...lobbying from a "creationist" group denouncing a Catholic booklet which affirms that it is possible to accept some form of evolution and still believe in the Creator. The lobby group seems to me rather panicky, and also confused and angry. They should calm down. A Christian can accept something of the evolutionary theory - it doesn't neccesarily contradict Genesis. This is a point that Pope Benedict has made more than once, and incidentally which Bl.John Henry Newman also made, writing in 1868, “the theory of Darwin, true or not, is not necessarily atheistic; on the contrary, it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of divine providence and skill.”
The new Youth Catechism produced for WYD tackles this rather well, affirming "God created the world out of nothing. He is Lord of history. He guides all things and can do everything. How he uses his omnipotence is of course a mystery...The sentence 'God created the world' is not an outmoded scientific statement. We are dealing here with a theo-logical statement, therefore a statement about the divine meaning and origin of things..."
YouCat has a Foreword by the H.Father and everyone attending WYD gets a copy. It is competently written and doesn't "talk down" to the young or attempt to be super-cool, it doesn't talk in jargon or assume its readers are stupid. It gives the Church's message and does so with confidence. Recommended.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
It's a great little book.
The Catholic Church doesn't deny science. Science is part of God's work. That's one thing that separates us from the strict protestants. Evolution is real. God started the process and guided the outcomes.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
St Augustine
Post a Comment