That quote from Humani Generis does not establish that evolution is heresy, or even incorrect. It merely states that "the greatest moderation and caution" should be used before it is accepted within the church." The symposium recognizes the fact that "Put crudely, the widely accepted scientific worldview is that human beings or any other product of evolutionary diversification is accidental and, by implication, incidental." The symposium is assuming evolution for the purpose of determining whether evolution necessitates such an atheistic world view.
The plain purpose, then, of assuming evolution is not to recognize that evolution is fact, but rather to examine evolution as it presently understood by biologists. So what the symposium is doing is actually fully in line with the excerpt from Humani Generis: It is trying to separate the necessary implications of evolution from among those present presumptions which pit evolution against God. Presumably, if this effort fails, than the Church would do something that the excerpt does not: condemn evolution, and formulate a response, an alternate explanation to account for the observations of biologists. If it succeeds, than the Church presumably would try to reconcile evolution to divine revelation.
Keep this is mind: A symposium was held on the Big Bang. The Pope discussed his understandings with Steven Hawkins. Steven Hawkins wrote that the Pope showed a masterful understanding of the Physics involved. So when the Pope asserted that the Big Bang actually confirmed the teachings of the Catholic Church, Hawkins, a devoted atheist, was alarmed so gravely that he has devoted every moment of his research since to promoting theories which are contradictory to the Big Bang, and which are shown to be in contradiction to observation at every turn.
***I'm looking up the quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas, now...
***
Then he was wrong.
So what do you have to say to these statements which clearly show that evolution is INCORRECT!
In Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae Encyclical Of Pope Leo XIII On Christian Marriage 1880 sec 5 "We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep.see http://www.freivald.org/~jake/library/arcanum-divinae-sapientiae_on-christian-marriage_html/arcanum-divinae-sapientiae_on-christian-marriage_documenttext.html
Vatican Council I in 1870, laid out this infallible dogmatic statement, along with an accompanying anathema, saying:"If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing, let him be anathema."
Pius IX also approved the following teaching of the first Vatican Council :
“This sole true God by His goodness and omnipotent power, not to increase His own beatitude, and not to add to, but to manifest His perfection by the blessings which He bestows upon creatures with most free volition, immediately from the beginning of time fashioned each creature, out of nothing, spiritual and corporeal, namely the angelic and the mundane; and then the human creation, common as it were, composed of both spirit and body.”
Denziger, para.1783, English translation of 30th edition by Roy J. Deferrari,(1957). B. Herder Book Co., London.
Evolutionary theory was shown to be incorrect in 1860 when the Council of Cologne condemned the idea of human evolution in very straightforward words:
"Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that...those who...assert...man...emerged from spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith."
Epiphanius (315-403): "Adam, who was fashioned from the earth on the sixth day and received breath, became a living being (for he was not, as some suppose, begun on the fifth day, and completed on the sixth; those who say have the wrong idea), and was simple and innocent, without any other name." (Panarion 1:1, translated by Phillip R. Amidon).
Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386): "In six days God made the world...The sun, however resplendent with bright beams, yet was made to give light to man, yea, all living creatures were formed to serve us: herbs and trees were created for our enjoyment...The sun was formed by a mere command, but man by God's hands" (Catechetical Lectures 12, 5).
“The Theory of Evolution Judged by Faith and Reason”(1959) English translation by John F. O’Hanlon P.P., S.T.L., published by Joseph F. Wagner, Inc., New York and by B.Herder, London, at pp. 124 et seq., Ernesto, Cardinal Ruffini, demonstrates that the Greek, Syrian and Latin Fathers, whom he names and quotes, all held the opinion that the description of the creation of our first parents in Genesis 2 is literally true.
Rev. Father Brian Harrison, in his theological treatise, “Did Woman Evolve from Beasts?”demonstrates that:
(1.) as early as 3 February, 557, in an epistle to King Childebert I and later in an epistle, “Vas Electionis”, addressed to the whole Church, Pope Pelagius I taught that Adam and Eve “were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of man” (see p. 8); and
(2.) the Council of Vienne (1312) not only affirmed the doctrine of the special creation of Eve from Adam’s side but also taught that it was a profound and beautiful foreshadowing of the mystical foundation of the Church, the immaculate Spouse of the Church, whereby it prefigured the water and blood, symbols of the principal sacraments, that flowed from the side of Christ at Calvary. See pp.8/9. (Copies of this article, sections 1 and 2, can be accessed on the website of the Roman Theological Forum, rtforum org , “Living Tradition” Numbers 97 and 98.)
And finally what does the angelic doctor have to add to the literal vs. figurative debate regarding the creation of man.
Aquinas asks "Whether woman should have been made from man?"
Objection 1: It would seem that woman should not have been made from man. For sex belongs both to man and animals. But in the other animals the female was not made from the male. Therefore neither should it have been so with man.
Objection 2: Further, things of the same species are of the same matter. But male and female are of the same species. Therefore, as man was made of the slime of the earth, so woman should have been made of the same, and not from man.
On the contrary, It is written (Ecclus. 17:5): "He created of him," that is, out of man, "a helpmate like to himself," that is, woman.
“I answer that, When all things were first formed, it was more suitable for the woman to be made from man that (for the female to be from the male) in other animals. First, in order thus to give the first man a certain dignity consisting in this, that as God is the principle of the whole universe, so the first man, in likeness to God, was the principle of the whole human race. “Wherefore Paul says that "God made the whole human race from one" (Acts 17:26). Secondly, that man might love woman all the more, and cleave to her more closely, knowing her to be fashioned from himself. Hence it is written (Gn. 2:23,24): "She was taken out of man, wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife."
....the human male and female are united, not only for generation, as with other animals, but also for the purpose of domestic life, in which each has his or her particular duty, and in which the man is the head of the woman.
“Reply to Objection 2: Matter is that from which something is made. Now created nature has a determinate principle; and since it is determined to one thing, it has also a determinate mode of proceeding. Wherefore from determinate matter it produces something in a determinate species. On the other hand, the Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man.
Reply to Objection 3: A certain affinity arises from natural generation, and this is an impediment to matrimony. Woman, however, was not produced from man by natural generation, but by the Divine Power alone. Wherefore Eve is not called the daughter of Adam; and so this argument does not prove.
St. Thomas Aquinas The Summa Theologica Quest. 92 article 2 (Benziger Bros. edition, 1947) see http://www.stjamescatholic.org/summa/FP/FP092.html
“Whether the woman was fittingly made from the rib of man?
"Wherefore from any other matter an individual of the human species cannot naturally be generated. Now God alone, the Author of nature, can produce an effect into existence outside the ordinary course of nature. Therefore God alone could produce either a man from the slime of the earth, or a woman from the rib of man."
(Summa Question: 92 Article 4 Ibid.) Catholics are NOT fundamentalists when the take the Genesis account literally anymore than the early Church fathers were, Thomas Aquinas or past Church Councils or past Popes.
So it has been clearly demonstrated that you can’t make a “monkey’s uncle out of the Catholic Church” with false theory of macro evolution which contradicts divine revelation and has no real scientific evidence to back it up. Has anyone ever seen one kind of species evolve into a completly new and different kind of species?
As G. K. Chesterton said regarding the scientist, “ But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own backyard... For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.” (G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting