Would the Church Baptize E.T.?

The short answer is "yes". Although, the statement has met with some controversy. After all, it is an unfortunate fact that the only intellectual traditions left (in the West, at least) still consistently holding fast to "human exceptionalism" are those associated with churches, with the Catholic Church in the vanguard. Discovering E.T., as conventional wisdom goes, would be the death knell of any religion whose doctrine has even a whiff of human exceptionalism.

However, one look at at Church history will provide some interesting insights into how the Church would deal with previously unknown forms of sentient life. Mike Flynn, author of the novel "Eifelheim", pretty much covers the length, breadth and beauty of it in this blog post. Heck, you could probably just stop reading this one and go over there.

In case you're still here, the short version is this: the Greeks, Romans and Medieval Europeans, immersed in a world of myths and legends, are not quite as unfamiliar with the unknown as we pompously assume. They live in a world where sea worms devour ships, monopods hop about on one gigantic foot in some far-off land in mysterious Asia, and cannibals with table manners exist just off the edges of the known map. The modern Western fascination with extraterrestrial and life on places beyond our own maps likely stem from that ancient curiosity about the unknown. The Church, entwined as She was with all of medieval life, was no stranger to the question of unknown forms of life. The question of what to do with "aliens" has been addressed several times. The most curious case, as seen in Flynn's post, is that of the dogheads, a race of beings with human bodies and canine heads that always seem to live just beyond the known world, be it in farthest India, or in the snowy, shadowy North of Scandinavia. In the 9th century, a missionary named Rimbert planned to go evangelizing north into the Viking heartlands. He commissioned a sort of travel guide for what he thought he might encounter there. For the question on dogheads, he went to a monk named Ratramnus, who gave him a detailed "ethnographic" account of the life of dogheads. In it, he concludes that because the dogheads have rule of law, wear clothes to cover the privy parts, and have domesticated beasts serving them, they must be considered a "degenerate" form of the race of Adam (code for "strange, but still human"), and thus worthy of evangelization and salvation.

This kind of thing would become a big deal. It is this sort of reasoning that allowed the Church to conclude, far ahead of everybody else in Europe, that those "indios" in the New World (our ancestors) were human, and thus worthy of the full panoply of rights accorded to human dignity. If it applies to dogheads, it would damn well apply to people whose strangeness is confined to a different skin color and foreign cultural practices.

To further the argument, the Church has not only supposedly baptized them, but has a saint who was a doghead.

St. Christopher the Doghead

Yep, its the St. Christopher of the famous medal, who is most often depicted as carrying the Christ-child across a river. In the Irish account of his life, he received human form as a blessing of his conversion from the pagan cannibalism of the dogheads, and was martyred for the Faith. Unfortunately, he has been taken out of the official lists of Christian saints (though his cult is still allowed), although one can understand why.

Were the dogheads real? Probably not. But if we're allowed to believe in the inevitability of discovering sentient life in the broader universe, who is to say that there isn't a real race of dogheads out there, a group of whom may have already visited Earth? In any case, they have a patron waiting right here for them. Who says the Church cannot do E.T.?

PS

Potential Foundations Topic!!!