RE: Were the seven days of creation in Genesis seven twenty four hour periods? - Where do these notions originate?
This is not a Catholicism bash, in case anybody interprets it as that, Catholicism was simply a monopoly for a long time and that has lasting impacts still visible today in various forms.
As you point out Catholicism has move on while other protestants have not:
“God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities,” he said. Catholics have long accepted that the creation story as written in the book of Genesis in the Bible can stand along the scientific theory of evolution and that the two are not mutually exclusive.
FromWikipedia
Early reaction to Charles Darwin's theories
Catholic concern about evolution has always been very largely concerned with the implications of evolutionary theory for the origin of the human species; even by 1859, a literal reading of the Book of Genesis had long been undermined by developments in geology and other fields. No high-level Church pronouncement has ever attacked head-on the theory of evolution as applied to non-human species.
Even before the development of modern scientific method, Catholic theology had allowed for biblical text to be read as allegorical, rather than literal, where it appeared to contradict that which could be established by science or reason. Thus Catholicism has been able to refine its understanding of scripture in light of scientific discovery. Among the early Church Fathers there was debate over whether God created the world in six days, as Clement of Alexandria taught, or in a single moment as held by Augustine, and a literal interpretation of Genesis was normally taken for granted in the Middle Ages and later, until it was rejected in favour of uniformitarianism (entailing far greater timeframes) by a majority of geologists in the 19th century. However modern literal creationism has had little support among the higher levels of the Church.