Pope Francis has plenty of official advisors (including the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith — CDF — in the Vatican), but they don’t seem to matter to certain Catholics who insist that Church teaching reflect their own ideas. The latest is a group of nuns at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — LWCR — who want a version of “conscious evolution” adopted. I don’t know, but conscious evolution could probably mean a number of things (not all bad), but in this context it sounds a lot like theistic evolution — God winds up the universe and lets it happen as it will. God at first, Darwin thereafter.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker takes on this “speculative Gnostic nonsense” in an article at Patheos. You don’t need “conscious evolution” to appreciate nature or want to protect it.

The nuns in the LCWR who heard non-Catholic Barbara Marx Hubbard, whom Fr. Longenecker describes as “New Age,” apparently ran afoul of Cardinal Muller, the new head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in the Vatican.

It is odd that some Catholics who are uncritical in their embrace of theistic evolution (whether as “conscious evolution” or something else) tend to oppose intelligent design, mischaracterizing it as a “Protestant” idea, even though many of its academic exponents are Catholics — Mike Behe, Michael Egnor, Ann Gauger, Jay Richards, David DeWolf, among others.

This might be a very good time for the LWCR and similar groups to invite actual Catholic scholars who support ID to meet with them.

Photo source: Wikipedia.