The Catholic Church and Evolution

by Michael Shackleton · October 4, 2016

A friend tells me that last Easter, Pope Benedict backtracked on Pope John Paul II’s statement that the Church accepts evolution as a theory of the origin of life on earth and that Pope Benedict insisted that life can never have evolved randomly from the earth. Is what she tells me an accurate statement? What is the Church’s position on the theory of evolution? – Heather

evolution

The Church teaches that the totality of everything that exists depends entirely on the creative power of God, and God needs no pre-existing reality from which to make it.

Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis of 1950 was the first papal statement to set out the Church’s attitude to the Darwinian theory of evolution in regard to this doctrine.

Given that God created everything out of nothing, the pope said the Church did not forbid research and discussion on the theory that the human body came from pre-existent living matter, and Catholics were free to form their own opinions, doing so cautiously and not confusing fact with conjecture.

However, Catholics must believe that the human soul was created immediately by God because the soul is a spiritual and rational substance that could not be brought into being by the transformation of matter.

In 1996 Pope John Paul II, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, repeated this by saying that the human soul could never emerge from the forces of living matter.

Simply put, whereas the human body may have evolved progressively over time, God directly endows each of us with a unique rational soul. It is the soul which makes each individual person capable of reasoning and making free decisions.

So, when in April 2005 Pope Benedict told scientists that human beings are not some product of evolution but each of us is the product of a thought of God, he was naturally referring to our rational soul.

At the Easter Vigil Mass this year he said: “It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.” This quote, I suspect, is what your friend had in mind.

Here the pope was clearly saying that rational life did not evolve randomly from matter. You see, then, the pope said nothing new or startling.