Pope Francis made recently waves for articulating before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences an utterly uncontroversial view: Catholic theology requires the rejection of neither the biological theory of evolution through natural selection nor the Big Bang theory. Pope Francis was not, of course, the first pope to articulate this view in this venue.
The hounds of befoggery nevertheless came unchained. One story has it that Pope Francis "trashed the Bible's version of creation." The Washington Post, in what is intended as a deflationary account, incomprehensibly likens Pope Francis's position to the Enlightenment idea of the clockmaker God. NBC, meanwhile, described Pope Francis's remarks as a "theological break from his predecessor Benedict XVI, a strong exponent [sic] of creationism." It may be too exacting a standard to expect NBC to grasp the ancient intricacies of how Catholic theology is promulgated (hint: an address to the Pontifical Academy does not have the binding power of an encyclical), but to saddle Pope Francis' predecessor with "creationism" is another matter.
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