Surprise! It's evolution - the Catholic Church's stand on evolution; humor - Column

Progressive, The, Dec, 1996 by Kate Clinton

Hold the presses! Big news out of the Vatican. Almost 150 years after Darwin hypothesized that the human body might not be an immediate creation of God but a product of a gradual process of evolution, Pope John Paul II has announced through a spokesman that maybe Sir Charles was onto something. Honeys, I am breathless.

In a related story, Dignity, a national organization of gay and lesbian Catholics, added a post-it to the papal announcement. "We also believe that the human body might not be an immediate creation of God, except in the case of Greg Louganis or Martina Navratilova."

The Pope, still convalescing from his appendix operation, announced through a papal rep that "fresh knowledge leads to the recognition that the theory of evolution was more than just a hypothesis." Is that coy enough?

Whatever was in the papal phenobarbital?

Maybe the very mysterious "fresh knowledge" came to the Pope when he was under anesthesia. Or his in-room cable service was re-running Planet of the Apes.

Of course, the Church has been trying to clean up its apse and get ready for the third millennium by amending the wrong teachings of the past. The hierarchy grudgingly copped to the fact that Galileo was right when he said that the sun, not the Earth, not even the Pope, was center of the universe. lt took them seventeen years of study and a picture of a guy playing golf on the moon, but they did finally admit that they done Galileo wrong.

What's next? "Isaac Newton: Gravity. Who Knew?"

This is not the first time the Church has tried to grapple with the evolution question. In 1950, Pope Pius XII, a.k.a. "The Shrunken Applehead Pope," cautioned the faithful, in the encyclical "Sui Generis," to regard Darwinism as a theory and not a doctrine. Then he died of the hiccups.

Surprise of all surprises, His Very Narrowmindedness did not go far enough in "Darwinius erat Correctus After Allus." Enough with the Homo erectus, I would have appreciated a little more comment on the social Darwinism of this late century. Our National Selection Process cuts the weak out of the herd and makes him President. Rupert Murdoch, the Antichrist, has the most fits and survives.

In mid-October, I went to Washington, D.C., to be with my friends, living and dead, at the final full display of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Park Service police felt compelled to measure it in terms of football fields, hardly a proper unit of measurement for so many drag queens.

As happened to me at the previous display of the Quilt, after an hour of panelsearching, a head-down, sad-day-at-thebeach kind of shuffle, I became enraged. It could have been the facility next to the information tent called the "Wellness Pavilion" and sponsored, without apparent hint of irony, by the pharmaceuticals (Rausch handed out free Kleenex packs emblazoned with its name). It could have been the cappuccino. Or it could have been the debut of Red Ribbon Ale.

We're not a movement anymore; we've evolved. We're a niche market just waiting to be scratched.

Kate "the evolution will not be televised" Clinton is a humorist.