Cardinal Schoenborn asserted that he was not trying to break new ground in writing his essay, but to correct the idea, "often invoked," that the church accepts or at least acquiesces to the theory of evolution.

According to the Times, many Catholic schools teach Darwinian evolution, in which accidental mutation and natural selection of the fittest organisms drive the history of life, as part of their science curriculum.

This led the cardinal, a member of the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, to say that he has been angry for years at those writers and theologians, many of them his fellow Catholics, who had "misrepresented" the church's position approving the idea of evolution as a random process.

The cardinal said that students in all schools, not only Catholic schools, should be taught that evolution is merely one of many theories.

He noted that the Congregation has no plans to issue new guidance to teachers in Catholic schools on evolution.

The cardinal's position did not stop some scientists and science teachers from reacting with confusion, dismay and even anger, with some telling the Times they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.

On the other hand, opponents of the Darwinian theory of evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal Schoenborn's essay.

The cardinal told the Times that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that he had spoken to then-Cardinal Ratzinger two or three weeks before his election as Pope Benedict XVI in April.

"I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," Cardinal Schoenborn said during a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat.

Mark Ryland, a vice president of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the theory of "intelligent design," which holds that the variety and complexity of life on earth cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some sort, told the Times that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay.

Both he and Cardinal Schoenborn said that an essay in May in the Times about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.

Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the official American effort to decipher the human genome, and who, the Times reported, describes himself "as a Christian, though not a Catholic," told the Times that Cardinal Schoenborn's essay looked like "a step in the wrong direction" and said he feared that it "may represent some backpedaling from what scientifically is a very compelling conclusion, especially now that we have the ability to study DNA. There is a deep and growing chasm between the scientific and the spiritual world views. To the extent that the cardinal's essay makes believing scientists less and less comfortable inhabiting the middle ground, it is unfortunate. It makes me uneasy."

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