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Pope Pius XI firmly rejected Catholic support for theistic evolution in the 20th century – LifeSite


Editor’s note: This article is Part 4 of a four-part study of Pope Pius XI’s understanding of the Catholic doctrine of creation as opposed to the modern scientific proposition of the evolution of mankind. Parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.

(Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation) — What is the status quo following Pope Pius XI’s critique of Darwin’s evolutionary proposition? As we approach the centenary of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, the mass media are already gearing up to celebrate this “victory” of modern science over “fundamentalist” Christianity.

It is quite remarkable to reflect on the fact that the reigning pope at the time of the Scopes Trial had successfully defended the traditional doctrine of creation, thoroughly refuted the claims of the evolutionists, and stood by his work at the very time when most Catholic intellectuals in the United States and Europe were either embracing theistic evolution or, at best, half-heartedly defending the traditional doctrine of creation.

In 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in its public schools. When opponents of the law persuaded a physical education teacher to violate the law by teaching from a textbook that taught human evolution, one of the leading Protestant populist political leaders, William Jennings Bryan, agreed to prosecute the case and appealed to Catholic and Protestant leaders alike to come to his support.

With the death of Pope St. Pius X, enforcement of the Congregation of the Index’s 1878 ruling that evolution could not be reconciled with Christian doctrine effectively came to an end – as did a straightforward interpretation of the rulings of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Just one month before the Scopes Trial, Jesuit Father Francis LeBuffe argued in the pages of Commonweal magazine that the 1909 responses of the PBC prohibited Catholics from entertaining the hypothesis of the evolution of the human body from lower life-forms. But neither he nor any of the minority of like-minded conservative Catholic theologians in the U.S. seems to have been willing to answer Bryan’s call for support for his defense of Tennessee’s right to forbid the teaching of human evolution in the public schools.

The effective silencing of Catholic criticism of the mass media’s push for the teaching of evolution as fact in all government schools helped to pave the way for one of the greatest abuses of natural science in the history of the world, as virtually every argument in support of the evolutionary hypothesis assembled by Darrow’s defense team is now acknowledged to have been totally bogus, even by the evolution-believing scientific establishment.

As early as 1922, the American Association for the Advancement of Science had passed a resolution that “the evidences in favor of the evolution of man are sufficient to convince every scientist of note in the world.” Darrow deposed some of the most eminent “scientists of note” in the United States in advance of the trial, so that he would be ready to present the overwhelming evidence for the hypothesis of human evolution. Although these depositions were never actually introduced as evidence during the trial, it is still highly instructive to examine them, to see just how flimsy the evidence touted as convincing to “every scientist of note” actually was.

READ: Creation, evolution, and ‘brain death’: The soul is the form of the body

This is not the place to consider all the alleged evidence for evolution in the depositions collected by Clarence Darrow, but it is worth noting that Darrow brought a plaster cast of the Piltdown Man skull to the trial. From the day in 1912 when its discoverers announced that they had found a definite missing link between apes and humans, the New York Times launched the “accepted narrative” on Piltdown Man with the modest headline, “”Darwin Theory is Proved True” – not “supported,” “substantiated,” or even “confirmed” – but “proved true”!

In 1931, the New York Times underscored the all-but-universal acceptance of this “proof” of Darwin’s theory with an article on one of the most famous paleontologists of his age, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), who pontificated from his positions at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History that humans had evolved in Europe, and, specifically, in England!

From 1934 until 1952, two-thirds of all biology textbooks in the United States hailed “Piltdown Man” as fossil proof of man’s evolution from a one-celled organism through hundreds of millions of years of “struggle for existence.” It was only in 1953 that a careful examination of the Piltdown Man skull revealed that it was a fraud.

Fr. John Augustine Ryan and the Catholic response to the Scopes Trial

The evolutionists’ legal response to the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of human evolution was handled by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When a teacher was found willing to violate the law, and William Jennings Bryan offered to prosecute the case, the ACLU received an offer from superstar attorney Clarence Darrow to handle the defense. Moral theologian Father John Augustine Ryan was the only Catholic member of the ACLU board at the time, and he told the ACLU president Roger Baldwin, “I can’t object to your going into a case like this. I don’t care where the body comes from, as long as the soul is recognized as the creation of God.”

It is worth taking a few moments to reflect on this statement from a “rising star” among Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. almost 100 years ago – a statement that finds an echo in the writings of the overwhelming majority of Catholic intellectuals today.

On the one hand, Fr. Ryan’s opinion has become so commonplace among Catholic thinkers that it is hard to grasp the potential for harm that his statement contains. On the other hand, a serious reflection on the negative implications of his statement should lead any informed Catholic to some deeply disturbing considerations. Indeed, Fr. Ryan’s statement ought to have raised the specter of a kind of rising neo-gnosticism within Catholic intellectual circles, of the very sort that the Magisterium had sought to eradicate once and for all with the Firmiter decree of the Fourth Lateran Council against the heresy of the Albigensian-Catharist heretics.

The Albigensian heretics had denied the special creation of the various kinds of plants, animals, and even of the human body, thus rationalizing sexual immorality on the ground that it mattered little what men did with their bodies, since the soul was the only part of man that was directly created by God. Like many of today’s theistic evolutionists, Fr. Ryan and other rising stars in the intellectual firmament of the early 20th century focused on social justice while withdrawing their support for the foundations of social justice in the traditional understanding of natural law.

The creation of man as man and woman as woman with a stable human nature established the norms of human sexual morality for all times and places. The widespread acceptance of human evolution by Catholic intellectuals like Fr. Ryan destroyed this foundation and eventually led to the acceptance of homosexuality, contraception, transgenderism, and other perversions, since the human body of man and woman in its original form was no longer seen as specially created for the soul as the “form of the body” – as defined at the Ecumenical Council of Vienne in 1312 – but as a transient physical habitation formed through material processes over long ages of time.

Evolving human nature is defined as much by its alleged evolutionary ancestors and close relatives – like the chimpanzees and bonobos – as by the state of its physical organization at any particular point in its evolutionary history. Worse still, to the extent that Catholic intellectuals retained any respect for the natural law, Fr. Ryan’s perspective led to the practice of regarding fallen human nature as the norm, rather than the original human nature specially created by God in the beginning.

Pseudo-science-tsunami and the curse of Galileo

Catholic intellectuals were not only afraid to be associated with protestant fundamentalists. They were also intimidated by secular intellectuals like Edwin Conklin at Princeton University who reminded the readers of the New York Times shortly before the Scopes Trial of the Catholic Church’s role in retarding scientific progress in the Galileo Affair.

To this day the myth of the Catholic Church’s role in the alleged obstruction of scientific progress through her persecution of Galileo is so widely believed that a mere mention of Galileo suffices to silence most Catholics who dare to question the consensus view on any topic related to the origins of man and the universe. That this was already the case 100 years ago is apparent from the ease with which pseudo-scientific claims were passed off as hard evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis during the Scopes Trial with scarcely a word of protest from Catholic intellectuals.

READ: How Adam and Eve paved the way for the modern scourge of divorce

The chasm that separated the Catholic faith of Pope Pius XI in 1925 from the modernist consensus that has gradually suppressed the expression of that faith in the United States and Europe has only continued to grow. And yet Pope Pius XI’s refutation of the evolutionary hypothesis is as true today as when he penned it. Not only have the principles that he invoked been thoroughly vindicated; the empirical evidence has mounted up in contradiction to the predictions of the evolutionists and in harmony with the literal historical truth of Genesis which the future Pope Pius XI so ably defended.

In light of the pope’s adherence to the true Catholic doctrine of creation, it seems fitting that he was chosen by the Queen of Heaven to receive her request for the Consecration of Russia in 1929, to prevent the spread of evolutionism and the other “errors of Russia” throughout the world. Indeed, it would seem that some strong modernist influence must already have entered into the circle of the pope’s advisors, preventing him from acting decisively according to his stated beliefs in response to the Cristero War in Mexico, the Scopes Trial in the United States, and the requests of Our Lady of Fatima.

How different the world would be today if Pope Pius XI had been free to act according to the truth that he had always believed and defended so well in these three matters!

Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the series on Pope Pius XI’s study of creation can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Reprinted with permission from the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation.


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