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Early Vatican Responses to Evolutionist Theology
by Brian W. Harrison, O.S. ** ** In recent years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the ‘Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office’, has made available for *bona fide *scholarly research its archives up to the end of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903. This represents a marked innovation in Vatican policy. Indeed, it is the first time in the centuries-long history of the Holy Office that the traditional norm of strict secrecy has been relaxed with regard to any of these documents. Now, at least in regard to the pre-20th-century material, this vast storehouse of intense theological reflection and disputation, involving some of the Church’s finest minds, is being unveiled, so to speak, and will doubtless prove to be of great value for a deeper understanding of the history of theology, and of the development of Catholic doctrine.
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by Brian W. Harrison, O.S. ** ** In recent years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the ‘Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office’, has made available for *bona fide *scholarly research its archives up to the end of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903. This represents a marked innovation in Vatican policy. Indeed, it is the first time in the centuries-long history of the Holy Office that the traditional norm of strict secrecy has been relaxed with regard to any of these documents. Now, at least in regard to the pre-20th-century material, this vast storehouse of intense theological reflection and disputation, involving some of the Church’s finest minds, is being unveiled, so to speak, and will doubtless prove to be of great value for a deeper understanding of the history of theology, and of the development of Catholic doctrine.
Code:
Not long ago I was able to avail myself of this new opportunity, becoming the first ‘outsider’ to inspect the files from the 1890s containing some of the initial evaluations of evolutionary theory by the Church’s teaching authority. It might be supposed, given the relative lack of interest in such matters on the part of recent theologians, that the doctrinal issues raised back then have all been settled peacefully over the period in which these documents were gathering the plentiful dust which greeted my respiratory system when they were finally roused from their century-long slumber and deposited on my table in the CDF reading room. In fact, these issues seem to me just as pertinent now as they were then – if not more so.
Shortly after Darwin’s *Origin of Species* appeared in 1859, the first significant magisterial response on the part of the Successors of the Apostles was that of the German Catholic bishops, who, in their Provincial Council of Cologne (1860), condemned the idea of natural human evolution in no uncertain terms:
[indent] Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that the opinion of those who do not fear to assert that this human being, man as regards his body, emerged finally from the spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith.[1](http://www.kolbecenter.org/presentations/Harrison/harrison.vatican.htm#ref1)
[/indent] In the next decades, no declarations were made on this subject by the Holy See, although Vatican Council I had on its agenda a reaffirmation of God’s special creation of the bodies of Adam and Eve, and probably would have promulgated this teaching had the Council not been cut short by the Franco-Prussian war. Nevertheless, Rome’s silence in response to Germany’s eloquence obviously signified her consent, since those bishops were simply repeating what the Church had always taught, and what was taught in all approved Catholic theology faculties at the time.
All right now, if the Council of Cologne has it right, what do we do with Pope Pius XII 1950 statement in Humani Generis that human evolution for the body is OK:
