Vatican Teologian & UFO'S

[Exporter]

A Theologian who resides at the Vatican has mad several statements reguarding extraterrestials, UFO"s and their spiritual condition. Go to greatdreams.com/balducci.htm

Monsenior Balducci of Rome said that extraterrestials have a soul and are not demons.

Read this paper and state an opinion based of the facts that you can glean from it.

 

[Jerusha]

That is pretty far out.

I like CS Lewis’s science fiction novels. IF there are extraterrestials, they would have souls. Most definitely. That there --ARE-- well, I really don’t thionk so. But not impossible.

Thanks for bringing up the subject.

 

[DavidFilmer]

To my knowledge (and I’m pretty sure I’m right about this one), the Church has never officially taught about the existence or nature of alien beings. Therefore, any private theologian (such as Msgr. Balducci) is perfectly free to formulate and express his own opinions about the matter.

The author of the website makes the mistake of ascribing more authority to Balducci than is merited. Balducci does not speak for the Catholic Church. The author’s supposition that Balducci would have been suppressed if he were speaking contrary to Catholic doctrine (silence implies consent) is deeply flawed. He says:

Anyone who studies Vatican behavior knows that if Monsignor Balducci was speaking against what the Church wants its followers to believe, he would have been silenced faster than you can say Hans Kung.

He lost the force of his argument right there. Hans Kung specifically taught contrary to dogmatically defined doctrine (papal infallibility). And it took more than ten years for the Church to revoke his “right to teach as a Catholic theologian” in 1979 (though he continued to teach without this distinction until his retirement in 1996). He was never excommunicated, and he remains a Catholic priest with full faculties.

Balducci, on the other hand, has never taught contrary to doctrine (because the Church has not taught anything regarding alien beings). So even the softballs that the Church threw at Kung would not come Balducci’s way, no matter how wacky his personal opinions might be.

 

[USMC]

This is a subject that I have wondered about. I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea what “aliens” are. Are they demons? Are they life forms from other planets? I do not have the slightest idea, and could not even begin a guess.

That being said, I actually tend to believe that they may be mor thatn just fiction. My brother, who is very grounded and does not at all tend to extremes, actually saw a UFO up close when he was younger (early 20’s), but He doesn’t talk about it much (actually he never talks about it). I ask him about it a few years ago and he said that when he first saw it he told a fee people, but they looked at him like he was crazy so he did not mention discuss it any more.

The Bible mentions a “wheel in the sky” in the Old Testament. I think that is what carried Elija away. Are these angels? If they are angels, my guess is that some of these angels are fallen angels. The New Agers, practially worship the aliens which is a confirmation that, whatever they are, they are not good.

Maybe some of the “aliens” are good angels (the ones that took Elija away) and some are fallen angels. But why do angels need bodies and space ships? They are imaterial.

Like I said, I have no idea what they are but do tend to believe that they are not just fiction. This may be one of those things we will not know about until judgment day.

 

[aridite]

If aliens have bodies, they are not angels. If they are living, they have souls. If they are intelligent, they have immortal, spiritual souls.

If they exist, they would be like any other rational animals (aka physical persons) who were previously unknown, i.e., Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians.

If they were subject to Original Sin, and I don’t see how they could not be, they would be in need of redemption by God Incarnate. Just as redemption wasn’t limited to Jews, or Europeans, so it would not be limited to Terrans (Earth natives). If they were not subject to Original Sin, they would be in a state of original innocence, but still need elevation by grace through God Incarnate.

But since there is no real evidence for their existence, I have no reason to believe they exist, so these questions are moot. I am not impressed by the statistical argument: there must be billions of planets capable of sustaining life, so there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We have no idea how likely the development of life is in the universe. It might just be a 1 in hundreds of billions chance. I don’t even know what it means to calculate the odds. And without an accurate measure of the likelyhood of life, there is no way to speculate whether that likelyhood has been realized.