Everything within the Bible is God-given Truth. Some of it is expressed literally, some metaphorically, some allegorically, and some of it is poetic. It is all “literally true”, but it is a mistake to interpret everything literally. We interpret the Virgin Birth literally because it has always been understood to be so; we are not bound to understand the creation account in a literal sense because, from the earliest Christian centuries and before, there has never been consensus to that effect even among the most orthodox of believers. The notion of, “The Bible Says It, I Believe It, That Settles It,” without a firm and extensive understanding on a wide variety of scholarly subjects relating to the Scriptures, its languages, and its historical contexts is fraught with the potential for grievous error.
I’d offer, in fact, that this is a large part of the reason why the Church traditionally limited authorization to read the Scriptures among those who otherwise might have had access to read them. Even the original Protestant Reformers did not view the Bible as a simplistic and literal work to be read without extensive knowledge of language, history, and traditional interpretations. The idea of Book, Believer, and Holy Ghost arose somewhat later.
Even Sola Scriptura, properly understood, does not reject the role of tradition in this sense.
Modernism itself is not the rejection of the notion that the entirety of Scripture must be interpreted literally. Indeed, the idea that the whole of Scripture must be interpreted literally is a modern innovation by noble souls who wished to counter the errors of modernism but who were not fully aware of its nature. Modernism, at its core, is the rejection of tradition as the primary lens through which Scripture must be viewed. It is tradition that teaches us which parts of Scripture are literal and which are metaphor. Tradition has never insisted the creation narrative to be literally true, at least not in terms of the particular details it lays out. That the world was created in seven literal days is far less important than the overall message — that God created the world and all that is in it, that God created Man in His Image, and, perhaps most pertinent to our current condition of all, that man repaid God by sinning against His Command and, as a result, has lost God’s amity and is repaid with the wages of suffering, death, and further sin.
I’d offer that to embrace Biblical Literalism, while certainly well intentioned, is to accept the Modernist world view implicitly because, in essence, it plays by Modernism’s rules.
All this said, while Catholics are at liberty to believe in evolution, Catholics are absolutely not at liberty to embrace a purely atheistic model of evolution that allows for no role of God in the creation of Life or in the special creation of Man in His Image. Christians are not at liberty to deny the reality of the fall, even if they interpret the narrative of the snake and fruit as something emblematic of something more mysterious and profound. Acknowledgement that a story might simply be a finger pointing at the moon is not permission to ignore the finger or not to ponder the object of its attention.
Ho-hum.
Your church fathers were, with the exception of Augustine (who was no evolutionist) literalist young earth creationists. It is now stated ex post facto that "there was no consensus" for two reasons: 1)"we now know" that this never happened, and 2)that's what that trailer trash believe, and dang it, we Catholics are intellectuals! We're not trailer trash!
Serafim Rose (an Orthodox priest-monk) wrote a book entitled Genesis and Early Man which demonstrates that the church fathers were literalists. The author also found out, to his great astonishment, that they were also young earth creationists, but, dang it all, he wasn't going to get involved in that, because he wasn't trailer trash!
You don't have to tell me about the levels of meaning in the Bible. But your claim that no one until the nineteenth century ever interpreted the Bible literally is historical revisionism. And by the way, thanks for your back-door endorsement of the documentary hypothesis (I suppose that's "always been believed" as well?).
Where are you Catholic creationists? Why don't you ever respond to posts like this one? Why are you always so silent? Is it not important to you?
Unfortunately, they are not at liberty to believe in six day young earth creationism because "that's Protestant." You mean like the documentary hypothesis?