This will be the story over the next few days, as the Pope gathers with his former students at Castel Gandalfo for a reunion seminar on the topic (last year the topic was Islam)

This year the seminar– devoted to a different topic each year– will focus on creation and evolution. About 30 people, including former students and other invited guests, will gather for the meeting, to be held September 1-3 at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. The closed-door seminar, which includes formal presentations mixed with ample time for debate, will conclude with Mass on Sunday morning, September 3.

The sessions will be opened on Friday afternoon, with presentations by Peter Schuster, a molecular biologist and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna. Participants will include Father Paul Elbrich, the German philosophy professor from Munich, and political philospher Robert Spaemann.

Mark Brumley at Ignatius Insight takes apart a TIME article on the subject:

In his latest weekly column, John Allen takes a long look:

He breaks the Pope’s writings on the matter down into four areas of concern, and then concludes:

Benedict XVI’s views on evolution, as by now should be obvious, can’t be condensed into a simple slogan, such as whether he’s "for" or "against" it. He has a deep respect for science, but at the same time he insists that empirical science by itself must not set the "frame" within which we think about the meaning and purpose of existence. He worries that an uncritical embrace of the theory of evolution has been dangerous, but he also has steered clear of identifying himself with its fundamentalist and Luddite critics. To put this in a formula, he doesn’t want to repeat the Galileo case, but neither does he want to surrender to Auguste Comte – who predicted a "physics of man" that would render religion obsolete.