If rational, extraterrestrial beings exist, what would be God’s relationship to them?
A once purely speculative musing has taken on new meaning with the May 8 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 have long been a source of public fascination. Catholic theologians and scientists have also been thinking about their implications for how humanity sees itself in relation to God
The general consensus is that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings does not upend the Church’s theology of creation.
Christopher Baglow, 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. 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 expressed a similar idea when asked by a child if aliens were real. “Always remember,” the late pontiff said, “they are children of God as we are.”
While the Catholic Church teaches nothing definitive on extraterrestrial life, 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.
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 answers its title question in the affirmative – but only if the extraterrestrial asked for baptism, as the sacrament must be freely given and received.
Brother Consolmagno served 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.
Current observatory director Jesuit Father Richard D’Souza agreed.
“They would be children of God,” D’Souza said of extraterrestrial beings in 2025. “I believe in a benevolent Creator. He is behind everything.”
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. Dominican Father Thomas F. O’Meara, a retired theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, said Jesus’ incarnation was a “unique” event.
Christian apologist C.S. Lewis explored that question in a 1930s space trilogy. He argued that rational beings on other planets may continue to live in an unfallen relationship with God and therefore not require the Redemption.
“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,” said Diana Walsh Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. “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.
In a March interview Pasulka said, “In the United States government right now, there are many people who believe in UFOs, in UAPs.”
“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.”
In March, Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, drew attention to the theory of aliens as fallen angels, saying in a podcast that he thought aliens are demons, and that spiritual warfare is the easiest explanation for “extra-natural phenomenon.”
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.
“Most Catholics are pretty comfortable with a set of categories that are real but invisible,” Douthat said.
— Maria Wiering, OSV News