learning from your mistakes

what I love about Catholicism is its long view of history and its awareness of past mistakes (if not present ones, but they will, eventually, become past mistakes and thus the Church will become aware...)

referring back to our earlier musings on evolution, I ran across this AP wire today which details the Vatican's on-going discussions about evolution:

Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul's 1996 statement that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis."
"A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false," he said. "(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof."

first of all, what an acronym! second of all, anything with the phrase "ontological quest" has my vote. third of all, I love that the Vatican has a website for STOQ and that the papacy clearly is in the age of the internet, while they also, in the same AP piece, referred to earlier mistakes in the on-going discussion between religion and science, mistakes they regret, such as the whole Galileo "thing":

The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." [...] "The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future," Poupard said.

what I love about this is that it's not like the Galileo case is new news, and yet, in Church Time, it kind of is. Perhaps the longevity of the Catholics might be a lesson to those claiming Christian status and behind the whole intelligent design thing. But I suppose that would mean learning from history, or even knowing history. oh well.