Pope Fires Chief Astronomer Over Opposition to "Intelligent Design"

This is bad.

(Via Volokh).

Update: One of Volokh's commenters points to this article in the National Catholic Reporter, a left-Catholic American newspaper. It doesn't reassure me. Obviously, the Pope is not going to endorse young earth Genesis literalism, but he does appear to think it is important that God intervene naturalistically in evoution. There is plenty of room in modern science for a transcendent intelligent creator, but not for the denial of natural selection as a blind, mechanistic process.