“Big Bang of Words Follows Vatican’s OK to Believe in E.T.,” screamed the Chicago Tribune headline (May 18, 2008). “Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God,” said Jesuit priest and astronomer Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, adding that “we cannot put boundaries to God’s creative freedom.” Why so much media hoopla after a Vatican astronomer declared that intelligent life on other worlds is compatible with Roman Catholic doctrine?
Granted, the statement appeared in the official Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano, suggesting that top church officials really wanted to get this message out. And yes, the church has come a long way since 1600 when it burned Giordano Bruno, in part for speculating about other worlds. But let’s not overreact. The Vatican has been in the astronomy business since 1578, and considering the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) for years now. (In 2005, Jesuit brother and Vatican Observatory astronomer Guy Consolmagno published a booklet arguing that “nothing in Holy Scripture . . . could confirm or contradict the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.”) No, the real story lies between the lines. Why has the Vatican attached such priority to astronomy, and why is it calling greater attention to it now?
What we now know as the Vatican Observatory was founded by Pope Gregory XIII in connection with his reform of the Western calendar. It began systematic astronomical observations in 1800 and was formally established by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. By 1935, Pope Pius XI had moved the observatory from Vatican City to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo and entrusted it to the Jesuits. It acquired two powerful telescopes and in 1981 built a secondary research center in America’s Arizona desert. By and large, the Vatican Observatory does genuine astronomy (though Father Funes is now the director because Pope Benedict XVI sacked his predecessor, George Coyne, in 2006 for being too dismissive of intelligent design theory). Just last fall, the Italian observatory hosted two hundred astronomers for a five-day conference on disk galaxies. Meanwhile, a new building is under construction at Castel Gandolfo with residences, offices, labs, a museum, and a library.
So the Vatican is serious about astronomy. But why spotlight it now? Some obvious answers suggest themselves. As recently as 1990, the idea of “intelligent life on other worlds” involved three unknowns:
Today, the “other worlds” issue is settled; nearly three hundred planets have been confirmed in other star systems. As I write, NASA’s Phoenix lander is about to drill into Martian ice seeking biological traces. We may soon discover a second, independent tree of life on the world next door.* Hmm—one- and-a-half unknown down, one and a half to go!
But when analyzing what the Church of Rome is up to, it’s seldom wise to focus solely on today’s headlines. The Vatican is one of the rare institutions that can strategize on a horizon of decades, even centuries. So what might be the Vatican’s “long game” here? I’m just guessing, but I think it has to do with the last time humanity discovered a New World.
The discovery of the Americas was hugely embarrassing to Western Christianity. Here was this vast and utterly unexpected landmass, and Scripture said nothing about it! Rationalists made great sport of that failure; in time, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith undertook to remedy it, weaving America and its native peoples into the Christian salvation narrative. Smith’s handmade faith, now a fast-growing world religion, grew primarily by drawing converts from Catholic and Protestant ranks.
My guess is that the Vatican has learned its painful lesson. Just as Scripture said nothing about those continents half a world from Europe, it is silent about other worlds and the beings who might call them home. The discovery that those entities also exist, unbeknownst to Scripture, could be devastating for the faith.
Of course, the idea that discovering intelligent life Out There might have ominous consequences for life Down Here is nothing new. It’s a staple of science fiction but also a theme that has long intrigued serious thinkers. In 1960, a Brookings Institution panel warned that the discovery of ETI might have a “disruptive effect on humanity” and might wrench the profoundly religious more than most. (The report even speculated about the wisdom of concealing ETI finds from the public.) More recently, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) pioneer Jill Tarter, who runs a project scanning the skies for alien signals, proposed another way that finding ETI could rock human belief systems. “If we get a message” from a presumably superior alien civilization “and it’s secular in nature, I think that says that they have no organized religion—that they’ve outgrown it.”
Of course, I’m just guessing. But I think the Vatican’s fascination with astronomy, and its new insistence that its teachings will not be threatened if a genuine ETI turns up, amounts to an exercise in anticipatory damage control. Here’s my best guess: The next time humanity learns (in Carl Sagan’s phrase) that “the universe is much bigger than our prophets said,” Vatican strategists aim to be among the religious leaders who can give the world a thumbs-up and say, “Oh yeah, we were on this all along.”
For simplicity’s sake, I will ignore the genuine possibility that life on Mars might prove to have a common origin with life here. Primitive life might have emerged but once on either world, then “hitchhiked” to the other on debris ejected from some cosmic impact. Of course, the scenario that would pose the greatest challenge to traditional Christianity would be if Mars life proved clearly to be a “second Genesis,” wholly independent of life on earth.
Tom Flynn is the editor of FREE INQUIRY and the editor of The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Prometheus Books, 2007). He is striving contumaciously to be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
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