Dear Kevin:

You do NOT have an anathema upon you. To begin with all anathema's were reduced to excommunications in the 1960's. Second you are not excommunicated either.

There is nothing wrong with believing in Evolution. One can be a good Catholic and believe in evolution or believe in six days of creation, either way, does not matter.

The Church states that the "mechanism" of creation and its development is a matter for scientific investigation and is not an issue for the Church, with the following exceptions:

The following three things are infallible truths that science cannot deny:

1) God is the creator
2) We do, in fact, have original parents of our race
3) The soul is not evolved, but individually created by God and infused into the person at the moment of conception

As long as you affirm these three truths, you can be an evolutionist and a Catholic.

It is important to state, however, that God is God. He can create in any way He wants.

Could God create the universe in six days and make it look like it was billions of years? Yes!

Could God have created the first Man out of dust and even though Adam was one minute old he would have the physical and mental maturity of a thirty year old? Yes!

Could God have created a big bang and allowed the natural forces that He created develop according to that nature? Yes!

Could God have allowed evolution to eventually evolve a species that He would choose to infuse a soul and thus become human beings made in His image? Yes!

Bottomline: God does what He wills. He could have used evolution to accomplish His design, or He could have created it all in what we would call six literal twenty-four hour periods. He is God.

Thus, a good Catholic can accept evolution or not as he sees it as long as the three truths listed above are affirmed.

Personally, given the Catholic worldview, I would also suggest that a good Catholics will admit that God can create the universe any way He wants and thus despite one's view on this God could have done it either way, or perhaps in some other way that we do not know.

By the way, regardless of the literalness or lack thereof concerning the Genesis story, the purpose of the creation story was NOT to posit science, it was to teach religious truth of who God is as Creator, who we are as His creation, and the relationship between God and His creation. That is all that matters from the Genesis account.

God bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary