So what is the Catholic doctrine?
The first teaching comes from Leo XIII – Adam & Eve were our first parents, by direct divine intervention and Eve was created from a portion of Adam’s body (*Arcanum Divinæ Sapientiæ *of Pope Leo XIII, 1880). Polygenism is thus impossible – that mankind arose from many first parents – the fairy-tale which is perpetrated today by most evolutionists.
Then from the Pontifical Biblical Commission in its response of 30 June, 1909,
On the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis, the declaration:
a) that those pseudoscientific exegetical systems elaborated for the purpose of “excluding the literal historical sense of the first three chapters of Genesis” are not based upon solid arguments (EB 324; DS 3512).
So as Fr Harrison rightly points out in
Did The Human Body Evolve Naturally? A Forgotten Papal Declaration:
“We are not dealing here with a mere Allocution, a
Motu Proprio, a Brief, an Apostolic Exhortation, or a
Nuntius, but **a fully-fledged piece of pontificating endowed with no less inherent or formal authority than *Humani Generis ***or
Providentissimus Deus: the Encyclical Letter *Arcanum Divinæ Sapientiæ *of Pope Leo XIII on
Christian Marriage, dated 10 February 1880.”
rtforum.org/lt/lt73.html
The
Arcanum Divinæ Sapientiæ to which refers to Eve being taken from Adam’s side says:
We call to mind facts well-known to all and doubtful to no-one: **after He formed man from the slime of the earth on the sixth day of creation, and breathed into his face the breath of life, God willed to give him a female companion, whom He drew forth wondrously from the man’s side as he slept. **In bringing this about, God, in His supreme Providence, willed that this spousal couple should be the natural origin of all men: in other words, that from this pair the human race should be propagated and preserved in every age by a succession of procreative acts which would never be interrupted. And so that this union of man and woman might correspond more aptly to the most wise counsels of God, it has manifested from that time onward, deeply impressed or engraved, as it were, within itself, two preeminent and most noble properties: unity and perpetuity.
This is where the pertinent information is in the document. The most important part is in blue. In the larger context, it the Pope is discussing the origin of Adam in Eve to make a bigger point about the origin of marriage. Context is key here. This encyclical largely concerns marriage. A brief summary can be read
here. It seems that when he says above that the “facts well-known to all and doubtful to no-one,” he is not so much concerned with asserting the historicity of those items, but rather is laying the ground for why whatever he has to say about marriage is true. He assumes his audience knows of the story of Adam and Eve as told by Genesis. Adam and Eve, as the original couple, is the real issue: They are the paradigm for the Pope’s explanation of marriage in society.
Now, if we are to say that this statement requires the belief that Eve came from Adam (or his side), then we must also say that it requires the belief that God formed man “from the slime of the Earth on the sixth day,” as the document says just before it refers to Eve’s creation from Adam. Yet we know from current Church doctrine that we are permitted to adhere to the evidence of science, which points to both (1) an old Universe and Earth [not “six days”] and (2) the evolution of the human body [not a special creation from the “slime of the Earth”]. So there has to be consistency here. And one cannot say that the only consistent answer is to believe in a six-day creationism, when the Church in fact teaches it is perfectly acceptable that the human body evolved over time. And the Church certainly does not require us to believe in a certain age of creation (the six days of Genesis, as the papal document refers to).
I think there are multiple ways we can reconcile this statement from the papal document with current Church teaching, since, after all, the Church today would seemingly reject that “the facts” the document refers to are “well-known” and “doubtful to no one” in the historical or scientific sense. For one, this document, or this part of the document, does not meet the requirement for an infallible papal statement. Then we would have to judge whether it is part of the universal ordinary magisterium, which would seem it is not, since the magisterium today… does not require belief in a literal six-days or special creation of Adam’s body. In fact, leading figures and popes have seen to be moving away from that idea for some time.
So I simply do not think this Papal document can be used as support for the belief, when the same reasoning given to belief in Eve’s creation from Adam would also require us to believe in items the Church has explicitly made clear we do not have to believe.
