Fifty years ago Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the most heralded documents issued by the council was the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). The theme of this book takes its inspiration from the following words of that document: And so mankind substitutes a dynamic and more evolutionary concept of nature for a static one and the result is an immense series of new problems calling for a new endeavor of analysis and synthesis. This book is a popular, non-academic theological "endeavor of analysis and synthesis" of many of the teachings of the Church from the perspective of the scientific theory of evolution. It relies heavily on the achievement of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
