
now officially in the evolutionists’ camp. We close with this headline
from a conservative leading newspaper in Rome:
“POPE SAYS WE MAY DESCEND FROM
MONKEYS—Il Giornale, front page headline.
Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus,
in 1893, led to Pius XII’s Humanae Generis in 1950, which evolved
into John Paul II’s 1996 statement. (That statement, by the way,
presented at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October
24, 1996, was apparently not given a latin name. It was a statement, not a
decretal.)
—
In the various news comments by various Protestant spokesmen,
for example, Keith Fournier, executive director of the American Center for
Law and Justice, who is part of Pat Robertson’s Virginia-based
organization,—yet they are defending the pope’s statement favoring
evolutionary theory!
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