The Catholic Church had already come to grips with Genesis not being literal due to geological discoveries in the years before Darwin's work was published, so Darwin's work was not treated with as much hostility as it would have been a few decades earlier. The official Catholic position at the time was already that the biblical account of creation should be interpreted allegorically.

This being the context, there was too much internal debate for the Catholic Church to issue an official position. This pattern was repeated with the development of cosmology and other modern physics ideas in the early 20th century.

Protestant reaction was more hostile.