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THE CATHOLIC Church may have theological problems acknowledging some “miracles”, at Knock or elsewhere, but not, it seems, the possibility of little green men from Mars. Back in 1600 the Inquisition tied Giordano Bruno to the stake and burned him for heresy. The crime of this Renaissance philosopher, writer and free-thinker? The idea of a “plurality of worlds” and the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the universe. But the church has come some way since then, to the point that this week scientists met in Rome at the invitation of the director of the Vatican Observatory to discuss this very possibility.

The conference on astrobiology, a science that seeks to find life elsewhere in the cosmos and to understand how it began here, was organised by José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit astronomer, who last year happily admitted the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligent life in an interview with Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, headlined “The Alien is my Brother”. Aliens, he insisted, are no threat to faith: “Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures over the earth, so there could be other beings, even intelligent , created by God.... We cannot establish limits to God’s creative freedom”.