While his predecessor was fairly restrained and sensible about the subject, Pope Benedict is starting to sound unfortunately stupid, claiming that “the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”. Of course this simply reveals that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory is. One could argue that he’s just abusing the concept of “proof”; a lot of philosophers and theologians expect science to be like (pre-Gödel) mathematics or logic, proving theorems rather than testing hypotheses against data. From this standpoint, one could substitute any scientific theory for “evolution” in his statement – gravity, relativity, thermodynamics, whatever. Sloppy, uneducated, but not necessarily malicious.
But that’s too charitable an interpretation:

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory. “We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

So not only does he really not understand science, but he’s using the kind of fallacious argument beloved of the ID crowd. Or perhaps he understands this stuff really well, but wants to pander to the gullible. Either way, it’s a load of Papal bull…….