Meet the Pope's astronomer

Brother Guy Consolmango, curator of the Pope's meteorite collection, was quoted on a variety of topics in a September article in The Telegraph, from which the following excerpts:

He said he was "comfortable" with the idea of alien life and asked if he would baptise an alien, he replied "Only if they asked"...

He said the characteristics synonymous with having a soul - intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions may not be unique to humans.  “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has has a soul,’ he said.

He said "intelligent design" had been... "hijacked by a narrow group of Creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it did not originally mean at all. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.’ The phrase 'Intelligent Design' was centuries old and described the idea that God could be discovered in the laws of space and time and the existence of human reason..

That's interesting re the history of "intelligent design," and makes sense re what was intended originally.

Photo: AP Photo/Plinio Lepri