Posted on 07/22/2025 10:00 AM (CNA Daily News)
Sebastião Marques Panzo, director of the National Secretariat for the Apostolate of the Laity of the Bishops’ Conference of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe (CEAST). / Credit: ACI Africa
ACI Africa, Jul 22, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
The upcoming Third National Congress of Catholic Laity in Angola will be a defining moment for the people of God in the southern African nation, the director of the National Secretariat for the Apostolate of the Laity of the Bishops’ Conference of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe (CEAST) said in a press conference July 16.
Addressing journalists, Sebastião Marques Panzo shed light on the July 24–25 congress, which marks the resumption of a four-year cycle of coordination of the laity that was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Panzo said the planned congress seeks to strengthen lay identity, promote social transformation, and renew the mission of Catholic laypeople in society.
“This congress is a decisive milestone in the history of the laity and the Catholic Church in Angola,” he said, adding: “This will be a moment for examining our conscience and planning the future. Without evaluation, there is no authentic progress.”
He noted that the congress’ four-year rhythm allows lay movements to assess their work, reaffirm their mission, and adapt to changing realities in the light of the late Pope Francis’ teachings and the Church’s social doctrine.
Panzo recalled the two previous congresses held in Luanda in 1992 and 2019, each shaped by its own historical context.
“The first congress came shortly after the transition to multiparty democracy and called laypeople to embrace citizenship and social responsibility,” he said. “By 2019, the focus had shifted to laypeople as ‘salt and light in the world,’ with emphasis on active citizenship, solidarity, and public witness of faith.”
He added: “We want to consolidate what we have learned and build a more structured and influential lay Church.”
The choice of Namibe Diocese for the 2025 event reflects the national character of the congress and the fact that laypeople in all regions are essential to the Church’s life and mission, Panzo said.
“This choice affirms that all parts of the Church can embrace this moment of reflection and action.”
The event, guided by the theme “Angola at 50 Years: The Role of Catholic Laity in the Political, Social, Economic, and Business Sectors,” will feature two main activities.
The first is a public conference open to all the baptized. The second is a session restricted to 150 delegates — three from each diocese of CEAST, including São Tomé. The delegates are to be responsible for drafting and approving strategic directions for the next four years.
According Panzo, the public session is designed to form and integrate laypeople, while the closed-door session will focus on decision-making and united forward movement.
“We expect this to be a space of networking, strategic debate, and effective use of lay resources and talents,” he said.
The program also includes prayer, biblical formation, and catechesis.
“This solid balance between faith and action is the great richness of the congress,” Panzo said, adding that it “will be a moment of deep listening, living memory, and celebration — an opportunity to learn from those who have helped shape the Church with fidelity and courage.”
To enhance participation, Panzo said a virtual parish platform is to livestream the entire congress, making it accessible to Catholics unable to travel to Namibe.
“This ensures the congress reaches even those in remote areas,” he said.
Delegates are tasked with engaging local movements, collecting testimonies, and bringing grounded insights to the discussions.
“They are not only called to listen but to carry forward the mission,” Panzo said.
After the event, he said two documents will be prepared for publication: a report with recommendations from the public conference and a strategic orientation document for the next four years, to be available on the official event website.
“Let us build a Church that is more participatory, transparent, and missionary. May each layperson embrace their vocation with courage and wisdom,” Panzo said.
This story was first published by ACI Africa, CNA’s news partner in Africa, and has been adapted by CNA.
Posted on 07/22/2025 08:30 AM (USCCB News)
WASHINGTON - “Despite material poverty, the Catholic Church in Africa is bursting with spiritual life, filled with converts and has abundant vocations,” said Archbishop Thomas R. Zinkula of Dubuque, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Subcommittee on the Church in Africa. “The Solidarity Fund for the Church in Africa makes it possible for African Catholics to carry out vital spiritual and social ministries.”
Across Africa, where the boundless growth of the Catholic faith can challenge the Church as much as material poverty does, the gifts of American Catholics to the USCCB’s Solidarity Fund make this a reality.
The Solidarity Fund for the Church in Africa is supported by a collection that is taken up by dioceses across the country in parishes on a date scheduled by the diocese. The online platform #iGiveCatholicTogether also accepts funds for the Church in Africa program year-round.
“The African Church gives generously to the U.S. Church as thousands of African priests serve in parishes of the United States,” Archbishop Zinkula said, “We are all brothers and sisters in Christ with a shared commitment to share his love with everyone.”
Gifts to the Solidarity Fund for the Church in Africa help bishops’ conferences and dioceses throughout Africa manage ever-growing numbers of Catholics, cope with global and local crises, evangelize and renew the faith of the people. The Subcommittee on the Church in Africa awarded more than $2.6 million in 2024 for 96 grants that support ministries in 32 countries or multi-national regions of Africa.
The 2024 grant cycle included a wide variety of projects:
“The Solidarity Fund for the Church in Africa lives up to its name. Your gifts build true solidarity. Though you may never have the opportunity to meet the recipient, you can trust that souls will be saved, and faith renewed because of the work supported by the Solidarity Fund,” Archbishop Zinkula said.
For more information see https://www.usccb.org/committees/church-africa
###
Posted on 07/22/2025 08:30 AM (USCCB News)
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Of the many momentous or menial tasks women religious perform, one of the better-kept secrets has been the role of four Sisters of the Holy Child Mary who were part of a global effort to make a complete map and catalog of the starry skies.
Up until recently, the women were no more than nameless nuns whose image has long been preserved in a black and white photograph that showed them wearing impeccably ironed habits and leaning over special microscopes and a ledger.
Their identities were finally pulled out of obscurity by the late Jesuit Father Sabino Maffeo, who passed away at the age of 102 earlier this year. While serving as an assistant to the director of the Vatican Observatory, he stumbled upon their names while going through the observatory archives, "putting papers in order," he told Catholic News Service in an interview April 26, 2016.
Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri, all born in the late 1800s and from the northern Lombardy region near Milan, helped map and catalog nearly half a million stars for the Vatican's part in an international survey of the night sky.
Top astronomers from around the world met in Paris in 1887 and again in 1889 to coordinate the creation of a photographic "Celestial Map" ("Carte du Ciel") and an "astrographic" catalog pinpointing the stars' positions.
Italian astronomer and meteorologist, Barnabite Father Francesco Denza, easily convinced Pope Leo XIII to let the Holy See take part in the initiative, which assigned participating observatories a specific slice of the sky to photograph, map and catalog.
Father Maffeo, who was an expert in the observatory's history and its archivist, said Pope Leo XIII saw the Vatican's participation as a way to show the world that "the church supported science" and "was not just concerned with theology and religion."
The Vatican was one of about 18 observatories that spent the next several decades taking thousands of glass-plate photographs with their telescopes and cataloging data for the massive project.
But the project at the Vatican Observatory began to suffer after Father Denza died in 1894.
When Pope Pius X found out the new director wasn't up to the job, he called on Archbishop Pietro Maffi of Pisa to reorganize the observatory and search for the best replacement, Father Maffeo had said.
In 1906, the archbishop found his man at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. -- Jesuit Father John Hagen who had been heading its observatory there since 1888 and was renowned for his research on "variable" stars, which have fluctuating brightness.
Though he had extensive experience in astronomy, Father Hagen never did the kind of measurements and number crunching required for the astrographic catalog, Father Maffeo had said.
"So he went to Europe to see how they did it and saw that in some observatories there were women who read the (star) positions and wrote them in a book with precise coordinates," the Jesuit priest had said.
The astronomers told Father Hagen that once the young women "were shown how to do it, they were very diligent," Father Maffeo said. At the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, for example, they even were referred to as "lady computers" because of the skill needed to calculate the coordinates according to set formulae.
When Father Hagen wondered where he might be able to hire young women for the Vatican, "he immediately thought -- nuns," and contacted the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary, who were located nearby, Father Maffeo had said. Coincidentally, Mary is often symbolized in Catholic Church tradition by a star.
In a letter dated July 13, 1909, to the superior general, Mother Angela Ghezzi, Archbishop Maffi said the Vatican Observatory "needs two sisters with normal vision, patience and a predisposition for methodical and mechanical work."
Father Maffeo had said the sisters' general council was not enthused "about wasting two nuns on a job that had nothing to do with charity." However, Mother Ghezzi was "used to seeing God's will in every request," he said, and she let two sisters go to the observatory.
Work for the sisters began in 1910, but soon required a third and later a fourth nun to join the team. Two would sit in front of a microscope mounted on an inclined plane with a light shining under the plate-glass photograph of one section of the night sky.
The plates were overlaid with numbered grids and the sisters would measure and read out loud each star's location on two axes and another would register the coordinates in a ledger. They would also check enlarged versions of the images on paper.
The Vatican was one of about 10 observatories to complete its assigned slice of the sky. From 1910 to 1921, the nuns surveyed the brightness and positions of 481,215 stars off of hundreds of glass plates.
Their painstaking work did not go unnoticed at the time. Pope Benedict XV received them in a private audience in 1920 and gave them a gold chalice, Father Maffeo had said. Pope Pius XI also received the "measuring nuns" eight years later, awarding them a silver medal.
The Vatican's astrographic catalog, which totaled 10 volumes, gave special mention to the sisters, noting their "alacrity and diligence," uninterrupted labors and "zeal greater than any eulogy" could express at a task "so foreign to their mission."
The international project to catalog star positions and build a celestial map ended in 1966 and recorded nearly 5 million stars. The catalog consists of more than 200 volumes produced by 20 observatories and the unfinished map is made up of hundreds of sheets of paper -- all work culled from more than 22,000 glass photographic plates of the sky.
Father Maffeo had said, "Never before had there been a presentation of the stars as vast as this."
While huge technological developments in surveying stars quickly eclipsed the project, modern-day scientists eventually discovered that comparing the star positions recorded a century earlier with current satellite positions provided valuable information about star motions for millions of stars.
The project showed that even in a new era of satellites and software, quaint glass-plate photographs and "lady computers" weren't wholly obsolete.
- - -
This story was first published by Catholic News Service April 28, 2016.
Posted on 07/22/2025 08:00 AM (CNA Daily News - US)
“The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene” by Alexander Ivanov, 1834-1836. / Credit: Alexander Ivanov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
CNA Newsroom, Jul 22, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).
Not much is known about the life of St. Mary Magdalene, whose feast day is celebrated in the Church on July 22. She first appears in the Gospel of Luke as a follower of Christ from whom seven demons have been cast out. In the Gospels, she is sometimes associated with two other women in Scripture: the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with oil and Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
Her most prominent position in Scripture occurs in the Gospel of John, where she remains with Jesus at the Crucifixion, keeps vigil at the tomb, and is the first to see him on Easter morning. Differing traditions have her evangelizing in Ephesus, while others place her in Marseille, France.
Her body has never been found.
Apart from the Blessed Virgin Mary, perhaps no other saint alive during the time of Christ appears to have been as deeply moved by Jesus’ death as this saint.
“How beautiful to think that the first appearance of the Risen One took place in such a personal way! That there is someone who knows us, who sees our suffering and delusion, who is moved by us, and who calls us by name,” said Pope Francis of the encounter in a 2017 general audience the year after upgrading her memorial to a feast day in 2016.
After this shocking encounter, the joy of Christ’s resurrection imbued her with the courage to spread this good news joyfully. “I have seen the Lord!” she proclaimed to the apostles and the whole world. Once known as a sinful woman, Mary Magdalene becomes the Apostle to the Apostles, the first witness to the Resurrection, and the model of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ risen from the grave.
“God surprises her in the most unexpected way,” Pope Francis opined. “So that woman, who is the first to encounter Jesus ... now has become an apostle of the new and greatest hope.”
This story was first published on July 21, 2021, and has been updated.
Posted on 07/22/2025 08:00 AM (CNA Daily News)
“The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene” by Alexander Ivanov, 1834-1836. / Credit: Alexander Ivanov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
CNA Newsroom, Jul 22, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).
Not much is known about the life of St. Mary Magdalene, whose feast day is celebrated in the Church on July 22. She first appears in the Gospel of Luke as a follower of Christ from whom seven demons have been cast out. In the Gospels, she is sometimes associated with two other women in Scripture: the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with oil and Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
Her most prominent position in Scripture occurs in the Gospel of John, where she remains with Jesus at the Crucifixion, keeps vigil at the tomb, and is the first to see him on Easter morning. Differing traditions have her evangelizing in Ephesus, while others place her in Marseille, France.
Her body has never been found.
Apart from the Blessed Virgin Mary, perhaps no other saint alive during the time of Christ appears to have been as deeply moved by Jesus’ death as this saint.
“How beautiful to think that the first appearance of the Risen One took place in such a personal way! That there is someone who knows us, who sees our suffering and delusion, who is moved by us, and who calls us by name,” said Pope Francis of the encounter in a 2017 general audience the year after upgrading her memorial to a feast day in 2016.
After this shocking encounter, the joy of Christ’s resurrection imbued her with the courage to spread this good news joyfully. “I have seen the Lord!” she proclaimed to the apostles and the whole world. Once known as a sinful woman, Mary Magdalene becomes the Apostle to the Apostles, the first witness to the Resurrection, and the model of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ risen from the grave.
“God surprises her in the most unexpected way,” Pope Francis opined. “So that woman, who is the first to encounter Jesus ... now has become an apostle of the new and greatest hope.”
This story was first published on July 21, 2021, and has been updated.
Posted on 07/21/2025 23:05 PM (CNA Daily News - US)
William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Seward Darrow, during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 20, 1925. Because of the extreme heat, the proceedings were moved outdoors. / Credit: Smithsonian Institution from United States, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 21, 2025 / 19:05 pm (CNA).
Less than 70 years after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, became the center of the American debate about human evolution, the interpretation of Genesis, and broader sentiments about Christianity.
On July 21, 1925 — a century ago today — substitute teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of violating a state ban on teaching evolution in schools. His $100 fine (equal to $1,837 today) was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Both then and today, the widely publicized trial has been portrayed as a microcosm of an asserted battle between “science” and “religion.”
Scopes was defended by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Clarence Darrow, who was religiously agnostic. William Jennings Bryan, a Protestant Christian and three-time Democratic Party nominee for president, defended the state law and a literalist understanding of the first few chapters of Genesis.
During the trial, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert and proceeded to grill him on certain texts of the Bible and question their historical accuracy. That line of questioning allowed Darrow to use the trial as a proxy fight against Christianity itself. Although that portion of the trial was thrown out by the judge because it was not relevant to Scopes’ charges, it is remembered for its impact on 20th-century debates about human evolution and Christianity.
Most famously, the 1955 play and 1960 film “Inherit the Wind” played up the “science vs. religion” narrative, effectively solidifying that perception in American culture.
The reality of the conflict at the time, however, was much more nuanced than “science” against “religion.”
Dominican Father Thomas Davenport, a physicist and philosopher at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, told CNA it would be “wrong” to suggest that Catholicism was on the side against evolutionary thought during the trial.
“The trial was … more of a crisis and a conflict involving American Protestants than Catholics, in part because of a broader philosophical, theological, and scriptural traditions that Catholics have to draw on to understand God’s revelation and the natural world, and to put them in harmony,” said Davenport, who co-authored the book “Thomistic Evolution.”
Kenneth Kemp, a retired philosophy professor for the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told CNA: “The trial is too often used by anti-religious polemicists as support for their idea that the relation between science and religion is fundamentally conflictual.”
Kemp, who authored two books on evolution and Christianity — “The War That Never Was” and “The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism” — said it’s important to learn “how easily history can be distorted in the service of ideology.”
“The ‘wars’ underlying the Scopes trial were in fact not between science and religion but rather one war between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists, with Christians on both sides, and another war between militant atheists and Christians, with evolutionists on both sides,” he said.
Catholic scholars considered the possibility of human evolution since the middle of the 19th century, around the time Darwin posited his theory, according to Kemp. In a lecture that he delivered at the Thomistic Institute, he said there were three distinct positions by the tail end of the 1800s.
One position, he pointed out, was that bodily evolution was simply a myth. The second position was that the human body evolved from an ape-like ancestor but that the human soul is directly created by God. A third position between the two suggested that an ape-like ancestor evolved toward a preparatory stage but that the final stage of the human body was formed by a direct act of God.
Some books promoting the second view were placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books in the 1890s, but the Church avoided making any proclamations on evolution at the time. The First Vatican Council in 1870 avoided the subject despite the widespread public discourse.
At the time of the Scopes trial in the 1920s, Kemp noted in the lecture, American Catholics “generally kept their distance from both sides of the controversy.”
In his lecture, Kemp cited a 1925 article in America magazine that said one side “wishes to establish Protestant fundamentalism as a state religion” while the other “aims at no less than an overturn of all of Christianity.” A 1925 Commonweal article characterized the trial as “the stirring up of a raucous and heated debate between … emotional extremists,” referring to the lawyers on both sides.
The Vatican issued a proclamation on the matter 25 years after the Scopes trial when Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis. The pontiff stated that human bodily evolution was a permissible belief, as long as one accepts that God directly creates the human soul and all humans descend from Adam and Eve. It does not require that a Catholic believe in evolution.
About 62% of self-identified Catholic Americans believe in evolution today, according to a 2024 Gallup survey. This is higher than the broader American population, of which 58% believe in the theory.
Much of the theological debate surrounded the text of the beginning of Genesis, but Davenport told CNA that Catholics should be careful about assuming that the passages “are relating a simple historical chronology” but rather should “try to understand what the literary genre and intent of the text was.”
According to Davenport, one lesson a person should take from the Scriptures about the origin of man is that the creation of human beings was “very good” and a “special part of the created order.” Another is that humans are “partly like the bodily animal world, but partly separate from it.” A third is that humans “were not predetermined to sin, but we fell through our own fault.”
Daniel Kuebler, a biology professor at Franciscan University, told CNA that the Church recognizes there is a “material component” to humans but that the process by which that comes about “is something that the Church has not made definitive proclamations on,” which permits a belief in human evolution.
Some of the opposition to evolutionary thought, according to Kuebler, stems from the belief that evolution would suggest “man is just a material being.” Yet, he said that claim “goes far beyond what science can demonstrate.”
Kuebler argued that evolution on its own “can’t explain the totality of man” and noted that the Church clearly teaches that humans have “a spiritual component: a soul that does not evolve.”
A century after the Scopes trial, a belief in evolution has increased among Catholics and the broader public. Yet some organizations, such as The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, oppose the concept of human evolution and continue to argue in favor of six-day creationism and the position that God created humans in their current form.
Hugh Owen, the founder and director of the Kolbe Center — a Catholic nonprofit — told CNA that his organization is faithful to Pius XII’s declaration on evolution, because the pontiff urged the faithful to consider the evidence for and against evolution. Owen said the Kolbe Center ensures the lay faithful have an “opportunity to look at both sides,” which he warned many young Catholics do not encounter.
Owen argued that Church tradition and the early Church Fathers are “completely on the side of six-day creation.” He said he believes it’s important to defend this position because “an error about creation is always reflected in an error about God” and that “the character of God is at stake.”
There were some Church Fathers, however, who did not believe in a strict six-day creation, such as St. Augustine of Hippo. Owen argued Augustine did not have access to a proper translation of Genesis.
Owen acknowledged that many Catholic intellectuals at the time of the Scopes trial believed in human evolution. Yet, he pointed to some of the evidence that was used before and during the trial that has since been proven fraudulent or inaccurate.
For example, two fossils that were believed to show an intermediary between early humans and modern man — Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man — were later disproven. Some organs that were believed to have lost their original function through evolution, he pointed out, were later found to have a current function.
Owen also pointed to the discredited embryonic recapitulation theory, which suggested that embryonic development went through various stages that resembled ancestral species.
“It’s been a gradual process, but there’s no doubt that already at the time of the Scopes trial, many Catholic intellectuals had already been deceived into thinking that bogus evidence … really did [prove human evolution],” Owen said.
Kuebler, alternatively, told CNA there are two main pieces of evidence that lead biologists to overwhelmingly believe that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor. One is “a whole host of intermediary fossils that are not quite human” and fossil records that show “an increase in brain size over time and upright posture.” The other is “the genetic evidence” showing a similarity with chimps.
Posted on 07/21/2025 23:05 PM (CNA Daily News)
William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Seward Darrow, during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, July 20, 1925. Because of the extreme heat, the proceedings were moved outdoors. / Credit: Smithsonian Institution from United States, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 21, 2025 / 19:05 pm (CNA).
Less than 70 years after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, became the center of the American debate about human evolution, the interpretation of Genesis, and broader sentiments about Christianity.
On July 21, 1925 — a century ago today — substitute teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of violating a state ban on teaching evolution in schools. His $100 fine (equal to $1,837 today) was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Both then and today, the widely publicized trial has been portrayed as a microcosm of an asserted battle between “science” and “religion.”
Scopes was defended by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Clarence Darrow, who was religiously agnostic. William Jennings Bryan, a Protestant Christian and three-time Democratic Party nominee for president, defended the state law and a literalist understanding of the first few chapters of Genesis.
During the trial, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert and proceeded to grill him on certain texts of the Bible and question their historical accuracy. That line of questioning allowed Darrow to use the trial as a proxy fight against Christianity itself. Although that portion of the trial was thrown out by the judge because it was not relevant to Scopes’ charges, it is remembered for its impact on 20th-century debates about human evolution and Christianity.
Most famously, the 1955 play and 1960 film “Inherit the Wind” played up the “science vs. religion” narrative, effectively solidifying that perception in American culture.
The reality of the conflict at the time, however, was much more nuanced than “science” against “religion.”
Dominican Father Thomas Davenport, a physicist and philosopher at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, told CNA it would be “wrong” to suggest that Catholicism was on the side against evolutionary thought during the trial.
“The trial was … more of a crisis and a conflict involving American Protestants than Catholics, in part because of a broader philosophical, theological, and scriptural traditions that Catholics have to draw on to understand God’s revelation and the natural world, and to put them in harmony,” said Davenport, who co-authored the book “Thomistic Evolution.”
Kenneth Kemp, a retired philosophy professor for the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told CNA: “The trial is too often used by anti-religious polemicists as support for their idea that the relation between science and religion is fundamentally conflictual.”
Kemp, who authored two books on evolution and Christianity — “The War That Never Was” and “The Origins of Catholic Evolutionism” — said it’s important to learn “how easily history can be distorted in the service of ideology.”
“The ‘wars’ underlying the Scopes trial were in fact not between science and religion but rather one war between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists, with Christians on both sides, and another war between militant atheists and Christians, with evolutionists on both sides,” he said.
Catholic scholars considered the possibility of human evolution since the middle of the 19th century, around the time Darwin posited his theory, according to Kemp. In a lecture that he delivered at the Thomistic Institute, he said there were three distinct positions by the tail end of the 1800s.
One position, he pointed out, was that bodily evolution was simply a myth. The second position was that the human body evolved from an ape-like ancestor but that the human soul is directly created by God. A third position between the two suggested that an ape-like ancestor evolved toward a preparatory stage but that the final stage of the human body was formed by a direct act of God.
Some books promoting the second view were placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books in the 1890s, but the Church avoided making any proclamations on evolution at the time. The First Vatican Council in 1870 avoided the subject despite the widespread public discourse.
At the time of the Scopes trial in the 1920s, Kemp noted in the lecture, American Catholics “generally kept their distance from both sides of the controversy.”
In his lecture, Kemp cited a 1925 article in America magazine that said one side “wishes to establish Protestant fundamentalism as a state religion” while the other “aims at no less than an overturn of all of Christianity.” A 1925 Commonweal article characterized the trial as “the stirring up of a raucous and heated debate between … emotional extremists,” referring to the lawyers on both sides.
The Vatican issued a proclamation on the matter 25 years after the Scopes trial when Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis. The pontiff stated that human bodily evolution was a permissible belief, as long as one accepts that God directly creates the human soul and all humans descend from Adam and Eve. It does not require that a Catholic believe in evolution.
About 62% of self-identified Catholic Americans believe in evolution today, according to a 2024 Gallup survey. This is higher than the broader American population, of which 58% believe in the theory.
Much of the theological debate surrounded the text of the beginning of Genesis, but Davenport told CNA that Catholics should be careful about assuming that the passages “are relating a simple historical chronology” but rather should “try to understand what the literary genre and intent of the text was.”
According to Davenport, one lesson a person should take from the Scriptures about the origin of man is that the creation of human beings was “very good” and a “special part of the created order.” Another is that humans are “partly like the bodily animal world, but partly separate from it.” A third is that humans “were not predetermined to sin, but we fell through our own fault.”
Daniel Kuebler, a biology professor at Franciscan University, told CNA that the Church recognizes there is a “material component” to humans but that the process by which that comes about “is something that the Church has not made definitive proclamations on,” which permits a belief in human evolution.
Some of the opposition to evolutionary thought, according to Kuebler, stems from the belief that evolution would suggest “man is just a material being.” Yet, he said that claim “goes far beyond what science can demonstrate.”
Kuebler argued that evolution on its own “can’t explain the totality of man” and noted that the Church clearly teaches that humans have “a spiritual component: a soul that does not evolve.”
A century after the Scopes trial, a belief in evolution has increased among Catholics and the broader public. Yet some organizations, such as The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, oppose the concept of human evolution and continue to argue in favor of six-day creationism and the position that God created humans in their current form.
Hugh Owen, the founder and director of the Kolbe Center — a Catholic nonprofit — told CNA that his organization is faithful to Pius XII’s declaration on evolution, because the pontiff urged the faithful to consider the evidence for and against evolution. Owen said the Kolbe Center ensures the lay faithful have an “opportunity to look at both sides,” which he warned many young Catholics do not encounter.
Owen argued that Church tradition and the early Church Fathers are “completely on the side of six-day creation.” He said he believes it’s important to defend this position because “an error about creation is always reflected in an error about God” and that “the character of God is at stake.”
There were some Church Fathers, however, who did not believe in a strict six-day creation, such as St. Augustine of Hippo. Owen argued Augustine did not have access to a proper translation of Genesis.
Owen acknowledged that many Catholic intellectuals at the time of the Scopes trial believed in human evolution. Yet, he pointed to some of the evidence that was used before and during the trial that has since been proven fraudulent or inaccurate.
For example, two fossils that were believed to show an intermediary between early humans and modern man — Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man — were later disproven. Some organs that were believed to have lost their original function through evolution, he pointed out, were later found to have a current function.
Owen also pointed to the discredited embryonic recapitulation theory, which suggested that embryonic development went through various stages that resembled ancestral species.
“It’s been a gradual process, but there’s no doubt that already at the time of the Scopes trial, many Catholic intellectuals had already been deceived into thinking that bogus evidence … really did [prove human evolution],” Owen said.
Kuebler, alternatively, told CNA there are two main pieces of evidence that lead biologists to overwhelmingly believe that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor. One is “a whole host of intermediary fossils that are not quite human” and fossil records that show “an increase in brain size over time and upright posture.” The other is “the genetic evidence” showing a similarity with chimps.
Posted on 07/21/2025 20:43 PM (CNA Daily News)
Father Gabriel Romanelli, parish priest at the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Family who was wounded in a recent strike on the church, stands before the altar during a Sunday morning Mass held by the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem at the church in Gaza City on July 20, 2025. / Credit: OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images
ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 21, 2025 / 16:43 pm (CNA).
The pastor of the only Catholic church in Gaza, Argentine priest Father Gabriel Romanelli, on Sunday described the current situation after the church was hit by Israeli fire on July 17, leaving three people dead and several injured, including a 19-year-old postulant who remains hospitalized.
In a video posted July 20 on his YouTube channel, Romanelli, a priest of the Institute of the Incarnate Word, began by sharing the bad news: “Unfortunately, the war continues,” he said. “Today there were many deaths, people who were even waiting in the north, where there is a great need for humanitarian aid. The numbers are terrible; there is no final figure yet, but they’re talking about dozens of deaths, many.”
Furthermore, he continued, “the heat is oppressive. Today the heat index was 42 degrees [Celsius; 108 degrees Fahrenheit], and they say it will remain that way for days to come. There have been more evacuations in different places throughout the Gaza Strip, and the bombardment continues unabated. We have had nearby bombardment with some shrapnel falling, and unfortunately, we have come to understand what shrapnel means, which is not just something that makes noise but something that damages, wounds, and kills.”
The priest mentioned that he, too, was injured on Thursday by shrapnel from Israeli fire, which was condemned by various Church leaders and by Pope Leo XIV himself, who spoke on Friday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and on Monday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Romanelli then said there is good news: “We are in God’s grace, we are persevering in the faith. Many have expressed their closeness in every way because of what has happened here: the attack on the Catholic Church here. The patriarchs have come to visit, as I told you.”
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Italian Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, “is still here, so it’s a blessing for the people to have him, to pray with him, to see him pray, to ask for his blessing, to listen to him, to console him. That he can console us is very gratifying. Everyone’s gratitude is very good news.”
“Other good news is that Nayib, one of our young men in a wheelchair with a lung injury, is doing better. He prays; he’s always been a prayerful man, and he continues to pray and ask for prayers. He’s still hospitalized,” Romanelli said, although the situation at the hospital, so necessary now, “is deplorable.”
“Most of the hospitals in the [Gaza] Strip were destroyed, but Nayib is doing better. His situation is delicate, but he’s doing better,” the priest added.
“Suheil is doing better. He had a major operation and will need to be patient during his recovery,” he continued. “He’s our postulant, whom you know, a great guy. He’s 19 years old and very well-liked here. The young people, the teenagers, the children, the adults are all very moved by what happened, so, well, today we were able to have a conversation. He spoke on the phone, so he’s doing better.”
The pastor of Holy Family Church also said that “people are still in shock: You can imagine how little time has passed since all of this. The good thing is that we prayed and sang. Although there were bombardments, there has been little flying debris these days, and the children wanted to go out, sing, and yell, so they were seen more in the yard, and they started playing with a soccer ball.”
“And well, we continue to ask you, thanking you for your prayers, and asking you to work, let us all work, and convince the world that peace is possible and necessary,” he continued.
The priest prayed “to the Prince of Peace, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the Blessed Virgin Mary for the gift of peace, especially for Gaza and for the entire region.”
This story was first publishedby ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Posted on 07/21/2025 19:12 PM (Catholic News Agency)
Pope Leo XIV greets residents of St. Martha Home for the Elderly in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, during a visit on July 21, 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media
ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 21, 2025 / 15:12 pm (CNA).
After spending time praying in the chapel, the Holy Father personally greeted approximately 20 elderly people, all between the ages of 80 and 101.
Posted on 07/21/2025 19:12 PM (CNA Daily News)
Pope Leo XIV greets residents of St. Martha Home for the Elderly in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, during a visit on July 21, 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media
ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 21, 2025 / 15:12 pm (CNA).
Pope Leo XIV on Monday morning visited St. Martha Home for the Elderly in Castel Gandolfo, the Italian town where he is spending his vacation.
According to the Holy See Press Office, the pontiff arrived at the residence on July 20 at 10:30 a.m. local time and was welcomed by the community of nuns who run the facility.
The Sisters of St. Martha religious order was founded in 1946 by Blessed Tommaso Reggio. The sisters aim to be “humble presences of peace and hope” for those most in need and to pay “the utmost attention to the quality of relationships and the well-being” of the nursing home’s residents, according to the order’s website.
After spending time praying in the chapel, the Holy Father personally greeted approximately 20 elderly people, all between the ages of 80 and 101.
He also greeted a young nurse and after prayer along with some songs, the pope addressed everyone, highlighting some themes from the songs and referring to Sunday’s Gospel reading from Luke.
The pope emphasized how in every person there is a part of Martha and a part of Mary and invited those present to take advantage of this time of life to live the dimension exemplified by Mary: to listen to the words of Jesus and to pray.
Pope Leo emphasized the importance of prayer, saying it is “so important, much greater than we can imagine,” and told the residents that “age doesn’t matter: It is Jesus who wants to draw near to us, who makes himself a guest for us, who invites us to be witnesses, young and not so young.”
“You are signs of hope,” he added. “You have given so much in life” and “continue to be that testimony of prayer, of faith,” a family that offers to the Lord what it has.
After praying the Lord’s Prayer together, Pope Leo XIV spent a while longer visiting the residence and returned to Villa Barberini, where he is residing during his stay at Castel Gandolfo, shortly before 11:30 a.m.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.