In one sense, the Holy Father's chapter on this subject to more to the point in the the Credo for Today

From a series of homilies given by the future pope. Excellent clarification of the Church's teaching in light of modern science.

In this remarkable collection of homilies given during Lent 1981, while he was still Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) explores creation as a central piece of Christian doctrine. His reading of the creation story sees belief in creation as reasonable, over against a scientism that sees God as irrelevant or simply a prime mover of the evolutionary process, and then explores deeply the questions of anthropology that inevitably arise from the story of the fall.

Reading Ratzinger as an American is always strange, because his most salient criticisms of European Marxists hit hardest, in the American landscape, against religious conservatives. Though 'In the Beginning...' is doubtless a creationist theology, it bears little resemblance to the Intelligent Design movement and its related entities. Ratzinger's account provides real food for thought for both sides of the contemporary debate.

His insights go much further than the question of creation's compatibility with the present scientific understanding of the origins of the universe, however. In his final homily, "Sin and Salvation," and especially in the Appendix, which discusses the consequences of faith in creation, he plumbs the depths of our human obsession with our own actions and charts a course toward the redemptive action of God, and the avoidance of sin as denial of humanity's fundamental condition of relationality, both to God and to our neighbors. This Appendix is frustratingly thin—a dissertation or two could be written working out a more comprehensive understanding of the concepts at hand—but what is here is certainly thought-provoking. ( )

Pope Benedict makes some correct and interesting points (if I may be so presumptuous to evaluate them so!) in his short work. But this treatment is less comprehensive than one might expect and leaves out discussion of some of the obvious and nagging questions. ( )