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So here is what the actual statement of the Council Fathers says in English Translation. After we will look at how it applies to the Theory of Evolution.
[quote:3o6lxkni]4. If anyone says that finite things, both corporal and spiritual, or at any rate, spiritual, emanated from the divine substance; or that the divine essence, by the manifestation and evolution of itself becomes all things or, finally, that God is a universal or indefinite being which by self determination establishes the totality of things distinct in genera, species and individuals: let him be anathema.
5. If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema.[/quote:3o6lxkni]
Not one word of the declaration discusses, or hints at how God designed that mankind, or plants and animals would develop. It does not define that God created the first man who looked and acted like ourselves, or if He created the world, planets and universe, and at a later time after a period of development an immortal soul, with free will was infused into the first human parents. It only says that God is the creator of all things.
The reference to Evolution in the text is not a condemnation of the theory that God Created man, infused a soul in him and that there was a physical evolution, but rather that we without God’s intervention or creative power evolved an immortal soul, or rational mind on our own without or outside of God’s creative power and will.
Catholics may believe in Evolution, or a literal Seven day/24hr day creation as described in Genesis. All the Church requires is that we believe that God created all things, physical and spiritual out of nothing, and that He could have created it as described in the first chapter of Genesis.
One of the errors of the Modernists, which came to it’s theoretical conclusion in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, was that Both God and Creation are unfinished and continue to evolve. He implied that God really did not know how things would work out, because He like ourselves was still learning things and developing. So it was not Darwin’s theory of Evolution of the Species that was condemned, but rather that our souls evolved until they became human souls, without the aid of God, and His creative power.