Associated Press, October 23rd, 1996
VENICE, ITALY--In keeping with his modern image, Pope John Paul issued a statement on 23
October calling evolution "more than a hypothesis"--strengthening the Roman
Catholic Church's acceptance of the 137-year-old theory. While Catholic schools have long
taught that religion and evolution need not conflict, many observers regard the Pope's
statement as a boost for those battling the forces of creationism in U.S. public schools.
The church first officially cast a favorable eye on evolution in a 1950 encyclical, Umani
Generis, by Pope Pius XII. John Paul, in a speech before a meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences at the Vatican this week, said that while the encyclical ``considered
the doctrine of `evolutionism' as a serious hypothesis … new knowledge leads us to
recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis. … The convergence …
of results of work done independently one from the other constitute in itself a
significant argument in favor of this theory.''
The Pope made it clear that while Darwin has the body, God still has the soul: ``If the
human body has its origin in living material which preexists it, the spiritual soul is
immediately created by God.''
"By this very clever move of the Pope," says Giulio Giorello, philosopher at the
University of Milan, "it will allow Darwinism to be studied not as a hypothesis but
as a real scientific truth, which will allow discussions on crucial issues such as
bioethics."
Italians made much of the statement. ``Pope says we may descend from monkeys,'' hooted the
conservative newspaper Il Giornale, according to a Reuters dispatch. Astrophysicist
Margherita Hack of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste considers the Pope's move new
and important. ``It is the first time that the church formally accepts the evolutionary
hypothesis as proven theory,'' she says. The statement, adds molecular biologist Giorgio
Tecce of Rome University, is part of ``a process of rethinking of the relationship between
the church and scientific developments'' ongoing since the Pope's 1992 rehabilitation of
Galileo. This is good news for science, Tecce says, because the anti-Darwinian view ``has
been used as an excuse by some in the scientific environment to put a brake on genetics
and molecular biology.''
U.S. Catholics, however, regard the Pope's statement as simply confirming a longtime
position. ``I don't think it's any great deal myself,'' says physician and theologian John
Harvey of Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
Read the full statement here. (Start at paragraph 62 for the statements relevant to the above press release).