The Catholic Church holds no official position on the theory of creation or evolution, leaving the specifics of either theistic evolution or literal creationism to the individual within certain parameters established by the Church. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, any believer may accept either literal or special creation within the period of an actual six-day, twenty-four-hour period, or they may accept the belief that the earth evolved over time under the guidance of God. Catholicism holds that God initiated and continued the process of his creation, that Adam and Eve were real people, and that all humans, whether specially created or evolved, have and have always had specially created souls for each individual.
Early contributions to biology were made by Catholic scientists such as the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel. Since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, the attitude of the Catholic Church on the theory of evolution has slowly been refined. For nearly a century, the papacy offered no authoritative pronouncement on Darwin's theories. In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that God created all things and that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces. , the Church supports theistic evolution, also known as evolutionary creation.
Catholic schools teach evolution as part of their science curriculum. They teach the fact that evolution occurs and that modern evolutionary synthesis is how evolution proceeds.
Early contributions to evolutionary theory
Catholics' contributions to the development of evolutionary theory included those of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Mendel entered the Brno Augustinian monastery in 1843, but also trained as a scientist at the Olmutz Philosophical Institute and at the University of Vienna. The Brno monastery was a centre of scholarship, with an extensive library and tradition of scientific research.Bill Bryson; A Short History of Nearly Everything; Black Swan; 2004; p.474 At the monastery, Mendel discovered the basis of genetics following long study of the inherited characteristics of pea plants, although his paper Experiments on Plant Hybridization, published in 1866, remained largely overlooked until the start of the next century.
He developed mathematical formulae to explain the occurrence, and confirmed the results in other plants. Where Darwin's theories suggested a mechanism for improvement of species over generations, Mendel's observations provided explanation for how a new species itself could emerge. Though Darwin and Mendel never collaborated, they were aware of each other's work (Darwin read a paper by Wilhelm Olbers Focke which extensively referenced Mendel). Bill Bryson writes that "without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they trace their ancestry to a single, common source; Mendel's work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen".Bill Bryson; A Short History of Nearly Everything; Black Swan; 2004; p.474-476 Biologist J. B. S. Haldane and others brought together the principles of Mendelian inheritance with Darwinian principles of evolution to form the field of genetics known as the modern evolutionary synthesis.Bill Bryson; A Short History of Nearly Everything; Black Swan; 2004; p.300
Changing awareness of the age of the Earth and fossil records helped in the development of evolutionary theory. The work of the Danish scientist Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), who converted to Catholicism and became a bishop, helped establish the science of geology, leading to modern scientific measurements of the age of the Earth.
Early reaction to Charles Darwin's theories Catholic concern about evolution has always been very largely concerned with the implications of evolutionary theory for the origin of the human species; even by 1859, a literal reading of the Book of Genesis had long been undermined by developments in geology and other fields.O'Leary, 7–15; Harrison, section "The Defence: Fr. Domenichelli"; Brundell, 84 No high-level Church pronouncement has ever attacked head-on the theory of evolution as applied to non-human speciesHarrison, especially Conclusion section 2 although a bishop of the church did excommunicate Gregorio Chil y Naranjo for his scientific work defending Darwin and Lamarck.
Even before the development of modern scientific method, Catholic theology had allowed for biblical text to be read as allegorical, rather than literal, where it appeared to contradict that which could be established by science or reason. Thus Catholicism has been able to refine its understanding of scripture in light of scientific discovery. Among the early Church Fathers there was debate over whether God created the world in six days, as Clement of Alexandria taught,Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Book VI, "For the creation of the world was concluded in six days" https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02106.htm or in a single moment as held by Augustine, and a literal interpretation of Genesis was normally taken for granted in the Middle Ages and later, until it was rejected in favour of uniformitarianism (entailing far greater timeframes) by a majority of geologists in the 19th century. However, modern literal creationism has had little support among the higher levels of the Church. The USCCB concluded that days of creation could not be solar days as the sun was created on the fourth day.USCCB. “The Visible World.” United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, 2nd ed., vol. 1, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington D.C., 2020, pp.55-56.
The Catholic Church delayed official pronouncements on Darwin's Origin of Species for many decades.Brundell, 86-87 While many hostile comments were made by local clergy, Origin of Species was never placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum;Rafael Martinez, professor of the philosophy of science at the Santa Croce Pontifical University in Rome, in a speech reported on Catholic Ireland net Accessed May 26, 2009 in contrast, Henri Bergson's non-Darwinian Creative Evolution (1907) was on the Index from 1948 until the Index was abolished in 1966.1948 Index listing —for some reason the date of publication is given as 1914 not 1907 However, a number of Catholic writers who published works specifying how evolutionary theory and Catholic theology might be reconciled ran into trouble of some sort with the Vatican authorities.The six leading examples are the subject of Artigas's book. Apart from Léroy, Zahm and Bonomelli, discussed below, there were St. George Jackson Mivart, the English Bishop John Hedley, and Raffaello Caverni. Each of these has a chapter in Artigas, and is also covered by Brundell. According to the historian of science and theologian Barry Brundell: "Theologians and historians of science have always been struck by the seemingly enigmatic response of Rome when it did come; the authorities were obviously unhappy with the propagation of 'Christianized evolution', but it seems they were not willing or able to say so straight out and in public".Brundell, 81 H.L. Mencken observed that:
19th century reception among Catholics
The first notable statement after Darwin published his theory in 1859 appeared in 1860 from a council of the German bishops, who pronounced:
The concentration of concern on the implications of evolutionary theory for the human species was to remain typical of Catholic reactions. No Vatican response was made to this, which some have taken to imply agreement.Harrison(2001) No mention of evolution was made in the pronouncements of the First Vatican Council in 1868. In the following decades, a consistently and aggressively anti-evolution position was taken by the influential Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, which, though unofficial, was generally believed to have accurate information about the views and actions of the Vatican authorities.Artigas, 2,5, The opening in 1998 of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (in the 19th century called the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index) has revealed that on many crucial points this belief was mistaken, and the periodical's accounts of specific cases, often the only ones made public, were not accurate. The original documents show the Vatican's attitude was much less fixed than appeared to be the case at the time.Artigas, 2, 5, 7–9, 220 etc.; Brundell, 82-83, 90-92 etc.
Though he was sensitive to claims to the contrary, John Henry Newman did not believe that evolution contradicted the Catholic faith. In 1868 he corresponded with a fellow priest regarding Darwin's theory and made the following comments:
In 1894 a letter was received by the Holy Office, asking for confirmation of the Church's position on a theological book of generally Darwinist cast by a French Dominican theologian, L'évolution restreinte aux espèces organiques, par le père Léroy dominicain. The records of the Holy Office reveal lengthy debates, with a number of experts consulted, whose views varied considerably. In 1895 the Congregation decided against the book, and Fr. Léroy was summoned to Rome, where it was explained that his views were unacceptable, and he agreed to withdraw the book. No decree was issued against Léroy's book, and consequently the book was never placed on the Index.Artigas, 119-120. Again, the concerns of the experts had concentrated entirely on human evolution.Harrison analyses the records at length.
To reconcile general evolutionary theory with the origin of the human species, with a soul, the concept of "special transformism" was developed, according to which the first humans had evolved by Darwinist processes, up to the point where a soul was added by God to "pre-existent and living matter" (in the words of Pius XII's Humani generis) to form the first fully human individuals; this would normally be considered to be at the point of conception.Harrison, Conclusion section 4 Léroy's book endorsed this concept; what led to its rejection by the Congregation appears to have been his view that the human species was able to evolve without divine intervention to a fully human state, but lacking only a soul. The theologians felt that some immediate and particular divine intervention was also required to form the physical nature of humans, before the addition of a soul, even if this was worked on near-human hominids produced by evolutionary processes.Harrison, especially Conclusion sections.