[StJacques]

"This heathen does not have a clue what the above means. There are too many inside baseball terms used - "divine casuality," "true contingency," etc."

"Divine causality" means "caused by God." In Catholic doctrine -- you would really need to read that Vatican document I linked, perhaps paragraphs 67 - 70, to get a theological introduction to these concepts -- there are two levels of "divine causality," God as the primary cause, meaning he did it himself outside of any natural process he created, and God as the secondary cause, meaning that is from within a natural process he created but without his direct intervention. "True contingency" is another way of expressing secondary causes and it means a natural process that unfolds of its own accord without the supernatural intervention of God. The implication you draw from this is that evolution and Christianity are not incompatible because a natural process that unfolds of its own accord still does so according to God's plan because it is God's process.

[Torie]

Thank you for an excellent explanation. But if one accepts that homo sapiens are a splendid accident of evolution, and God was only there to create the processes that allowed it to happen, by accident, than we have a species created in "God's image" or whatever the correct term is, that was an accident. If it was not an accident, and it was part of God's plan, his planned end game, than you are positing mechanisms that inevitably lead to the emergence of homo sapiens, and that gets rather near to ID, does it not?

If I get lucky, and this heathen is fortunate enough to meet the Pope next month, and he seems to have the time, maybe I will ask him myself. :)

[curiosity]

The implication you draw from this is that evolution and Christianity are not incompatible because a natural process that unfolds of its own accord still does so according to God's plan because it is God's process.

Or put in simple language, evolution may have created us, but God created evolution, so ultimately God is still our creator.

This stuff is really not that complicated. While I have high regard for the scholastics, using their fancy terminology often obscures things rather than clarifies, especially in a case like this.