Objection #3:

 YOUCAT alleges that Genesis does not give a true account of creation.

The underlying reason for YOUCAT’s rejection of Scriptural inerrancy comes to the forefront in the book’s discussion of evolution theory and the historicity of the creation account in Genesis. Thus, although the fathers of the Council of Trent referred to this foundational text as “the sacred history of Genesis” ⁽¹⁵⁾ and Pope Pius XII confirmed in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that the first eleven chapters of Genesis ”are truly a kind of history” one sees the authors of YOUCAT taking the destructive path that the Modernists first forged more than a century ago. ⁽¹⁶⁾

In Question 42, YOUCAT asks: “Can someone accept the theory of evolution and still believe in the Creator?” It answers:

Yes. Although it is a different kind of knowledge, faith is open to the findings and hypotheses of the sciences…A Christian can accept the theory of evolution as a helpful explanatory model, provided he does not fall into the heresy of evolutionism, which views man as the random product of biological processes.

The answer states that it is acceptable to believe in evolution theory without stating any restrictions whatsoever, even with regard to human evolution. This is a serious error refuted by more than 19 centuries of consistent Church teaching. The response displays a complete ignorance of the flaws with evolution theory, including claims of human evolution, as well as a complete disregard for historical Church teachings on the doctrine of creation. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Most young people reading YOUCAT will immediately understand "the theory of evolution" to mean biological evolution through mutation and natural selection. A fundamental and essential part of that hypothesis is that the first human beings were conceived in the womb of a sub-human creature. Thus, according to YOUCAT, Catholics can "accept" that Adam was conceived in the womb of a non-human entity.

In reality, however, the Catholic Church rejected this view long before Charles Darwin, as all Church Fathers and Doctors, including St. Thomas Aquinas, unanimously taught that Adam was created immediately (directly and all at once) by God, from the dust of the earth, and Eve was supernaturally created by God from Adam’s side. This teaching is found throughout the writings of the Fathers and in 561, Pope Pelagius I affirmed it in a profession of faith:

For I confess that…Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created, the one from the earth, the other…from the rib of man... ⁽¹⁸⁾

In 1215, the Lateran Council IV infallibly decreed (and this was repeated in Vatican I almost word for word) that God:

at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual, and corporal, namely, angelic and mundane, and finally the human… ⁽¹⁹⁾

Even more explicitly, Pope Leo XIII wrote in his encyclical on holy marriage (1880):

Though revilers of the Christian faith refuse to acknowledge the never-interrupted doctrine of the Church on this subject, and have long striven to destroy the testimony of all nations and of all times, they have nevertheless failed not only to quench the powerful light of truth, but even to lessen it. We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. ⁽²⁰⁾ [emphasis added]

Given that this and other encyclicals are part of the ordinary teaching Magisterium and demand religious assent according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one wonders on what authority the writers of YOUCAT call "evolutionism" a "heresy" as distinguished from the "theory of evolution" that Catholics may “accept”? The only magisterial statement cited in YOUCAT on “evolutionism” as defined in the text is a sentence in the margin of page 38, taken from a homily by Pope Benedict XVI:

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. ⁽²¹⁾

If, as seems to be the case, the writers of YOUCAT received their warrant to condemn evolutionism as “a heresy” from the low-level authority of a papal homily, how much more ought they to have condemned the broader "theory of evolution," based on the much more authoritative conciliar and magisterial decrees that are completely incompatible with the origin of all biological species through mutation and natural selection!

Moreover, the idea that one can accept evolution as a helpful model of earth history and at the same time affirm the historical information recorded in the early chapters of Genesis is problematic and establishes a false tension between evolutionary speculation and the history in the Bible. This very approach was condemned by Pope St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis when he observed that the Modernists argued for a separation of faith from natural science when, in fact:

there can never be any dissension between faith and science, for if each keeps on its own ground they can never meet and therefore never can be in contradiction. ⁽²²⁾

The YOUCAT explanation also fails to make the essential distinction — which all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church made without exception — between the order of creation in which God established the universe by His divine power and the order of providence which began when God had finished creating all of the different kinds of creatures and they began to interact within the framework of the natural laws that God had established. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great synthesizer of the patristic legacy, summed up the creation/providence distinction in the Summa Theologica by stating that: “In the works of nature, creation does not enter, but is presupposed to the work of nature.” ⁽²³⁾ In other words, natural processes and operations are not themselves instances of God’s creative activity; rather, they show his Providence at work in maintaining his prior work of creation, which is presupposed by the way these processes and operations now take place.

YOUCAT’s denial of this fundamental distinction between creation and providence echoes the thought of Teilhard de Chardin who wrote that Creation and development are “constantly fused, combined, together,” ⁽²⁴⁾ even denying any distinction between the pre-Fall and post-Fall world. ⁽²⁵⁾ In 1962, the then-head of the Holy Office, Cardinal Ottaviani, issued a monitum against the works of Teilhard de Chardin, warning bishops and superiors that Teilhard’s writings were filled with “serious errors which offend Catholic doctrine” and ordering them to “protect, especially the minds of the young, against the dangers of the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his followers.” ⁽²⁶⁾ Now, fifty years later, Teilhard’s errors are to be presented to millions of Catholic youth as the official teaching of the Catholic Church!