Bingo. To wit, the great St. Augustine:
On Genesis, Book II "Question of the phase in which the moon was made" 15, 30"God, after all is the author and founder of things in their actual natures. Now whatever any single thing may in some way or other produce and unfold by its natural development through periods of time that are suited to it, it contained it beforehand as something hidden, if not in specific forms and bodily mass, at least by the force and reckoning of nature, unless of course a tree, void of fruit and stripped of its leaves throughout the winter, is then to be called imperfect, or unless again at its origins, when it had still not yet borne any fruit, its nature was also imperfect. It is not only about the tree, but about its seed also that this could not rightly be said; there everything that with the passage of time is somehow or other going to appear is already latent in invisible ways. Although, if God were to make anything imperfect, which he then would himself bring to perfection, what would be reprehensible about such an idea? But you would be quite within your rights to disapprove if what had been begun by him were said to be completed and perfected by another."
I believe it is also Aquinas' position that the Creation is a completed act of God but that we who live within it see only the concretion of it as an unfolding or secession of events and things.
IMO Augustine and Aquinas' positions are the reason the Church will never have any particular quarrel with the biological science of evolution provided it stays within their boundary. It does seem to fit nicely with the ancient idea of the creation being revealed to us as a succession of forms.
About Creation the Catholic Encyclopedia says this-
"Whether, with St. Augustine and St. Thomas, one hold that only the primordial elements, endowed with dispositions and powers (rationes seminales) for development, were created in the strict sense of the term, and the rest of nature — plant and animal life — was gradually evolved according to a fixed order of natural operation under the supreme guidance of the Divine Administration (Harper, "Metaphysics of the School", II, 746); or whether, with other Fathers and Doctors of the School, one hold that life and the classes of living beings — orders, families, genera, species — were each and all, or only some few, strictly and immediately created by God — whichever of these extreme views he may deem more rational and better motived, the Catholic thinker is left perfectly free by his faith to select."