Editor's Note:

Following today's issue, Sightings will be on summer hiatus until Monday, August 8.

The installation of a new pope brings its own kind of honeymoon: Catholics and (to the degree that they take an interest) the wider world usually await the initial encyclical of a new pontiff before beginning to draw conclusions about the future directions the Catholic Church will take.

In the context of the recent installation of Pope Benedict XVI, a July 7th op-ed piece in the New York Times by Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn, archbishop of Vienna, is thus all the more striking ("Finding Design in Nature"). Adjudicating what would appear to be an internecine Catholic issue -- what did the previous pope, John Paul II, really think about the relation between the theory of evolution and Church teaching about God's role in creation and the doctrine of divine providence? -- Schoenborn effectively leapfrogs John Paul's more recent (and widely cited) formal statement of compatibility, published in 1996. He asserts that the pope's actual convictions and "robust teaching on nature" -- the Church's definitive teaching -- is more accurately reflected in statements made as part of a 1985 general audience. The cardinal's revisionist reading of papal pronouncements serves his contention that the "neo-Darwinian dogma" of evolution is not compatible with Christian faith. "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true," he writes, "but...an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not."

The waters were further stirred by a July 9th news article on the Times' front page, whose authors report that in a telephone conversation the cardinal "said he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories" ("Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution"). The article also connects the cardinal's essay with the personnel and general mission of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA, whose Web site states that it advocates teaching "scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory, not alternatives to it." According to the Times article, Cardinal Schoenborn was in contact with the Institute prior to writing his essay, and the essay was submitted to the Times by Creative Response Concepts, a public relations firm whose clients include the Institute. Readers are naturally left to wonder about the degree to which the placing of a piece ostensibly devoted to resolving an internal Catholic dispute in a national newspaper of record was accidental or not. Was the cardinal, in offering an interpretation of pontifical teaching, in fact allying Church teaching with the "intelligent design" theories of the Discovery Institute, and by implication the pending American court case involving the teaching of evolution (Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al.)?

Biologists have written to Benedict XVI to express their dismay at the Schoenborn essay, and to request clarification that the Church's stand on the relationship between scientific method and religious belief continues to reflect John Paul II's 1996 letter to the Pontifical Academy, in which the pope affirmed the compatibility of "scientific rationality and the Church's spiritual commitment to divine purpose and meaning in the Universe." This exchange will play itself out in the months ahead, but I predict that its outcome will not make the editorial page -- much less the front page -- of the Times.

Of greater interest is the specter of a cardinal choosing to take center stage during the new pope's honeymoon with the world. What is happening here is of great import to Catholics everywhere, and has significant implications for Catholicism's role in the world in this new century and the special challenges it presents to all of us, perhaps especially to those who possess, and seek to act responsibly on, religious commitments.

While we ought to honor the tradition of awaiting the first encyclical, Pope Benedict has repeatedly and unwaveringly declared in his public pronouncements to date his concern that the Church address what he has described as the relativism of the modern world. Benedict has averred his interest in addressing its specific manifestations in western Europe, and has even at times offered the conjecture that the Church may need to shrink in size to retain the integrity of its witness to truth. This strikes a very different note from the words and deeds of John Paul II, whose consummate media papacy reflected an incipient evangelistic impulse.

This stance perhaps reflects a dubiety about the Church's Second Vatican Council, specifically regarding those of its conciliar documents which express the need for the Church to engage, indeed to learn from and to be shaped by, the wider world of knowledge and practice of which it is a part. Conciliar documents in any religious tradition are notoriously ambiguous, and those of the Catholic Church are certainly no exception to the rule. But there is little doubt that the thrust of the Council -- to open the windows and doors of the Church to the world, in one apt phrasing -- will, at least in this pontificate, be under some duress. Up to now the vast majority of Catholics have assumed that, following the impulse of the Council, a Catholic theology could learn from and accommodate productively the truths of, for example, the theory of evolution. Whether that can continue to be the understanding -- or whether relativism will be understood to encompass modern science, to say nothing of modern politics, biblical hermeneutics, etc. -- is clearly at issue.

The important question -- one with more than internecine implications -- is whether a revisionist reading of the Council and its subsequent expressions by the new Catholic magisterium will willy-nilly make the Church an ally of such reactionary religious sensibilities as those of the exponents of creationism and "intelligent design."

Richard A. Rosengarten is Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the University of Chicago Divinity School.