[Aquinasfan]

Reuters is full of it. According to Reuters, "The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution..."

Yet, it turns out that "The Roman Catholic Church" is a professor at (not coincidentally) Bologna University.

"Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the demand it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," said the article in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper.

Evolution represents "the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth" and the debate in the United States was "polluted by political positions," wrote Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at Italy's Bologna University.

[phantomworker]

Schoenborn [Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna] later made it clear the Church accepted evolution as solid science ..."

The Church, which has never rejected evolution, teaches that God created the world and the natural laws by which life developed. Even its best-known dissident, Swiss theologian Hans Kueng, echoed this in a recent book in Germany.

This literal reading of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is a tenet of faith for evangelical Protestants, a group that has become politically influential in the United States.

Many U.S. Catholics may agree with evangelicals politically, but the Church does not share their theology on this point. Intelligent design has few supporters outside the United States.

While not an official document, the article in L'Osservatore Romano had to be vetted in advance to reflect Vatican thinking.

Did you read the entire article? Catholicism is one of the largest mainstream religions in the world.