Don't look for a big change any time soon in the Catholic Church's views on evolution. Although supporters of evolution had feared that the Pope would embrace so-called intelligent design, Pope Benedict XVI gave no sign at a gathering last week as to how he thought the topic should be taught.
The pope said little during the meeting, which included his former theology Ph.D. students and a small group of experts near Rome. Peter Schuster, a chemist at the University of Vienna and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, attended the meeting and gave a lecture on evolutionary theory. "The pope … listened to my talk very carefully and asked very good questions at the end," he says. And the Church's most outspoken proponent of intelligent design, Cardinal Schönborn, seemed to distance himself from the theory.