After He Got Done Here, Did Jesus Have To Go To Alpha Centauri?

We're coming to you today from the basement here in, or actually below, the marbled halls of IM Central. We're just outside agent Mulder's office. OK, really we're just standing next to the furnace, but we wanted to make a neat lead in to the question of the day: Does the Vatican have an X-Files Section?

The Pope's chief astronomer says that life on Mars cannot be ruled out despite the fact that NASA has rovers crawling all over the planet which have so far not stumbled across any cities, or even the odd, isolated mini-mall. "Did I say Mars," the astronomer Father Gabriel Funes said. "I meant Vulcan." Writing in the Vatican newspaper, Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space. "Well, not in outer space per se," he added. "They'd probably, like have to be on a planet or an asteroid or something. Unless, of course it was the Crystal Entity who is most probably Baptist."

Hmm...that could explain John Hagee.

Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and Blessed Virgin Mary gift shop near Rome (John the Baptist bobbleheads, half off!) said the search for forms of extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God. "Now if we were to find some, that'd be a different story," he added. "Especially if they were Klingons. My feeling is 'love thy neighbor' is not part of their theology."

Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculated.

Well, not so fast there monsignor. You better think this through a little. Why do we need a church? Because Eve ate that apple and gave us all original sin which only the church can remove through baptism. No original sin, no baptism, no church. You have to go to work for a living. Not much call in the business world these days for old men in funny hats who speak dead languages.

Asked about the Catholic Church's condemnation four centuries ago of the Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo, Father Funes said mistakes were made, but "look, that was 400 years ago. Are you still going to be ragging on us about the church sex scandal in 2408?"

Science and religion need each other, he assured readers. When asked to explain why science needed religion, Father Funes responded that it was important scientists didn't get "too big of heads because they can explain all that natural phenomenon stuff. They need to know we're going to be on them like Dobson on Proctor and Gamble if they get too close to making us irrelevant."