The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism, 1831-1950

The history of the Catholic Church's response to evolutionary biology has often been badly misrepresented as antagonistic. In fact, its response is better characterized as a long process of accommodation. This work is a comprehensive introduction to the work of the Catholic scientists and theologians who worked out the details of that accommodation.

Few Catholics found the evolutionary origin of plant and animal species theologically objectionable. None thought that evolutionary processes provided a sufficient account of the origin of the first human beings. Catholics differed over whether those processes played a role in the origin of the first human body.

Catholic evolutionism began with the work of four nineteenth-century scientists who might be called the pioneers of Catholic evolutionism—Belgian geologist Jean-Baptiste d'Omalius d'Halloy, English anatomist George Mivart, Italian anatomist Filippo De Filippi, and French paleontologist Albert Gaudry. The next generations of Catholic evolutionists, writing in the period from about 1890 - 1940, included scientists (Jesuit entomologists Erich Wasmann and Felix Rüschkamp) as well as priests who focused more exclusively on the question of compatibility (Dalmace Leroy, John Zahm, Henry de Dorlodot, and Ernest Messenger). Among the scientists might also be included French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who made some contributions to the general idea of the compatibility of evolutionary biology and Catholic theology, but who eventually veered off in the direction of a comprehensive evolutionary theology of nature the details of which are beyond the scope of this book.

Catholic anti-evolutionists made efforts to have the Church prohibit works of Catholic evolutionism that, in their judgment gave evolutionary processes too great a role in the formation of the human body or that relied on problematic principles of hermeneutics. Efforts on the former front were eventually blocked by Pope Pius XI. The first magisterial statement on the question came, however, only in 1950, with Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani generis, which provisionally declared the orthodoxy of evolutionary accounts of the origin of the human body.

In addition to providing details about Catholic evolutionists and the magisterium, the book also reviews the treatment of the new ideas in Catholic encyclopedias, periodicals, and textbooks. Although written in the first instance as a work of scholarship, the book was also written with attention to the needs of scientists, priests, and members of the general public who are interested in the question.