The Pope and Darwin

Time magazine writer Jeff Israely notes:

Headline writers (even TIME's) might be tempted to advertise a grudge match between the Holy Father and the high priest of natural selection. But look again. Our title promises the Pope AND Darwin, not the Pope VS. Darwin.

Pope Benedict XVI is hosting a discussion group this weekend at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, that will debate evolution and creation. It's unclear whether the meeting will have any impact on the Catholic Churches position on evolution.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has long been rejected by Religious Right conservatives in the US who want a Bible-based view of creation taught in public schools. One of the most famous examples of this is the Scopes trial -- sometimes referred to as the Scopes Monkey trial -- that pitted attorneys William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrow.

While Religious Right conservatives in the US have long embraced creationism over evolution, Catholic tradition on the subject is much less ridged. Pope John Paul II in 1996 called evolution "more than a hypothesis." And in October 1996 reaffirmed the Church's openness to the theory of evolution:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points....Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies -- which was neither planned nor sought -- constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

It is unclear whether or not Pope Benedict XVI will take a more critical view of evolution. At his inaugural mass after his election last year, he declared:

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the
result of a thought of God.

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn a close associate of Benedict, raised eyebrows last year with an article in the New York Times suggesting the Catholic Church supported the Intelligent Design movement. Time reports that a few months following the article the pope entered the fray when he used the words "intelligent project" to describe the universe's creation.

The "Intelligent Design" theory is a recent invention of Religious Right activists who have been trying for decades to sneak God into public school science classrooms. The theory recently got a boost from George Bush, who publicly stated that intelligent design should be taught along side evolution in public school science classes.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes out of the meeting.