Who's sorry now

Doctor Who, eat your heart out. All those aliens you've been talking to over the past forty-odd years (with that long TV break when the TARDIS failed its MOT or something) are being claimed by the Catholic Church.

According to a piece in The Times, little green men or tall, thin, grey ones with obsidian eyes would all be seen as creatures created by God. In other words, as one comment beneath the story has it, the Catholic Church is trying to "crow-bar" the idea into its own system as it scrambles "for some credibility".

The Times says,

Father Jose Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit, told L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, that "It is possible to believe in God and in extra-terrestrials". He said Christians could "admit the existence of other worlds and other forms of life, even those more evolved than ours, without necessarily questioning faith in the Creation, the incarnation and the redemption of mankind".

Let's get this right. If the Catholic Church has only just kissed and made up with Galileo, as we said a couple of days or so ago, does this mean it makes things up as it goes along? I mean, at one time, this organisation, with a leader who is supposed to be so clever as to be infallible in certain aspects of his work, which ran large parts of the world, which kicked arse because it knew everything and didn't like dissent, thought this planet was the centre of all things. It actually thought that. God didn't, you know, have a word in its ear and put it right on a few things.

As science has rushed through its agenda at quite a lick during the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, the church has been forced to accept certain things in order to hang onto what bit of credibility it has left in the eyes of the more rational, and I include some religious thinkers among those.

Of course, it always has the get-out of saying, "Well, yes, science is well clever, and the world is awesome, but it's just the way God meant it, right? God meant mankind to do science and stuff and discover lots of really clever things and that."

One has to assume, of course, that each of the planets that the aliens – little green ones or otherwise – came from would have had a virgin birth some time in their past, that one of their kind was born by parthenogenesis and had to be executed 33 of their years later for being uppity, but rose from the dead and ascended into—

Oh, hang on. Which way is up, now that we're thinking across planets, across galaxies? Which way is Heaven? Because that's another thing you've got to take into account if you really go in for this Catholic tosh hook, line and sinker, rather than just pick and choose, the way so many do, isn't it? This geezer rose into the sky, didn't just disappear, poof, like the TARDIS. Read Mark 16:19 and Luke 24:51, with a smattering in the Acts of the Apostles. No, up he went, bodily. Perhaps they all met in the middle somewhere.

But Catholic prelates can sit around all day and ponce about in their obscene opulence counting angels and doing magic with words. They'll find a way of accommodating just about anything to hang onto power by keeping themselves credible enough to live off the backs of others.