Letters to the Editor
-
@JosephU
Council of Trent? First Vatican Council (1868)? Pius XII (1950s)?
You see how all of your "proofs" for the backwardness of the Catholic Church are pre-Vatican II? You do realize that, contrary to popular opinion, the church is not a monolithic enterprise; that once a proclimation is made there it stays, forever encased in stone?
How do these quotes grab ya?
the Vatican's former chief astronomer, Fr. George Coyne, prior to his retirement, issued a statement on 18 November 2005 saying that "Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science." Cardinal Paul Poupard added that "the faithful have the obligation to listen to that which secular modern science has to offer, just as we ask that knowledge of the faith be taken in consideration as an expert voice in humanity." He also warned of the permanent lesson we have learned from the Galileo affair, and that "we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism." Fiorenzo Facchini, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, called intelligent design unscientific, and wrote in the January 16-17, 2006 edition L'Osservatore Romano (The Vatican's Newspaper: "But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science....It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious."