By Maria Wiering, OSV News
(OSV News) — If rational, extraterrestrial beings exist, what would be God’s relationship to them?
A once purely speculative musing may take on new meaning with data disclosures from the U.S. Department of Defense on alleged encounters with “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs.
UAPs — once known as “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs — and the intelligence behind their existence has long been a source of public fascination, and long before claims were made about UFO remains being found at Roswell, New Mexico. But Catholic theologians and scientists have also been thinking about their implications on how humanity sees itself in relation to its Creator.
Among the scholars exploring this topic, the general consensus appears to be that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings does not upend the Church’s theology of creation.
Christopher Baglow, the director of the Science & Religion Initiative of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, addressed this question in a 2021 lecture for the Society of Catholic Scientists Annual Conference, a version of which he published in Church Life Journal. His starting point was with humans and extraterrestrials sharing God as their creator, thus giving extraterrestrials “capacity for a special relationship with God in which they can know God and respond to him with freedom and love.”
“God would love them, and want to share his life with them,” he said.
St. John Paul II is said to have expressed a similar idea when asked by a child if aliens were real. “Always remember,” the late pontiff is reported to have said, “they are children of God as we are.”
While the Catholic Church teaches nothing definitive on extraterrestrial life, over the centuries Catholic intellectuals have considered the question. In the 15th century, German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, a philosopher and theologian, speculated that God’s creativity made intelligent life on other planets probable.
Much more recently, Jesuit astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno asked a key question pointblank, with the title of his 2014 book “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” Co-authored with Jesuit Father Paul Mueller, the book takes a Q&A approach to a range of questions of faith and science. As for its provocative title question, it answers in the affirmative — but only if the extraterrestrial asked for baptism, as it is a sacrament that must be freely given and received.
A Detroit native, Brother Consolmagno is president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation who served a decade as the director of the Vatican Observatory from 2015 to 2025. “Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul,” he told The Guardian in 2010, adding that he would be “delighted” if intelligent extraterrestrial life were discovered.
Current observatory director Jesuit Father Richard D’Souza has shared a similar view.
“They would be children of God,” D’Souza said of extraterrestrial beings in 2025. “I believe in a benevolent Creator. He is behind everything.”
Jesuit Father José Funes, another former Vatican Observatory director, leads Project OTHER, which brings together scientists, theologians and philosophers to the Catholic University of Cordoba, Argentina, to study the possibility and potential impact of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings.
“Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. And this is not in contrast with faith, because, and this is important to understand — we cannot place limits on the creative freedom of God,” he said in a 2023 article published by the Vatican Observatory. “The existence of intelligent life on planets other than Earth is neither required nor excluded by any theological argument. Theologians, like the rest of the human race, have to wait and see.”
In a 2021 interview with Catholic News Service, Father Funes urged Catholics and others to consider the topic through an academic lens, not conspiracy theories.
Among the questions theologians — including the famed, 20th century Jesuit theologian Father Karl Rahner — have considered is whether the Incarnation would have been repeated on other planets for other intelligent species. Both Father Funes and Dominican Father Thomas F. O’Meara, a retired theology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Vast Universe: Extraterrestrials and Christian Revelation,” told CNS that Jesus’ incarnation was a “unique” event that would not necessarily take place beyond Earth.
The question is one the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, an Anglican author best known for his “Chronicles of Narnia” books, explored via fiction in the late 1930s and 1940s with his Space Trilogy. The books — “Out of the Silent Planet,” “Perelandra” and “That Hideous Strength” engaged the topic of extraterrestrials popularized in culture by other writers such as H.G. Wells, best known for “The War of the Worlds,” a novel first published in 1898 and infamously dramatized for radio in 1938.
Lewis’ work considers the possibility that rational beings on other planets may continue to live in an unfallen relationship with God and therefore not require the Redemption in the way human beings do.
Lewis’ trilogy was also a touchpoint in a 31-minute documentary titled “What Should Catholics Believe about UFOs?” from Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute. Produced by the institute’s Brett Robinson, the documentary brought together several scientists, theologians and other scholars to talk through the title question.
In the documentary, Lewis scholar Michael Ward points to Lewis’ own questions of whether the current cosmological model “might be shattered” by new discoveries. Noting that a Christian anthropology has had room for other scientific advances, such as the Copernican system and Darwinian biology, Ward said, “There’s nothing new under the sun that can’t be accommodated within the existing framework.”
Among the experts interviewed is Diana Walsh Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of “American Cosmic,” published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, which explores the phenomenon of belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life.
“A lot of people think that the recognition that there are non-human intelligences would change religion, eradicate religion or fundamentally discredit it, but I don’t think so at all,” Pasulka said in the documentary. “Within the major religions there’s wisdom there with respect to how to deal with non-human intelligence.”
A Catholic, Pasulka sees a connection between contemporary reports of UAPs and medieval descriptions of phenomena in the sky, and her work has led to correspondence with aerospace engineers and members of the U.S. Space Force seeking explanations for their own experiences or research.
In an interview published in March in the Spanish newspaper El País, Pasulka said, “In the United States government right now, there are many people who believe in UFOs, in UAPs. That’s a fact. They use taxpayer money to study it. But they have different interpretations.
“There is, incidentally, a high percentage of devout Catholics in the military who study this,” she added. “They believe there are probably a variety of phenomena. Some they would categorize as being caused by angels and demons. And then there are some they believe are a threat, from an unknown extraterrestrial civilization. They only know they’re here, and they treat them as a threat because they’re military personnel: if something is in their airspace, they want to know what it is.”
In March, Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, drew attention to the theory of aliens as fallen angels, saying in a podcast interview that he thought supposed aliens are demons, and that spiritual warfare is the easiest explanation for “extra-natural phenomenon.”
Paul Thigpen, a theologian who died earlier this year, also explored that possibility as part of his 2022 book “Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith: Are We Alone in the Universe With God and the Angels?”, but he determined that the spiritual realm was an unlikely explanation for all UAP. He expressed concern that human contact with extraterrestrials could cause some to substitute their reality with God or mistakenly see them as a source of salvation.
“The Church could accommodate such new scientific knowledge, just as she did the 16th-century scientific revolution demonstrating that the Earth is not the center of the solar system,” he said in a 2022 interview with the National Catholic Register. “If we were to encounter directly an alien species, with the possibility of communication, the Church would, of course, have many questions to ask about their spiritual and moral status. The answers to those questions would then shape the Church’s response to such creatures. As we examine the issues involved, we’re pressed to delve much deeper into the meaning of traditional Catholic teaching about the omnipotence and creativity of God, the image of God in humanity, the fall of the human race, the nature of the Incarnation, the means and scope of redemption and the reality of the ‘last things.'”
On May 5, Will Rahn of The Free Press published a podcast episode titled “These Two Catholics See Signs of God in UFOs” featuring Pasulka and New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat for a series titled “What Should Smart People Think About UFOs?”
Douthat did not commit to a particular theory about the nature of extraterrestrial life, should it exist. He did, however, acknowledge the tension Catholics might face if it were revealed to be real.
“Most Catholics are pretty comfortable with a set of categories that are real but invisible,” Douthat said. “And it would be a shift, let’s say, if the Church said, ‘And by the way, some of these preternatural beings can show up on Air Force cameras.’ That would not be impossible, but it would be a different mode of thinking about these things than most Catholics have right now.”
Maria Wiering is managing editor of OSV News.
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