Ready or not ....
by Tom Horn and Chris Putnam
As our book Exo-Vaticana heads to the printer we still do not
know whether the last pope will turn out to be a person on our short list, but,
whoever he is, intrigue surrounds how he may accommodate the newly celebrated
astro-theology of Rome’s top astronomers and theologians and whether this will
somehow fulfill the Catholic prophecies of the coming Man of Sin—the seed of
Satan—either as an alien serpent-savior, or as a deceiver that points mankind
to a god of another world.
In point of fact, the Bible describes both
the False Prophet (Petrus Romanus?) and the Antichrist as having allegiances
and endowments not of this Earth. Not only can both of them call “fire”
(lightning that struck St. Peter's Basilica two weeks ago?) down from out of
those heavens suspected to be the host-location of aliens (see Revelation
13:12–14 as a clear alliance with the “powers” of the celestial realm), but the
prophet Daniel tells us their belief system will actually honor a “strange,
alien god.” In Daniel 11:38–39 we read:
But
in his estate shall he honour the God of forces: and a god whom
his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious
stones, and pleasant things. Thus shall he do in the most strong holds [Hebrew Mauzzim] with a strange god, whom he
shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause them to rule over
many, and shall divide the land for gain. (emphasis added)
Several parts of Daniel’s prophecy stand
out as very unusual. First, the “God of forces” or alternately “god of
fortresses” (מעזים אלה) has been connected to Baal-Shamem, literally “Lord of the Heavens,” a deity
whom the Manichaean Gnostics later worshipped as “the greatest angel of light.”[1][i] His second reference to the deity as “a strange
god” is also intriguing. The Hebrew text “עִם־אֱלוֹהַּ נֵכָר”
can be literally rendered “with an alien god.” Add to this how the
turn-of-the-century Protestant scholars translated this text as directly
related to segments at the Vatican, and things get really interesting (more on
that later).
With
this in mind and based on other documents contained in the upcoming book, it’s
evident that for hundreds of years, both Catholic prophets and Protestant
reformers believed the Antichrist would ultimately champion a strange, alien
deity (and this fits perfectly with what we have documented and have even been
assured of in person by today’s Vatican authorities, astronomers, and
theologians, as readers will discover). They also saw how this union would ultimately
lead to war and destruction from the heavens. And these visionaries were not
alone in their assessment concerning a powerful alien-christ and his coming war
as the result of otherworldly alliances. Government leaders around the globe
have believed this for some time, and as far back as 1955, General Douglas
MacArthur warned:
You now face a new world, a world of change. We speak in strange terms,
of harnessing the cosmic energy, of ultimate conflict between a united human
race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy. The nations of the
world will have to unite, for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The
nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people
from other planets.[1][iv]
Over thirty years later, one of America’s
most beloved presidents, Ronald Reagan, echoed the same before the United
Nations when he said:
In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how
much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside,
universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think
how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien
threat from outside this world.[1][v]
In Britain, the five-star admiral and former head of
the British Ministry of Defence, Lord Hill-Norton, expressed his opinion that
“some UFO encounters are definitely antithetical to orthodox Christian belief”
and helped to form an international group called UFO Concern to assess the
phenomenon as it pertains to religion and national security.[1][vi]
More recently, the
former UFO adviser for the UK Ministry of Defence, Nick Pope, acknowledged that
Britain has even prepared (and is preparing) top-secret sophisticated aparati
in anticipation of this future military engagement against space invaders.[1][vii] Global leaders outside
the United Kingdom who have hinted similar knowledge of a potential external
threat include former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, former US
Senator Barry Goldwater, J. Edgar Hoover when he was director of the FBI,[1][viii] and the former
president of the old Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who believed “it must be
treated seriously.”[1][1][1][1][ix] It makes one wonder if
something of this knowledge was behind recent Vatican comments when it criticized
the Ridley Scott film Prometheus,
saying that it is “a bad idea to defy the gods.”[1][x]
The Gospel According to
ET—Ready or Not, Here it Comes
Over the last
decade especially, the Vatican has ramped up its production of science and
theology studies aimed at developing an ecclesiastical position for disclosure
of extraterrestrial intelligence. This includes November 2009, when it convened
a five-day study week on astrobiology at the summer residence of the pope on
the grounds of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, during which astronomers and
scientists from countries around the world joined prominent churchmen to
evaluate “the origin of life and its precursor materials, the evolution of life
on Earth, its future prospects on and off the Earth, and the occurrence of life
elsewhere.”[1][xi]
Whether any discussion was held at that time concerning
the LUCIFER device and what it is monitoring in deep space from atop Mt. Graham
is unknown (the meetings were private), but just three months later, in January
2010, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Science of the UK, and the
Commonwealth hosted representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, and
the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs to discuss “The Detection of
Extraterrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society.”[1][xii]
Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, and
other speakers at that time referred to “overwhelming evidence” and
“unprecedented proof” to signify how close we are to making irrefutable
disclosure of alien life. This had Vatican spokesmen in the news again with
increasingly candid statements regarding the future of the Church and Jesuit
preparations to accommodate a dynamic ET reality.
In the
lead-up to the Vatican-sponsored conference on astrobiology, the official
Church newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano,
interviewed Father José Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the
Vatican Observatory who made it clear that accepting the reality of intelligent
aliens does not contradict the Catholic faith and that, in fact, to believe otherwise is the real heresy,
as it puts “limits on God’s creative freedom.” Attorney Daniel Sheehan, who
served for ten years as general counsel to the United
States Jesuit Headquarters in Washington, DC, said Funes’ explicit statement
that disbelief in extraterrestrial intelligence “puts limits on God’s creative
freedom” was code-talk for those in the know. He wrote:
On the face
of it, this statement may not seem like an important event…. However, unbeknownst
to the non-Catholic world, Father Funes’ specific choice of words tracks
precisely the exact wording of the key aspect of the official Catholic Church
Edict that was issued in 1277 by Bishop Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris,
in which the Catholic Church officially condemned St. Thomas Aquinas’
Theological Proposition #34 in which Aquinas had publically asserted that “the
first cause [meaning God] cannot possibly have created other worlds.”
Proposition #34 was officially condemned by the Catholic Church on the specific
grounds that “it seems to set limits on God’s creative freedom,” the precise
words that were deliberately used by Father Funes in 2008.[1][xiv]
Sheehan went
on to explain why the reassertion of this theological position by Roman
Catholic leaders is very important:
The fact that
these precise words were chosen by the official Jesuit director of the Vatican
Observatory to announce the new official policy of the Roman Catholic Church
acknowledging the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial life
elsewhere in the universe is understood by those of us who are familiar with
such matters to be no mere coincidence. It may, indeed, prove to be of
extraordinary importance. For this specific 1277 Catholic Edict that condemned
Proposition #34 of Thomas Aquinas is deemed, by Church authorities and by
secular historians alike, to have been the action which opened “the plurality
of worlds debate” in Western civilization, which led directly to the removal of
earth from the center of the universe four-hundred years ago. And these words may point
the way, here in the twenty-first century, to our removal from our position on the pinnacle of the pyramid of
life.” [1][xv]
What Sheehan
here identified is the belief by most Catholic theologians that Christianity as
we know it is based on a pre-Copernican cosmology. Once cosmology changes as a
result of new discovery or disclosure of alien life, so, too, will theology,
whether explicitly or implicitly. To believe otherwise is “cosmic hubris,”
thought Andrew Burgess, who wrote:
As long as
someone is thinking in terms of a geocentric universe and an earth-deity, the
story has a certain plausibility.… As soon as astronomy changes theories,
however, the whole Christian story loses the only setting within which it would
make sense. With the solar system no longer the center of anything, imagining
that what happens here forms the center of a universal drama becomes simply
silly.[1][xvi]
While some in the Catholic
church believe there is no official church teaching on Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (which, as we document, is coming), it is possible to derive their
trajectory even now from officially sanctioned literature. Kenneth J. Delano’s Many
Worlds, One God (1977) is described
on its dust jacket as “an intelligent discussion of the existence of
extraterrestrial life and its impact upon mankind.” The thing that makes this
book important is that it advocates belief in ETs and boasts a nihil
obstat and an imprimatur. A nihil
obstat is an official approval granted by a designated censor in the
Roman Catholic Church. Its presence certifies that a work does not
contradict Catholic teachings on matters of faith and
morals. An imprimatur is
the final approval and official declaration by the bishop in the diocese where
the work is to be published, indicating the content is free from errors
concerning Catholic doctrine.
In this
hard-to-find work, Delano states, “Extraterrestrial visitors to our planet
might display an astonishing knowledge and understanding of the universal laws
of nature as well as psychic abilities that enable them to exercise powers of
mind over matter to an equally amazing degree. To our bewildered human race,
their wondrous deeds would be indistinguishable from the miraculous. An
experience of this sort would shake the foundations of many a person’s
religion.”[1][xvii]
He continues, “In our dealings
with ETI, we will have to adopt a way of thinking called ‘cultural relativism’
by anthropologists. Like cultural relativists who do not assume that their way
of life is better than the ‘weird’ or ‘evil’ practices of other peoples, we
must not assume that our species, Homo sapiens, is morally superior to any
other species of intelligence in space.”[1][xviii] This sort of relativism leaves
mankind wide open for a great deception scenario. Furthermore, the idea that
“moral truth is relative” is dangerously false. An extreme example makes this
self-evident. For example, we ask, “Is there ever a circumstance in which
‘killing babies for fun’ is morally virtuous?” Of course, no one in his or her
right mind will answer affirmatively. Thus, moral truths are not relative. If
something is evil, it is evil for all. The sanctioned Roman Catholic position
treating ETI in terms of cultural relativism demonstrates just how susceptible
the Vatican is to evil supernaturalism cloaked in an alien guise.
Philosopher
J. Edgar Burns foresaw how space exploration would thus become the cosmic
center for the birth of a new “space-faith” (what he also called “cosmolatry”)
that ultimately would give birth to a new religion. “By ‘new religion’ it is
not entirely clear whether Burns meant an annihilation of the past or a
breakthrough in religious consciousness that renders our ‘truth claims’
obsolete,” wrote Ilia Delio in Christ
in Evolution. “What the term does connote, however, echoes an insight of
the [Jesuit] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [whose conclusions were celebrated by
Pope Benedict XVI], namely, that Christianity is reaching the end of one of the
natural cycles of its existence. ‘Christ must be born again,’ he said, ‘he must
be reincarnated in a world that has become too different from that in which he
lived.’ It is in light of this insight that ‘exoChristology,’ a term Burgess
used to discuss Christological issues ‘raised by discoveries in outer space,’
takes on new import for Christian faith.”[1][xix]
This also casts significant light on the new official position of the Vatican
that not believing in aliens
and being willing to accept their superior morality and coming new religion is
not only paramount to heresy, but is based on a dying and antiquated belief
system. Given that the Vatican holds sway to over 1 billion followers as well
as influencing an even greater number of peoples, governments, and policies
worldwide, any puny obstacles to their revised Christianity will thus hardly
keep most of the world’s “spiritual” people from wholeheartedly embracing the
alien serpent-saviors on their arrival. In fact, acquiescence to ET gods will
be widely and positively received by the masses of the world, according to
Vatican astronomer and professor of fundamental theology, Father Giuseppe
Tanzella-Nitti, exactly because:
Extraterrestrial
life contexts re-propose the intervention of mediators from faraway worlds, the
delivery of moral messages that awaken in human beings the existential
questions that ordinary terrestrial life has made dormant. Moreover… contact
with civilizations different from our own is…a powerful conceptual place in
which the human family returns to wisdom and self-understanding.
As Paul Davies has intelligently pointed out… “The powerful theme of
alien beings acting as a conduit to the Ultimate—whether it appears in fiction
or as a seriously intended cosmological theory—touches a deep chord in the
human psyche. The attraction seems to be that by contacting superior beings in
the sky, humans will be given access to privileged knowledge, and
that the resulting broadening of our horizons will in some sense bring us a
step closer to God.” [1][xx]
Professor
Tanzella-Nitti further elaborated on this alien-derived “privileged knowledge”
in his doctrinal paper for the Vatican in which he expressed theologically how,
upon open contact with these highly advanced aliens, the Church will “have
to conclude that our understanding of Revelation until that moment had been
largely imprecise and even ambiguous [or, nowhere near the truth].”[xxxiv][1][xxi]
But all is
not lost, as a new and improved religious “revelation” based on information
acquired from another world is coming.
It will involve a “strange, alien God” according to prophecy and (according to
both ancient and modern authorities) be advocated for by a priesthood seated in
Rome. Just be aware that there is a considerable downside. To reject the
mysterious new gospel or even to neglect bowing down before the image that the
deity sets up in its place (Daniel 11:38–38; Revelation 13:15) will result in
“as many as [will] not worship the image of the beast [to] be killed.” There
will be no place for those heretics Father Funes referred to who reject the
(papal?) decree and refuse to accept the alien dogma. Any such denial will
definitely not go unpunished.
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