Father Stanley L. Jaki is a passionate Hungarian-born priest, a snowy-haired man with coal-black eyes set in a handsome pink face, eyes that flash dismissive anger or hint at conspiratorial mirth.
He is combative. He has a penchant for imaginative gesticulation; he wields his forefinger like a dirk. He is a papal Gurkha living in America, prepared to impale anyone who would confuse the crucial questions: How life began on Earth, and how it advances.
Which is why he appeared this week at Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg, to clarify Pope John Paul II's much-discussed Oct. 22 letter on evolution, and perhaps repair the damage done by what he calls the media's mangling of its message.
Jaki is more than a defender of the faith, or at least brings more to that task. He is a physicist, one of 17 Americans in the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which only a third are Catholic. He studied under the Austrian Nobel laureate Victor F. Hess, the discoverer of cosmic rays. He has been a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, Einstein's old haunt. He is a prize-winning author of 35 books on religious/scientific matters. (His latest, which came out in July, is "Bible and Science.")
His criticisms, for the most part, are aimed at the unprovable claims of evolutionary scientists, as well as simplistic reporting on complex matters by the media.
In the case of the pope's letter last month, newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks around the world had interpreted it as an acceptance, even an endorsement, of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
To many, it seemed any papal reference to evolution would signal the next step in a perceived process of reconciliation between religion -- or at least the Roman Catholic Church -- and science.
John Paul took the first step in 1992. In a statement to the Academy he vindicated Galileo, who was persecuted in 1633 for asserting that the Earth circled the sun, instead of the other way around.
But the pope's letter this October contained nothing about reconciliation, said Jaki (pronounced "yaki"). In fact, the letter suggested that in the area of evolution, no such reconciliation is required. The Vatican has never formally opposed evolution, though neither has it embraced it in its entirety. It has been taught in Catholic schools for decades.
