Benedict the Enlightened

Oh my, isn't that a great handle for Ratzi? I just made it up.

It seems we're back to evolution again in the wake of last week's remarks by Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.... More praise of B16 from The Times in London

Last week [Poupard] was giving a press conference before a meeting in Rome of scientists, philosophers and theologians; this week they will be discussing the difficult subject of infinity. Cardinal Poupard had a beautifully trained French mind and inner loyalty to the Catholic faith. Nothing he says is said without careful thought. At the press conference he was discussing the issue of evolution, which is the critical dividing line between science and religion. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shook religious belief when it was first published in 1859 in a way that Isaac Newton’s equally important Principia had not shaken the faith of 1687.

In The Times Martin Penner reported the cardinal’s argument. He had said that the description in Genesis of the Creation was “perfectly compatible” with Darwin’s theory of evolution, if the Bible were read properly. “Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.”

He argued that the real message of Genesis was that the Universe did not make itself, and had a creator. “Science and theology act in different fields, each in its own.” In Rome, the immediate reaction was that this was a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of “intelligent design”. No doubt the Vatican does want to separate itself from American creationists, but the significance surely goes further than that. This is not another Galileo case; the teachings of the Church have never imposed a literal interpretation of the language of the Bible; that was a Protestant mistake. Nor did the Church condemn the theory of evolution, though it did and does reject neo-Darwinism when that is made specifically atheist.

And Schonborn showed up for an audience with the Pope at just about the same time. But that's beside the point. More on Poupard's alignment with the Pope:

It is a precautionary statement, distancing the Church from the American attack on Darwinism that Rome considers to be neither good science, nor good theology. It will also be taken as an indication of the priorities of the present Pope Benedict XVI.

His critics had expected him to be more conservative than his predecessor. I tended to share this expectation myself, but refrained from expressing it because new leaders always surprise one; they move in directions no one had previously foreseen. We should have been more conscious of differences between the national traditions of the Catholic Church in Poland and in Germany. The Polish Church, which trained John-Paul II, had always combined conservative theology with support for the national claims to liberty. The German Church has always been challenged by the modernism of German theology.

In the 16th century Germany was the region where the Reformation happened. German theologians on the Roman Catholic side had to understand the arguments of the Reformers if they were to reply to them. In the 18th century Germans were fully exposed to the French Enlightenment. In the 19th century they were exposed to German philosophers such as Hegel, and to the challenge of German biblical scholarship. Modernism itself in the late 19th century had a great influence on German Catholic opinion.

All these arguments are well understood by Benedict XVI, because so many of them are German arguments.

And because B16 is Benedict the Enlightened.

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