Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877–1902

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments Work in the Vatican archives has not been easy. Systematic cataloging of records is currently in progress, but for our work the only catalogs available were the old ones. At times we had to search blindly, though usually successfully, for dossiers of whose existence we were not sure, among a host of other dossiers carrying the dust of a century and with no clear indication of their contents. Of course, our work has been made possible due to the assistance and cordiality of Monsignor Alejandro Cifres, director of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, and to his whole group, to whom the authors ’ thanks is gratefully offered. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, currently Pope Benedict XVI, while prefect of that congregation, made possible the opening of its archive, long desired by researchers, and appointed one of the authors (Artigas ) a member of its advisory Scientific Council. Although the main part of this research has been done in the Vatican archives , it would have been impossible without consulting other archives. A brief but productive research stage was conducted by one of us (Martínez) at Notre Dame (Indiana).To the staff of the University of Notre Dame Archives, and especially Sharon Sumpter, and to the Indiana Province Archives Center (Congregation of Holy Cross) and Jackie Dougherty, we extend our gratitude. We are also grateful for the permission to reproduce texts from those archives. Other material has been kindly provided by the General Archives of the Dominicans in Santa Sabina (Rome), and the Archives of the Dominican Province of France, Bibliotèque du Saulchoir, Paris (Michel Albaric). An adumbration of this work, titled “New Light on Catholic Responses to Evolution : The Reception of Evolutionary Theories in Catholic Media in the Late 19th Century,” was presented in July 2002 at the Workshop on Science and Human Values, hosted in Castelgandolfo by the Reverend George V. Coyne (head of the Vatican Observatory), organized by Professor John Brooke (Oxford University ) and by the Humanities section of the European Science Foundation, headed by Professor William R. Shea (Galileo Chair, University of Padua). A first version viii | acknowledgments of the chapter on Raffaello Caverni was published in Scripta Theologica (Pamplona ) 36 (2004): 37–68. A part of the work was conducted at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and, in the final stages, at the University of Navarra in Pamplona (summer 2003) and at Boston University (summer 2004), profiting from the facilities provided by the three universities. Negotiating Darwin This page intentionally left blank ...