If ETs landed on Earth tomorrow, what would the Catholic Church's next step be?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RealisticCatholic
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
R

RealisticCatholic

Guest
More for fun and speculation than anything else.

Assume the aliens are not hostile and (2) there is at least a language barrier – perhaps even insurmountable. Would evangelization even be an option? Would an ecumenical council be called ASAP?

Feel free to run with this in any direction. For example, would we still include them in the Church if they couldn’t receive certain sacraments? What if they could not digest bread and wine? Etc.

Etc.
 
Last edited:
I imagine there would be efforts undertaken to see if Jesus had revealed Himself to them. An ecumenical council would likely be held to see if they could receive the Sacraments and if the New Covenant applied to them.
 
There has been some good fiction written around this speculation.

My favorite is a novella in one of the “Infinite Space, Infinite God” collections (sadly it appears they are out of print now 😦 )
 
Theologically, they couldn’t join our Church. Christ assumed human nature and human flesh to redeem us from Adam and Eve’s human original sin. Our fall and redemption is directly tied to our human nature and common descent from Adam and Eve, something the aliens would not share. Baptism and so on would have no effect for them.

I think we either (1) entrust them to God’s plan in general and/or (2) encourage them to worship God, even if they can’t be sacramentally joined to the Church. Kind of like how Gentiles could worship God at the Temple without becoming Jewish.

Also, these aliens may already have received revelation from God, so who knows…
 
There was a fascinating little novel some years back, “Beyond The End”, IIRC published by Christendom College Press. The author was a female religious (sister). The theme concerned the impending destruction of the earth by a comet, and the arrival of humanoid aliens from a planet called Koinonia. They rescued a handful of young people and, I think, a bishop, who ended up consecrating two of the boys as priests (and possibly bishops as well, I don’t recall), thus ensuring continuance of the Church. The Koinonians were baptized, even though they didn’t need to be (just as Our Lord and, possibly, Our Lady had no need of baptism either), intermarried with the earthlings, and the children of these unions inherited original sin through their human parents. I don’t recall how it ended, so I can’t really “spoil” it, but there you have the basic plot.

I found this book in the free bin of a bookstore (McKay’s I think) in Manassas, Virginia, and somehow it got lost in moving or something. My only critique was that it came off as slightly fascistic (one of the girls got in trouble because she didn’t braid her hair in the plain Koinonian way) and was eager to make the point that changes were made to the Koinonian liturgy because the Church has the authority to make such changes (a slap at Latin Mass traditionalists who invoke Quo Primum?). Other than that, I loved the book.

I’d like to get a copy for my son (turned 12 years old today). Any ideas where I could find it?
 
“IF” is an absolutely huge, very loaded word. The Church, for her part, would respond precisely as she has to each and every challenge and difficulty over the past 2,000 years.
 
http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/co...--religion--society/faq-science-religion.html

Would the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence – aliens – affect your faith?

The first and most important fact we have to confront in the whole question of “extraterrestrial intelligence” is this: we don’t know. Of all the planets we’ve found orbiting other stars, it’s not clear if any of them are suitable places for life as we know it. On none of them, nor indeed anywhere closer to us in our own Sun’s system of planets, have we ever found evidence that completely, uncontrovertibly, proves life originated in some place other that just here on Earth. As far as we know for sure, we could be alone.

Fr. Ernan McMullin, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame with a background in physics, has discussed the possible impact on Christian theology of discovering extraterrestrials, and he concludes only that it would certainly inspire theologians to develop new ways of thinking about topics like original sin, the immortality of the soul, and the meaning of Christ’s redemptive act. But, as he points out, there is already a voluminous literature, and hardly a consensus, on these points among theologians even today, without ETs!

Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, an astronomer and Opus Dei priest who teaches theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, comes to the same conclusion. He has written a lengthy entry on Extraterrestrial Life in the Dizionario Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede (The Interdisciplinary Dictionary of Science and Faith, of which he was an editor). But at the end, he concludes by saying (in my translation of his Italian), “the last word on the question of extraterrestrial life will not come from theology, but science. The existence of intelligent life on planets other than the Earth neither rules in, nor rules out, any theological principle. Theologians, like the rest of the human race, will just have to wait and see.”

The mere possibility of intelligent life elsewhere puts a human (or at least, human-like) face on the far better established astronomical observation of the enormity of our universe. For us Catholics, the thoughts that come from contemplating this question, in the absence of any firm answers, should lead us to focus on realizing God’s greatness and His special love for us.
 
It is problematic question, especially if we look at original sin and redemption. As we believe there was one pair of original parents who sinned. If we neglect option of parallel “original sins” committed by some larger group why we can assume that some aliens committed it?
I think either they have to be part of the same original sin (this also gives good start for some classical sci-fi conception of all alien races having common ancestors), or be sinless in which case probably they will came to evangelize us (and I am very afraid that we will just kill them).
 
Just going to throw this out there…

Could Adam and Eve’s original sin have somehow corrupted the entire universe, including the souls of alien intelligent beings who existed at that time? In other words, while these beings didn’t commit the original sin, they were part of creation, were affected by it, and are thus in need of redemption. (That is, if they even exist, and there is no reason to think they do, but on the other hand, we can’t say with certainty that they do not).

I have in mind a school of thought (I doubt it is doctrinal, just theological and mystical speculation) that says, for instance, all of nature is ugly and deformed compared to what it would have been if sin had not entered the world. I don’t recall where I read this. Substitute “creation” for “world” and it’s something to consider.

Needless to say, this is something that Almighty God hasn’t seen fit to reveal to us. He may know that we simply couldn’t handle it.
 
I would hope the Church welcomes them with open arms, and teaches them all we know about God. Maybe we can learn a few things from them.
 
The first thing the Church should do is throw holy water on them and command them to leave in Jesus’ name, because they are probably fallen angels.
 
CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy novels might be of interest here.
 
Feel free to run with this in any direction.
Okay. In my experience when people speak of extra terrestrials, they make several assumptions:
  1. sentient life off of Earth does exist
  2. the beings are beyond living in caves hunting saber-toothed tigers with pointed sticks
  3. they want to come to Earth
  4. they have technology that allows #3
  5. they have life spans long enough for it (even if it was possible to travel at the speed of light, it would still take 4 years to get to the closest planet that can support life, and we have no reason to believe that it does)
Usually, when I point this stuff out, they reply with a facile smile and happily make all those assumptions because people tend to believe what they wish to believe and work backward, bending logic to fit their conclusions.

To finally answer the question (sorry it took so long, but you said “any direction”) this is all why it’s easy to trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that the church would accept his guidance. “…and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
 
There is reason to believe that the speed of light barrier can be breached or worked around. A few proposals are out there. There is no reason to believe the universe has beings at our intelligence level or higher. If aliens existed and came to earth, any language barrier could be overcome since they would need to have an understanding of our planet and human beings. In order to study our world they would need to interact with it. Yes, the military will be there with our latest weapons, but that’s no guarantee that they start shooting at the first alien to walk out of their ship - Hollywood movies do not count 🙂
 
Usually, when I point this stuff out, they reply with a facile smile and happily make all those assumptions because people tend to believe what they wish to believe and work backward, bending logic to fit their conclusions.
Well, another term for “science fiction” is “speculative fiction”. The problems arise when people start actually believing the speculations. I wrote my own First Contact novel, and while it was fun wondering how that would work, I certainly didn’t take it seriously.

D
 
Based on our faith as revealed by Christ and documented in Sacred Scripture, the only explanation for the appearance of an ET that would be consistent with what we believe would be that it was a manifestation of the Prince of Lies or one of his servants. Pretty simple, actually.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top