Can Catholics believe in Extraterrestrials?
With the same playbook as other recent propaganda, we're being groomed to believe in Extraterrestrials (ETs). As "Disclosure Day " approaches, a pseudo-religion emerges:
- A "science-based" spirituality of love and peace, which absorbs world religions.
- Aliens are superior; they taught Jesus his miracles.
- Humans can communicate with ETs via CE5 meditation. 1
- The Bible is outdated. 2
- ET deniers are uneducated; they don't "follow the science."
Conspicuously absent is:
I am The Way, the Life and the Truth, no one comes to the Father except through me. 3 Repent and be saved. 4
Secular Society and all religions are open to ETs, except Christianity; the last line of defence.
Many Catholic media personalities claim the Church hasn't ruled on ETs, including Jimmy Akin (Catholic Answers), Fr. Robert Spitzer (EWTN), Robert Duncan (CNS, OSV News), Matt Fradd (PwA), and Matt Walsh (Daily Wire). They say “it's science, not theology.”
Catholic Inc. doesn't understand extraterrestrial belief turns dogma to rubble. 5
ET belief is a gateway drug into the New Age
Even gifted apologetic legend, Jimmy Akin, is vulnerable. He recently speculated about sacramental marriage between aliens and humans, if they can have sex. Then he defended Freemasonry.6 Now he's teaching psychic studies at Rhine. 8 His Mysterious World carelessly dives into phenomenon the Vatican warns about:
New Age Spirituality is… spiritual narcissism or pseudo-mysticism … strange and exotic beings … extraterrestrials … psychic powers and occult… 9
When confronted with Mary's position in Heaven, he mused,
If there are other mothers of Jesus out there, they wouldn't be as high as our Mary.
Wait! Aren't aliens "superior" to humans? Jimmy says:
"It's not always demons… if UAPs10 ... blow up and leave fragments of metal and stuff, we need to go with the premise that they are physical objects." 11
This is wishful thinking. Fr. Ripperger, an exorcist, asserts demons are capable of all documented exotic "UAP" activity.
The case against Extraterrestrials
Catholics don't need a new Vatican proclamation on ETs. We have:
- The Bible
- Early Church Fathers
- Magisterium
- Sensus fidelium
Cover to cover, the Bible is about marriage. 12 It ends with the Church as "the Bride," 13 "the wife of the lamb." 14 It would be inconsistent with God’s nature to describe his relationship to his Church as monogamous marriage, and require our marriages to be monogamous, 15 only to be discovered as a polygamist on "disclosure day."
If advocates say aliens are part of the Church, then why doesn't the Bible ask us to pray for our “step-brothers,” and why are advocates lobbying to add “cosmos” to “Thy Will be done on earth …” 16
We are not to pray for extraterrestrials (or to them). Instead, the Bible warns that, as we approach the apocalypse, there will be a Great Deception. 17
For over 1800 years, popes, bishops, priests, saints, and laity unanimously held that all incarnate rational creatures are humans, descended from Adam and Eve; 18 a little lower than angels, 19 with no creature in between. 20 This Sensus Fidelium was Christological, which makes it an infallible doctrine. 21
With 266 popes, and over 11,000 saints, we don't have one positive ET statement. 22 Conversely, Pope Pius II, 23 Pope St. Zachary, 24 St. Augustine, 25 St. Thomas Aquinas, 26 St. Philastrius, 27 and more condemned "other worlds, other men." These haven't been "corrected" by Rome.
Alien redemption theories with responses
(1) Jesus redeemed aliens
- Jesus, the New Adam 28 redeemed Adam and his descendants' sins; 29 died for our sins 30 of the world! 31
- God's incarnation is solidarity with humans.
- "Go into the world and proclaim…" 32 not the “cosmos”.
(2) Aliens have their own Jesus
- “If anyone shall say that Christ… had different bodies and different names... let him be anathema.” 33
- God gave his only Son. 34
- Hypostatic Union forbids that Jesus and aliens tapped into "Christ Consciousness." 35 Christ is inseparable from Jesus, fully God, fully human.
(3) God saved aliens in a different way
So Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, will sit this one out?
(4) Aliens never fell
Really? Not one of these incarnate evolutionary rational beings with self-will ever sinned, while Lucifer and a third of the rational angels fell? 36
ET advocates bounce from weak theory to weak theory, with little commitment to any of them, as if something will stick.
More doctrine and/or dogma
- Christ the King will come "soon." Time will end for the entire material universe. 37
- Mary, a human, is "Queen of the Universe." 38
- The universe is destined for and addressed to man. 39
- God created everything for man, 40 entrusted all of creation to humans. 41
- Man has "dominion over all creatures." 42
- The one Holy Spirit is the "soul" of the one Holy Church. 43
The Vatican New Age document rightly groups extraterrestrials with the occult and other dangerous beliefs. 44 Let’s heed their warning.
By David MacDonald with adaptations from "Only Man Bears His Image by Daniel O'Connor, with permission.
I contacted Catholic Answers May 2024. Apologist Tom Nash responded: "There is no Catholic position on the existence of aliens, as such. Whether life exists on other planets is a scientific, not a theological, question." A request for escalation went unanswered.
Notes
- 1 CE5 stands for Close encounters of the 5th kind, popularized by Dr. Steven Greer (1990s). Practitioners gather in dark, quiet environments—often stargazing.
- 2 ET advocate, Fr. Richard Rohr.
- 3 Jn 14:6
- 4 Mk 1:15
- 5 ET advocates Fr. Richard Rohr's assertion
- 6 Pints with Aquinas interview with Jimmy Akin. (Freemasonry and UFOs)
- 7 The magisterium condemns Freemasonry in In eminenti apostolatu, Pope Clement XII (1738), Humanum Genus Pope Leo XIII (1884), Declaratio de associationibus massonici, Pope John Paul II (1983)
- 8 Formally called parapsychology. The Rhine Institute is a school of the paranormal "bridging science with spirituality." The New Age on full display. https://www.rhineedu.org/
- 9 Vatican pastoral document, JESUS CHRIST THE BEARER OF THE WATER OF LIFE, A Christian reflection on the “New Age”, Section 3.2, released 2003.
- 10 Or UFO
- 11 Catholic Answers podcast, What Happened in the Lost Years of Jesus? (Weird Questions) time 3:47 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWC-9qhKChg
- 12 Adam and Eve, Song of Solomon, Jesus' discourses, Revelation, etc.
- 13 Rev 22:17
- 14 Rev 21:9
- 15 Mt 19, Lk 16:18
- 16 Mat 6:10
- 17 2 Thes 2:11
- 18 Summa Theologiae I q.29 a.1, Catechism §356, Humani Generis, para. 26 (Catholic Dogma)
- 19 Psm 8:5
- 20 Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
- 21 Lumen Gentium 12: “The whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief when, from the bishops down to the last of the faithful, they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.”
- 22 An ET advocate claimed JPII did but there is no evidence of that.
- 23 Pius II, Cum sicut accepimus (14 Nov. 1459), proposition 3
- 24 Boniface’s correspondence, Epistola 80
- 25 City of God. Book XI, Chapter 5
- 26 Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 47, Article 3 (“Whether there is only one world?”)
- 27 St. Philastrius, Bishop of Brescia †397 A.D.
- 28 Rom 5:12-21, 1 Cor 15:22
- 29 Rom 5:12–21, 1 Cor 15:22, Adam is generally considered redeemed in Catholic theology.
- 30 1 Cor 3:15
- 31 John 1:29, 1 John 2:2
- 32 Mk 16:15
- 33 Second Council of Constantinople, 533 A.D. The Anathemas Against Origen. §7
- 34 Jn 3:16
- 35 Col 1:3-4,15-19. They claim John 1:1 is about universal cosmic energy (chi, prana, etc.)
- 36 Rev. 12:4, 12:9
- 37 Rev 21:1, Mat 24:29
- 38 Lumen Gentium (1964), Ad Caeli Reginam, Oct 11, 1954
- 39 GAUDIUM ET SPES §3, Catechism §299
- 40 Catechism §358
- 41 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church §451. It is authentic Magisterium (§80)
- 42 Eucharistic Prayer IV, Part of the Mass, the Church's highest prayer.
- 43 Catechism 813
- 44 JESUS CHRIST THE BEARER OF THE WATER OF LIFE, A Christian reflection on the “New Age”, Section 3.2, released 2003