Don't you hate people who ride their own hobby-horses to death? Can't help it, though. Here, Cardinal Schönborn makes the point my own hubby wrote about in the W. Post at the time --namely, that all those people back in 1996 who read JPII's comments on evolution before a group of scientists as the Church's approval of evolution were misreading him entirely. The Pope was deliberately vague about evolution, a question better left to scientists. His purpose was to defend the human soul --and to tell scientists that just as there are questions outside the scope of theology, so there are questions outside the scope of science. Both fields can be put at the service of the truth, but just as the Pope wouldn't presume to say what scientific experiments will tell us, science, too, would be better served by keeping a prudent silence on questions it can't answer. The matter has arisen again because people are trying to call B16 an evolutionist, too. You really must RTWT in order to follow the argument, but here's the conclusion.
Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers. Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.
