PH, believe this if you like; but to do so is to ignore who the Pope is. His greatest responsibility on earth as the Vicar of Christ is to preserve and transmit the deposit of the faith, which is biblically based. For him to argue against special creation would mean he'd be required to excommunicate himself. :^)
Well, we've both read what he said. Here's another link if anyone wants to look again: Message from the Pope, 1996.
At this point, I'm obviously not going to persuade you. There are many commentaries you can find on the web. Just put "Pope 1996 evolution" into your favorite search engine and you'll get a zillion hits. In my opinion, the Pope performed brilliantly. On the one hand, he must preserve the revealed truth about God and man's spiritual nature. And he did that.
On the other hand, he didn't want to preside over "another Galileo mess" and thus bring intellectual scorn upon the church which it is his duty to preserve. He did that too. He said, in effect: "Science is okay with me; but the spriritual realm belongs to religion." Think about it some more. The Pope wants his church to stay abreast of, and be relevant to, the ongoing discoveries about the physical world. He doesn't want the church to become another Flat Earth Society. He's doing what must be done. One might even say he's done an inspired job.
Yes indeed! It is pretty hilarious how Patrick keeps insisting that the Pope is not Catholic!