Doesn't the Church Reject Science and Evolution?

Doesn't the Catholic faith require a young earth, a rejection of evolution, and a literal reading of Genesis?

The objection, at its strongest:

1. Science has established an ancient universe, an old earth, and the common descent of living things through evolution.
2. Christianity teaches a six-day creation, a young earth, and a literal Adam fashioned from dust.
3. So to join the Church you must reject the science, and an honest person chooses the science.

In response:

• The young-earth, anti-evolution package is not Catholic teaching. It is a recent, largely modern movement — one that grew up outside the Catholic Church and without her teaching authority — and it does not speak for the ancient faith it claims to defend. The Church has never bound the faithful to a literal six-day timetable or to the age of the earth.
• The Church does not require you to disbelieve evolution. Catholic teaching leaves the biological development of living bodies — including the human body — open to scientific inquiry. What the faith does hold is that the human soul, which is spiritual, is created directly by God and is not the product of matter alone. That is a claim about what the human person is, not a rival theory of how bodies developed.
• Genesis was never meant to be read as a modern science textbook. The opening chapters are written in a solemn, figurative, liturgical style — the literary idiom of their own age — to teach who created and why: that one God freely made all that is, that creation is good, that man is made in God's image, and that sin, not God, introduced death and disorder. To force that language into a stopwatch-and-ruler chronology is to misread the genre and miss the point the text is actually making.
• This is not a modern retreat. Long before Darwin, the Fathers and Doctors warned against reading Genesis too literally. St. Augustine held that the days of Genesis were not ordinary days and cautioned believers not to talk nonsense about the natural world in the name of Scripture. St. Thomas taught that where a passage can be read in more than one way, the faith is not to be tied to a reading that observation might overturn. Reading Genesis for its theology rather than its geology is the older and more Catholic instinct.

Faith and reason cannot ultimately contradict each other. They have the same Author. God is the source both of the truths He reveals and of the reason by which we study the world, so a genuine finding of science and a genuine teaching of faith can never really collide. Where they seem to, either the science has overreached its evidence or the Scripture has been misread, and patient inquiry, not panic, is the Catholic response:

Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny Himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.

— First Vatican Council, Dei Filius

• The harmony is the Catholic track record, not a recent rescue. The same Church produced the cathedral schools and the university, the friar-scientists and the monastic copyists who preserved learning. A priest, Georges Lemaitre, first proposed what we now call the Big Bang. The caricature of a faith at war with science is a story told about the Church, not by her.
• The real distortion is a symptom of leaving the Church. The loud modern pairing of Christianity with young-earth literalism arises precisely where Scripture has been cut loose from the Church and her Magisterium: every reader left to be his own final authority, and the text pressed into service as a science manual it was never meant to be. This is the very problem the Catholic answer to Scripture alone addresses: a living teaching office, reading Scripture in the light of the whole tradition, is the safeguard against that fragmentation, not its cause. Far from being the enemy of reason, the Church is the reason this distortion never took root in her.

So the Church you are considering is not asking you to choose between the God reason reached at the start of this path and the world science describes. They meet in the one truth, and it is precisely the Church's teaching authority that has kept that harmony intact where others lost it.