A Disaster 70 Years Ago

Pius XII in an allocution (speech) to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, stated that the world was 5 billion years old, according to dating methods that are very exact. This happened the day of St. Cecilia, 22.XI.1951.

One could imagine he had already sinned against the faith the previous year, with Humani Generis, leaving formally undecided, and in practise often in the field decided the wrong way, what should be decided the right way. If so, he could have been for one year "papa materialiter, non formaliter" and as such able to apostatise. This speech before the Academy could then have been his apostasy.

Some lenifying circumstances though - he could have been assuming simply the day age theory or gap theory held and that Adam's creation was even with a 5 billion year delay c. 6 or 7000 years ago. You see, if he was hearing of the U-Pb dating of the meteorites, now assumed to be just 4.5 billion years old, he might have seen no implication about the age of mankind, since carbon dating was not yet invented./HGL