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https://aleteia.org/2023/03/11/wonder-are-creation-and-evolution-in-conflict/

Fr Henry Newman’s Galileo, Revelation, and the Educated Man: (1861)

‘One of the characteristics of the day is the renewal of that collision between men of science and believers in Revelation, and of that uneasiness in the public mind as to its results, which are found in the history of the 17th century. Then, Galileo raised the jealousy of Catholics in Italy; but now in England the religious portion of the community, be they Catholic or not, is startled at the discoveries or speculations of geologists, natural historians and linguists. Of course I am speaking, as regards both dates, of the educated classes, of those whose minds have been sufficiently opened to understand the nature of proof, who have a right to ask questions and to weigh the answers given to them. It was of such, we must reasonably suppose, that Father Commissary was tender in 1637 [1633], and to such he allied in his conversation with Galileo, as he took him in his carriage to the Holy Office. “As we went along,” says Galileo, “he put many questions to me, and showed an earnestness that I should repair the scandal, which I had given to the whole of Italy, by maintaining the opinion of the motion of the Earth; and for all the solid and mathematical reasons which I presented to him, he did but reply to me: “Terra autem in aeternum stabit,’ as Scripture says.” There could not be a greater shock to religious minds of that day than Galileo’s doctrine, whether they at once rejected it as contrary to the faith, or listened to the arguments by which he enforced it. The feeling was strong enough to effect Galileo’s compulsory recantation, though a pope was then on the throne who was personally friendly to him. Two Sacred Congregations represented the popular voice and passed decrees against the philosopher, which were in force down to the years 1822 and 1837. Such an alarm never can occur again, for the very reason that it has occurred once. At least, for myself, I can say that, had I been brought up in the belief of the immobility of the Earth as though a dogma of Revelation, and had associated it in my mind with the incommunicable dignity of man among created things, with the destinies of the human race, with the locality of Purgatory and Hell, and other Christian doctrines, and then for the first time had heard Galileo’s thesis, and, moreover, the prospect held out to me that perhaps there were myriads of globes like our own all filled with rational creatures as worthy of the Creator’s regard as we are, I should have been at once indignant at its presumption and frightened at its speciousness, as I never can be at any parallel novelties in other human sciences bearing on religion; no, not though I found probable reasons for thinking the first chapters of Genesis were not of an economical character, that there was a pre-Adamite race of rational animals, or that we are now 20,000 years from Noah. For that past controversy and its issue have taught me beyond all mistake, that men of the greatest theological knowledge may firmly believe that scientific conclusions are contrary to the Word of God, when they are not so, and pronounce that to be heresy which is truth. It has taught me, that Scripture is not inspired to convey mere secular knowledge, whether about the heaven or the Earth, or the race of man; and that I need not fear for Revelation whatever truths may be brought to light by means of observation and experience out of the world of phenomena which environs us. And I seem to myself here to be speaking under the protection and sanction of the [1835] Sacred Congregation of the Index itself, which has since the time of Galileo prescribed to itself a line of action, indication of its fearlessness of any results which may happen to religion from physical sciences…’--- Fr John Henry Newman: 1861


The Patron Saint of Evolution:

‘I mean that it is as strange that monkeys should be so like men with no historical connection between them, as the notion that there should be no course of history by which fossil bones got into rocks.’--- H. Newman: quoted in Chieflifejournal