The cardinal's views are publicly and robustly rejected by Fr Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, which is a scientific institution sponsored by the Holy See.
Fr Coyne, who is 72, has been in charge of the observatory since 1978; he spends half the year in Tucson, Arizona, as a professor in the University of Arizona astronomy department, where he is still actively involved in research.
In The Tablet he says that Cardinal Shönborn's article has "darkened the waters" of the rapport between Church and science, and says - flatly contradicting the cardinal - that even a world in which "life... has evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection" is compatible with "God's dominion".
For a Vatican official of such seniority openly to attack the views of a cardinal on such a potentially explosive subject as evolution is unprecedented. It also reveals a deep rift at the heart of the Catholic Church's thinking. It is known that Fr Coyne wrote privately to both Cardinal Shönborn and the Pope himself protesting against The New York Times article soon after it was published last month. But it is understood that so many scientists, especially Catholic scientists, have since contacted him to express their disquiet, that he felt he had to go public. He is believed to have cleared the article with his Jesuit superiors.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article303775.ece
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