What did the Allocution Say?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : On Catholics Believing Evolution · Creation vs. Evolution : Does Humani Generis say we must subject to a future judgement of the Church as if there was none already pertaining to the matter? · What did the Allocution Say?

I think footnote 11 in Humani Generis refers to the last sentence in this passage:

That day in which God formed man and crowned his head with His own image and likeness, making of him the ruler of all living things in the sea, in the sky and on earth,8 the Omniscient Lord God became his teacher. He taught him agriculture, to cultivate and look after the delightful garden in which he had been placed;9 He drew to man all the animals from the field and all the birds of the air to see what he would call them and so man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds, all the wild beasts;10 but, despite being in the midst of so many living things, man felt sad and lonely and attempted in vain to find a face which looked like him and which would contain a ray of that Divine Image which shines out of the eyes of every son of Adam. Only from man could there come another man who would then call him father and ancestor; and the helpmate given by God to the first man came from man himself and is flesh from his flesh, made into a woman and called such because she came from man.11 At the summit of the ladder of all that lives, man, endowed with a spiritual soul, was made by God to be a prince and sovereign over the animal kingdom. The multiple research, be it palaeontology or of biology and morphology, on the problems concerning the origins of man have not, as yet, ascertained anything with great clarity and certainty. We must leave it to the future to answer the question, if indeed science will one day be able, enlightened and guided by revelation, to give certain and definitive results concerning a topic of such importance.

Footnotes 8 - 11 Genesis 1:26, 2:15, 2:19-20 and 2:23.

So, on the one hand Pius XII extensively cited Genesis as factual history and, on the other hand, awaited future results of science, with a proviso:

if indeed science will one day be able, enlightened and guided by revelation, to give certain and definitive results concerning a topic of such importance.

In other words, he seems to have considered the then present results of palaeoanthropology as inadequate, he even says so:

The multiple research, be it palaeontology or of biology and morphology, on the problems concerning the origins of man have not, as yet, ascertained anything with great clarity and certainty.

Sounds a bit like a Creationist without the backing of Creation Science and trying to make sense of Conventional Science as it was then - and failing.

It does NOT sound like "Moses accepted the best science of his day, St Thomas Aquinas accepted the best science of his day, therefore I accept the best science of my day on this question as on any other". I have heard that sentiment a bit ad nauseam from certain modernist Catholics.

But the footnote 11 in Humani Generis was probably not by himself, and there is a clear difference between "you must submit to the judgement of the Church" (not saying it has to be a future judgement) and "we may see in the future if science can add sth of importance" (not saying a word of any judgement of the Church or submitting to it in this immediate context).

So, as far as the documented words by Pius XII are concerned (prior to 22 November 1951, barring what I could have missed, just counting my research so far):

• he was a creationist believing Eve came from Adam's side, and he also believed Adam was taught agriculture;
• he could by submitting to the judgement of the Church have meant a past judgement, or a simple reactualisation of that past judgement (from Trent, for example);
• he was not totally impressed by secular science of his time;
• specifically, he considered it to be way too early to consider secular science had proven anything about the origins of man.
• AND he considered that if science ever does so, it needs to be "enlightened and guided by revelation" - sounds like Creation Science, CMI would hardly disagree with the sentiment.

Source for the quotation is an ebook in pdf containing Papal allocutions to the academy of sciences from Benedict XV to "John Paul II" - a collection made in Vatican City in 2003.

[PDF]Papal Addresses - Pontifical Academy of Sciences
www.pas.va/content/dam/accademia/pdf/sv100.pdf

I must admit, I find the consideration for astronomers a bit less encouraging as to geocentrism, but he did not directly mention heliocentrism as far as I can see, though he did mention stellar distances and distant galaxies which in fact are oblique corrolaries of heliocentrism (or perhaps not so oblique ones) and which of course pose the Distant Starlight Problem.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Anthony of Padua
13.VI.2018