'Daylight Origins Society' reading material

Truth Declared In Apostolic Tradition

The whole point of the 19th Century push to justify evolution was to enable a naturalistic explanation of Origins without the need for a transcendent Creator. Unfortunately, the compromise concept known as Theistic Evolution is of little use in the struggle against materialistic Evolutionism. But the Catholic Church has not been silent in declarations in encyclicals and Councils about Creation and evolution.

Leo XIII taught in his 1880 encyclical Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae that Adam was made from the slime of the Earth and that Eve was specially created from a portion of Adam’s body. The four conditions which Vatican Council II would later recognize in Lumen Gentium (para. 25) in order for a doctrine to be proposed infallibly by the ordinary Magisterium had been fulfilled by the year 1880 with respect to the origin of Eve as taught by Leo XIII. The Church has thus declared that the first female human being was specially created; her body did not come via evolution. Thus, the origin of Eve’s body is not an open question for Catholics.

Leo XIII also implicitly ruled out polygenism (i.e., “many first parents”) by insisting on monogenism in the same encyclical. Polygenism was also strongly condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis. He declared that Catholics,

“cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.”

It is noteworthy that Fr. J. Franklin Ewing, SJ, a paleontologist and theistic evolutionist, wrote in the 1956 publication Human Evolution of his own conviction that Pius XII had taught that polygenism is irreconcilable with the doctrine of Original Sin. Further, polygenism was also ruled out in the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church (see para. 360, footnote 226 reference to the Book of Tobit 8:6:

“Thou madest Adam of the slime of the earth and gave him Eve for a helper. From them the race of mankind has sprung. …”.

Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5 - Page 6 - Page 7 - Page 8 - Page 9 - Page 10 - Page 11 - Page 12 - Page 13 - Page 14