This is apparently the actual quote from New York's late Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral (Sunday, Nov. 24th, 1996) about Adam and Eve:
"It isn't new teaching that the Holy Father was clarifying. What he wanted to emphasize is that physical or biological evolution is not the critical thing. What is critical is that every human person is made in the image and likeness of God, it is the Holy Spirit, that breathes life into a womb and brings forth a human being. It was this Spirit of God that breathed a soul in His image into the earth, as we are told in the Book of Genesis, or even, perhaps, into a lower animal, and brought forth man, brought forth woman by way of, we are told at least symbolically, a rib from the side of Adam."Cardinal O'Connor proposed that God breathed a "soul" into a pre-existing evolutionary sub-human ape-like creature and called him Adam. He also proposed that the biblical account of Eve's creation from Adam's rib is merely "symbolic". From this one would have to conclude that he believed Eve evolved from the primordial soup over the eons as well, rather than being created in just one day. In other words he was saying Genesis does not tell you the truth when it speaks of a six day creation, rather it is merely symbolic, a fairy tale or a fable, but not a factual account. Truth apparently is to be found in atheistic Darwinian theory, but not in Genesis, the word of God?
Here is a short article about Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor's remarks
online at 
CNN Interactive.
So did man really evolve? Is Genesis a fairy tale? Can the Christian
believe in evolution as now endorsed by the Pope and Archbishop of New York? Did God create
the world through Evolution?
