Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens
The chief astronomer says those beliefs don't contradict faith in God
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory......
....The interview was headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother."
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With increasing numbers of people believing not only in the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, but even claiming encounters with aliens, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church is beginning to explore what effect the discovery of sentient ETs might have on Christian theology.
In: Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic belief and the search for
extraterrestrial intelligent life, author Guy Consolmagno SJ, asks:
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/et.html
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VATICAN OFFICIAL DECLARES ON NATIONAL TELEVISION: EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT IS REAL
Michael Maregski, Lutheran pastor of Our Holy Father in Rome, is quoted as saying "the ufologists have been speculating for many years that aliens may have been portrayed as angels to our ancestors in antiquity. If this speculation turns out to be proven true; why would angels be buried at the Vatican only to be forgotten?" Father Edward Muldoon, of St. Jude's in Rome, answered pastor Michael Maregski's question with "maybe they are angels, but remember, there were two groups of angels."
http://www.greatdreams.com/ufos/vatican.htm
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His letter to bishops came with a two-page letter from the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, dated June 29 and addressed to episcopal conferences around the world.
“By directive of the Holy Father, in accord with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this congregation ... deems it convenient to communicate to the bishops’ conferences ... as regards the translation and the pronunciation, in a liturgical setting, of the divine name signified in the sacred Tetragrammaton,” said the letter signed by Cardinal Francis Arinze and Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, congregation prefect and secretary, respectively.
The Tetragrammaton is YHWH, the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God.
“As an expression of the infinite greatness and majesty of God, it was held to be unpronounceable and hence was replaced during the reading of sacred Scripture by means of the use of an alternate name: ‘Adonai,’ which means ‘Lord,’” the Vatican letter said. Similarly, Greek translations of the Bible used the word “Kyrios” and Latin scholars translated it to “Dominus”; both also mean Lord.
“Avoiding pronouncing the Tetragrammaton of the name of God on the part of the church has therefore its own grounds,” the letter said. “Apart from a motive of a purely philological order, there is also that of remaining faithful to the church’s tradition, from the beginning, that the sacred Tetragrammaton was never pronounced in the Christian context nor translated into any of the languages into which the Bible was translated.”
The two Vatican officials noted that “Liturgiam Authenticam,” the congregation’s 2001 document on liturgical translations, stated that “the name of almighty God expressed by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton and rendered in Latin by the word ‘Dominus,’ is to be rendered into any given vernacular by a word equivalent in meaning.”
http://www.austindiocese.org/newsletter_article_view.php?id=3039
also more discussion here on removal of name Yahweh and other renditions (jehovah)
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/166626/1.ashx
