In the early 1870s one of Charles Darwin's most fervent advocates, Thomas Henry Huxley, visited Ireland's leading Catholic seminary, St Patrick's College, Maynooth. He brought with him the conviction that the Roman Catholic Church was the ‘vigorous and consistent enemy of the highest intellectual, moral and social life of mankind’. The almost complete absence of any scientific instruction in Catholic colleges did little to persuade him otherwise. In Huxley's eyes one of the greatest merits of Darwin's theory was that it occupied ‘a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism’ to the Catholic Church. When, in 1874, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Belfast, its president, John Tyndall, launched another offensive that placed science and Catholic teaching in opposition: ‘we claim and we shall wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory’. Unsurprisingly, antagonism towards evolutionary theory was soon the norm among Irish Catholic clergy.

A massive literature on the religious response to Darwin has largely concentrated on Protestant reactions, both hostile and receptive. Presbyterians in Belfast were no more forgiving of Darwin's naturalism than their Catholic counterparts. Indeed, there is a view that the Catholic Church, with fewer tendencies to bibliolatry, was less troubled by Darwin's anthropology than Protestant constituencies. One could point to a Catholic scientist, St George Jackson Mivart, who, as an early convert to evolution, seemingly gave the lie to Huxley's aphorism that it was impossible to be a soldier for science and a true son of the Church. The fact that there was no official denunciation of Darwin from the Holy Office, as there had been of Galileo, has also been presented as evidence for a more measured response.

Recent scholarship, exemplified by the work of Mariano Artigas, Thomas Glick and Rafael Martinez, has painted a less flattering picture. Their Negotiating Darwin: the Vatican confronts evolution, 1877–1902 (2006) used recently released Vatican archives to show that, although Catholic officialdom was careful not to repeat the mistake that it had made with Galileo, it nevertheless brought censorious pressure to bear on Catholic scientists known to be espousing evolutionary biology. As Don O'Leary observes in the opening chapter of Darwin and Catholicism, once a reaction against modernism had set in, it would prove dangerous, especially for any Catholic priest, to express support for Darwinism.

O'Leary's essay is one of five historical studies that constitute the first part of the volume under review, which, with additional sections on philosophical and theological themes, offers a rounded account of Catholic encounters with Darwinism and the degree to which a limited accommodation has been (or could be) achieved. As a guide to the gradual shifts in receptivity that occurred during the twentieth century, and for insight into current Catholic thinking on the subject, Darwinism and Catholicism meets a real need. Historians will especially appreciate O'Leary's emphasis on the significance of local parameters in his account of a peculiarly Irish intransigence. Offering a more centralised perspective, Pawel Kapusta charts the changing sensibilities visible in papal pronouncements from Humani generis (1950) to the present. His particular markers are the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, the start of the pontificate of John Paul ii, and the latter's address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996. If Humani generis marked the first official recognition that some form of evolutionary theory is reconcilable with Catholic doctrine, the views expressed by Pope Paul vi following Vatican II reveal where lay the stumbling blocks to a still more conciliatory stance – in the theology of original sin and especially in the axiom that every human soul is the immediate creation of God. Closer dialogue between theology and the natural sciences was a feature of the pontificate of John Paul ii, enabling him to say in 1996 that the theory of evolution was now ‘more than a hypothesis’. A sticking point does, of course, remain. The dualism implicit in the assertion that evolution can account for the development of the human body, but not the human soul, sits uncomfortably with the monism to which Darwin and the great majority of Darwinian scientists have subscribed.

A different dualism is introduced by Fáinche Ryan as she reflects on Thomas Aquinas's distinction between primary and secondary causation and the resemblance this bears to Darwin's conception of a Creator who creates through the instrumentality of ‘laws’. The idea that it would have been easier for Thomas to have accepted Darwin's theory than it was for nineteenth-century Anglicans wedded to Paley's natural theology is a motif that recurs through several of the essays. Ryan even suggests that Darwin's faith in God as Creator might have been more secure had he studied Aquinas. Here the history comes close to an apologia for Thomism, for which readers need to be prepared. When Thomas could write that the universe in its beginning was ‘perfect as regards the species of things’, it takes a little exegetical dexterity to bring him any closer to Darwin.

The controversial twentieth-century Catholic thinker who did most to integrate evolutionary biology with a Catholic spirituality – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – receives sympathetic treatment from François Euvé, who provides a refined and attractive exposition of Teilhard's vision. For Teilhard the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection was applicable to pre-human evolution; but, once humans had emerged, the processes of transformation were themselves transformed. Unlike Henri Bergson, who was a major influence, Teilhard was deeply committed to a teleological reading of life's history, in which there was ‘an absolute direction of progress towards the value of growing consciousness’. In the last of the historical chapters, Patrick Byrne and Frank Budenholzer remain within a history of ideas paradigm as they examine the worldview of Bernard Lonergan, with its emphasis on the intelligibility of the universe and what that means for both scientific and theological methods.

Among the philosophical essays, it is impossible to overlook Peter van Inwagen's surprisingly succinct argument for compatibility between Darwinism and the assertion of God's existence. If God is omnipotent (as God is by definition) then God could create any world, including a Darwinian world. Why then, he asks, ‘should someone who thinks that the actual world is a Darwinian world regard that feature of the actual world as demonstrating that – as having even any tendency to show that – there is no God?’ If there is anything having that tendency it is the ‘immense amount of suffering the world contains’; but this, he insists, is not a discovery of science. The problem is that in certain respects it was. The long, tortuous, bloodstained trail of evolution was staggering to Darwin as his science disclosed, and had to explain, the massive extent of extinction. Moreover what his science told him, and what human and animal suffering told him, were not disconnected. In his Autobiography he confessed that the argument from suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause was, for him, a strong one. But, in the same sentence, he immediately added that ‘it agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection’. The challenge here is recognised by John Haught in the least complacent of the theological essays, in which he warns against any theodicy that stultifies human commitment to the alleviation of suffering. In keeping with his book Deeper than Darwin, Haught suggests that if Catholics are to come to terms with Darwinism, they need to discard vulgar concepts of divine ‘order, design or plan’ in favour of a biblical understanding of Providence as promise. A message that many Protestant Christians would also do well to heed.