Church wrangle over Darwin

The Vatican's astronomer has rebuffed a cardinal's attack on Darwinism, causing a new war of words in the Catholic Church over evolution.

In the article Finding Design in Nature in last month's New York Times, Cardinal Christoph Shonborn reignited the row between the Church and science by denying Darwin's theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith.

He wrote: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

This week Father George Coyne, an American Jesuit priest and a distinguished astronomy professor, attacked Shonborn's views in the Tablet, Britain's Catholic weekly.

Shonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, is a long-standing associate of Pope Benedict XVI, who it is thought would have backed his views.

Those views have provoked alarm among scientists and liberal Catholics around the world who thought Catholicism had come to terms with evolution, and who now see the spectre of creationism rising in the Church as it has risen among fundamentalist Christians in the United States.

This week, President George W. Bush said the theory of "intelligent design" - a version of creationism, which disputes the idea that natural selection alone can explain the complexity of life - should be taught in US schools alongside evolutionary theory.

Shonborn is understood to have been helped to get the article in the New York Times by Mark Ryland, a leading figure in the Discovery Institute, a conservative American Christian group which promotes the intelligent design viewpoint.

But now the cardinal's views have been robustly rejected by Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, which is linked to the University of Arizona.

In the Tablet, Coyne, 72, said Shonborn's article had "darkened the waters" of the rapport between Church and science, and asserted - flatly contradicting the cardinal - that even a world in which "life ... has evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection" is compatible with "God's dominion".

For a Vatican official of such seniority openly to attack the views of a cardinal on such a potentially explosive subject as evolution is unprecedented, revealing a rift at the heart of the Catholic Church's thinking.

Coyne wrote privately to Shonborn and the Pope, protesting at the New York Times article soon after it was published last month.

But many scientists, especially Catholic scientists, have contacted him to express their disquiet that he had to go public. It is believed he cleared the article with his Jesuit superiors.

At issue between the two churchmen are the views of John Paul II, who in 1996 declared to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis" and appeared to accept Darwin's theory.

In last month's article, Shonborn played down this statement as "rather vague and unimportant". He pointed to comments John Paul II made in 1985 when he spoke of the role of God the creator in designing the world.

Coyne attacked the cardinal's analysis and says the Pope's later statement was "epoch-making".

"Why does there seem to be a persistent retreat in the Church from attempts to establish a dialogue with the community of scientists, religious believers or otherwise?"

- Independent