A senior Vatican official on Tuesday said evolutionary theory was ''not incompatible'' with the teachings of the Catholic Church and the Bible as he launched the Vatican's latest initiative to promote dialogue between scientists and theologians.
Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the pontifical council for culture, made his comments as he presented a new interdisciplinary conference to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species that will take place in Rome in March next year.
''Evolutionary theory is not incompatible a priori with the teaching of the Catholic Church, with the message of the Bible and theology, and in actual fact it was never condemned,'' Ravasi said.
He added that theologians, philosophers and scientists will attend next year's conference with the aim ''not necessarily of coming to an agreement, but of confirming the possibility of dialogue and a common desire to interpret reality, albeit from different points of view''.
Ravasi ruled out the Vatican following in the steps of the Church of England, which earlier this week issued an indirect apology to Darwin via an article written by a senior Anglican on its website.
''The Catholic Church never condemned (Darwin),'' Ravasi explained.
''We should stop thinking of history as a court of law that is continuously in session but rather concentrate on establishing franker and more efficient dialogue between two points of view that look at the same reality - that of man and his world,'' he added.
The Catholic Church has for over 50 years accepted Darwin's theory of random selection as the most probable cause of development, but has always stressed God's role.
However, Pope Benedict XVI last September issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory during a speech in Germany, saying that according to theories derived from Darwin's work, the universe is ''the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable''.
In 1992 the Catholic Church rehabilitated another scientist, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), 400 years after he was found guilty of heresy for claiming the earth orbits the sun and forced to publicly recant his findings.
