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Q: I know the Catholic Church is completely supportive of evolution, but I am wondering what its teachings are specifically regarding human evolution. Did we or did we not evolve from apes? (Frank)
Dear Frank:
There was a time when theologians rejected the idea of evolution, but this attitude changed in the late 1800's when Biblical scholars began to clarify the differences between religious truth, and scientific truth. Thus we arrive at the Church's view today, which sees the writers of Genesis, not as scientists, but as inspired authors communicating the great religious truths concerning Creation, the Fall, and Redemption.
There is no major conflict between the Church and science on this matter. God is the creator of all the processes of life, including evolutionary ones, if indeed that is how plant, animal and human life came to be developed.
The Church does not take definitive positions on specific scientific matters, such as whether man evolved from apes or some other kind of pre-human. The Church's main sphere of interest concerns the creation of the human soul, and the Church cautions against those evolutionary theorists who regard the soul as simply a by-product of the brain. The Church teaches us that souls have not evolved, but at some point were created immediately by God. In addition, our soul is immortal, and will be reunited with our body at the end of time.
Pope John Paul II touched on the topic of man developing from some kind of pre-human or antecedent living being, when he wrote:
It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution … it is possible that the human body, following the order impressed by the Creator on the energies of life, could have been gradually prepared in the forms of antecedent living beings. The human soul, however, on which man’s humanity definitively depends, cannot emerge from matter, since it is of a spiritual nature." (General Audience, 16 April 1986)
As Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote quite extensively about evolution, making the point that God willed the human being in a more specific and direct way than he willed other aspects creation, In doing so he created a being, Man, a subject capable of thought and with the ability to decide freely, who would know, love, and serve Him in this world, and be happy with Him forever in the next. So rather than us picturing human beings descending from the apes, writes evolutionary biologist Fiorenzo Facchini in the Vatican newspaper (May 5, 2008), we might better picture humans as ascending or rising up from the animal kingdom to a higher level, thanks to the hand of God.
God bless,
Father Norbert