The James Webb Space Telescope could be coming closer to discovering a planet capable of sustaining life, most recently through its study of exoplanet K2-18b in the habitable zone where liquid surface water might exist around its star. 

Our faith centers around God’s redemption of man on the Earth he created. So this raises the question: Can Catholicism stand if astronomers discover alien life?

To answer that, we need look no further than a few miles outside of Rome at the Vatican Observatory in Albano Laziale — the latest in a long line of papal observatories. 

Though Vatican astronomers now travel to the Arizona desert to study the stars far from light pollution, the observatory stands as a physical monument that the Catholic Church not only welcomes astronomical discoveries, but itself probes the secrets of the universe. And whatever we find out there on K2-18b or beyond, be it alien life or nothing at all, our faith is big enough for everything God made.

 

Great Catholic Scientists

In fact, no matter how much popular culture tries to smear the Church as the enemy of science, Catholics have always emphatically embraced scientific discovery.

Most everyone has heard of the “Big Bang” theory to describe the first moments of the universe, with some falsely believing this theory contradicts the biblical creation narrative of Genesis. What most don’t know is that the Big Bang theory was proposed by a Belgian priest and astronomer named Georges Lemaître. Far from contradicting God’s creative power, Father Lemaître described how the expansion of the universe — something the Big Bang theory proposes to explain — can be the case only if the universe itself was created. 

Likewise, Nicolaus Copernicus was more than an early astronomer who proposed the heliocentric theory of the solar system. He was also a canon in the Church, which at that time meant he was ordained to minor orders. Church authorities didn’t see his heliocentric theory as threatening. In reality, the Pope welcomed Copernicus’ discovery while a cardinal urged the astronomer to share his theory far and wide. 

Angelo Secchi was both a priestly father in the Church and also the father of astrophysics who created a novel classification of stars by their spectra, set up an early network of weather stations, and fashioned instruments to measure the Earth’s magnetic field.

Outside of the realm of astronomy, it was an Augustinian friar by the name of Gregor Mendel who pioneered modern genetics, a Jesuit named Roger Boscovich who advanced early atomic theory, and another Jesuit named Francesco Maria Grimaldi who discovered that light behaves as a wave. 

As far back as the fifth century, the Catholic world was engaged in the “Antipodes Debate” — a controversy, in St. Augustine’s words, over whether there were “men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets on us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours.” 

(While St. Augustine was open to proofs that the Earth is round, he was skeptical that there were men on the other side who could have traversed “the immense expanse of the ocean” to propagate the human race descended from Adam — an understandable doubt for someone who had no acquaintance with the Bering Strait or long-distance Polynesian navigation.)

The truth is, Catholics aren’t the enemy of science. If anything, we are, and for centuries have been, its biggest advocates. And that has only become more evident in the modern age — which brings us back to the Vatican Observatory.

 

CatholicTech

Just down the road from the Holy See’s headquarters for astronomical research outside of Rome is Catholicism’s latest scientific institution, the Catholic Institute of Technology, a brand-new university devoted to training the next generation of Lemaîtres, Copernicuses and Secchis. 

CatholicTech’s location is purposeful. There, students can be inspired by the nearby observatory not only as a physical monument of Catholic scientific history, but also because the Vatican Observatory Foundation remains a working research institution. It funds educational programs, publishes articles on astronomy, and supports the operational Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT), designed with innovative Gregorian optics still being used in the most state-of-the-art ground-based telescopes being built today.

The expanding scientific outpost in Italy’s Alban Hills demonstrates that the Church’s appetite for discovery is alive and growing in the 21st century.

So while the ground-based VATT may not beat the space-borne James Webb in finding alien life, if there is such life to be found, when such a discovery is made we can guarantee one thing: The Church will welcome this expansion of knowledge as she always has, with a love for the truth, grateful awe at creation, and faith as big as the universe God made.

 

Jeff Kleck, Ph.D., is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, an adjunct professor at Stanford University, and the dean of academics at Catholic Institute of Technology. Jeremy Wayne Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), a humanities-focused alternative to the SAT and ACT tests, and a member of the board for CatholicTech.