A Catholic Learning Curve

We all make mistakes from time to time. Welcome to humanity. However, when Christians make a mistake, or when those of a religious faith make a mistake it's always magnified. Further though there are some mistakes that are far more serious than others. So, where am I going with all of this?  :-) 

I'm not picking on Catholics. Protestants have their own baggage, as we ALL do!

The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically through the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited.

The Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science has come a long way since Galileo was tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant his finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe. Bible verses were used to support the geocentric philosophy; however, Rome wasn't ready for such a change of view (heliocentric).

It's not unlike us today. Our BS (belief systems) is predicated on what we've been historically TAUGHT and what we OBSERVE. NEWS FLASH! Both can be wrong.

Worse yet was the fact that it took until 1992 for the Catholic Church, under John Paul II to declare that the ruling against Galileo was an error from what he wrote as, "a tragic mutual incomprehension." Say what?

That's water down the drain though.

The Catholic Church has learned its lesson and if anything, they're getting ahead of the scientific learning curve. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory. Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results just last Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

Funes added, "Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe." There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe.

So, from the Catholic Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, E.T. phone home!  :-)