Intelligent, rational people everywhere received a boost today from an unexpected place: Vatican City.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. [...] "The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

Poupard went on to say that the story of Genesis was concerned solely with theology, "while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science." I'm sure many people will be surprised to hear a defense of evolution coming out of the Vatican, but I'm not all that shocked. After all, when I was in first grade, our teacher (a nun) told a classroom full of six-year olds that the story of Adam and Eve was symbolic in nature and shouldn't be taken literally. Now, if only the Church would adopt a similarly enlightened view on homosexuality, premarital sex, birth control, female ordination, priestly celibacy, and abortion rights... [NEWS.com.au] Evolution in the bible, says Vatican (via Slashdot)