The Vatican has travelled a huge distance in both time and space by accepting the existence of extraterrestrial beings and asking its flock to treat extraterrestrials as “brothers.” A 45-year-old Jesuit, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, who heads the Vatican Observatory, said to be one of the oldest and the biggest, wrote in the Vatican newspaper L’Observatore Romano that there could be extraterrestrial life and that he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God. “We can’t put limits on God’s creative freedom,” he wrote.

Even though it is rather late in the day that the Vatican is recognising the possibility of life on other planets, it is a sign that it is catching up with the times. It is also far removed from its bigotry in the 16th century when the brilliant Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was given life imprisonment for supporting the Copernicus theory that the earth moved round the sun. At that time, according to the Vatican, the earth was stationary and everything else moved around it. Galileo had in his book Dialogue lent strong support to Copernicus and even though the Church had given him permission to support Copernicus, he was only to give it the weight of a hypothesis.

The then Pope Urban VIII summoned him and after a commission was formed to look into his heresy he was subjected to an inquisition. It was of course only as late as 1992 that the Church absolved Galileo of his heresy. This new development in the Vatican raises countless curious questions. Would God in his creativity have repeated the same model of creation? Would the Vatican be exploring the existence of extraterrestrial beings? Would these extraterrestrial beings love their neighbours? One looks forward to hearing more from the Vatican on the subject of extraterrestrials.