Belief in the theory of evolution as accepted by science may be at odds with the Catholic faith, a leading cardinal has written. In an op-ed article in Thursday's New York Times, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, declared that "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
Cardinal Schoenborn asserted that he was not trying to break new ground in writing his essay, but to correct the idea, "often invoked," that the church accepts or at least acquiesces to the theory of evolution.
According to the Times, many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.
This led the cardinal, a member of the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, to say that he has been angry for years at those writers and theologians, many of them his fellow Catholics, who had "misrepresented" the church's position approving the idea of evolution as a random process.The cardinal said that students in all schools, not only Catholic schools, should be taught that evolution is merely one of many theories.
The cardinal told the Times that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that he had spoken to then-Cardinal Ratzinger two or three weeks before his election as Pope Benedict XVI in April.
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