The Catholic church has had little problem with evolution for many years now. I think they are just staking a claim for some metaphorical core in Genesis, that somehow God really in some mysterious way started it all.

This is more-or-less the leftpondian consensus for the last three-quarters of a century. It's really only the US fundies and their third- world imitators who still stick to the every-word-in-the-Bible line.

Stephen Jay Gould, an excellenty science writer who thought he was superceding Darwinism when he was actually improving it, pushed the idea that science and religion are separate domains, and that religion has nothing to say about science, whereas science has nothing to say in the moral sphere. I'd broadly agree, except to add that the religions must show that their moral strictures have better backing than "it says so in a controversially- translated book".