In the Incarnation, the Son became born of a virgin. True God and True Man.
If evolution is correct, then what man was then, will change to something different and was an animal in the past. If/when man evolves to the “next stage” will the Incarnation and economy of Salvation still be valid? Was it for the monkeys? Or for that matter, was the Incarnation valid only for certain subspecies of humans?
Think about it. The one big danger is that the Catholic theologians of today have been playing fast and loose with the Incarnation, something that the Early Church guarded very closely.
I don’t have much problem believing in evolution and seeing the Incarnation as a unique and appropriately singular event.
This world was designed with humanity at the head of it—as its gardeners and tenders and keepers and lords. All the other species were placed under us as our charges. If we had to go through millions of years to get to man...what is that to me? Didn’t we go through thousands of years before God revealed Himself to Moses? And another thousand at least before the Christ? And another two thousands before the Church encompassed all the earth? God works in His time, not ours.
However we got here, we fell in a way that no other species could fall. So we needed to be fixed in a special way: the Incarnation.
Because we are the head species, and presumably the species through which God was going to bring the earth to perfection, God became man. Not monkey. Not slug. Once man is set aright, the whole earth will then fall into place, because that’s what our job was from the beginning. To tend, to keep, and to subdue.
As for some hypothetical “next stage” evolved human—that will never happen. We’ll need geologic time to get there, and we can’t even make it one century without cataclysmic wars and bigger and better superweapons making those wars ever more destructive. Simply put, given our titanic hubris, we’ll never make it that far. We’ll see the book of Revelations play out instead.