The Helix Nebula, also known as “The Eye of God.” (Source)

When I was an undergraduate, I spent an afternoon in one of my theological societies discussing how Christians should respond to the discovery of alien life, should it ever happen. Our group split between those who believed the question was null anyway, as there were no aliens, and those, like me, who held that if they did exist, we should baptize and catechize them anyway.

It seems that no less a figure than Father Faber himself should have something to say on the matter. Imagine my shock when, quite unexpectedly, I came across the following passage yesterday in Faber’s The Precious Blood (1860/1959):

God made the angels and the stars. The starry world is an overwhelming thing to think of. Its distances are so vast that they frighten us. The number of its separate worlds is so enormous that it bewilders us. Imagine a ray of light, which travels one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles in a second; and yet there are stars whose light would take a million of years to reach the earth. We know of two hundred thousand stars down to the ninth magnitude. In one single cluster of stars, eighteen millions of stars have been discovered between the tenth and eleventh magnitudes. Of these clusters men have already discovered more than four thousand. Each of these stars is not a planet, like earth; but a sun, like our sun, and perhaps with planets round it, like ourselves. Of these suns we know of some which are one hundred and forty-six times brighter than our sun. What an idea all this gives us of the grandeur and magnificence of God! Yet we know that all these stars were created for Jesus and because of Jesus. Mary’s Son is the King of the stars. His Precious Blood has something to do with all of them. Just as it merited graces for the angels, so does it merit blessings for the stars. If they have been inhabited before we were, or are inhabited now, or will at some future time begin to be inhabited, their inhabitants, whether fallen and redeemed, or unfallen and so not needing to be redeemed, will owe immense things to the Precious Blood. Yet earth, our little, humble earth, will always have the right to treat the Precious Blood with special endearments, because it is its native place. When the angels, as they range through space, see our little globe twinkling with its speck of colored light, it is to them as the little Holy House in the hollow glen of Nazareth, more sacred and more glorious than the amplest palaces in starry space. (The Precious Blood 20-21).

The passage stood out to me for a few reasons. First, we might note Fr. Faber’s charming vision of angels flying through outer space. It strikes me as typical of his imaginatively poetic spirituality to find all of reality brimming with several orders of hidden and divine life. Secondly, Faber anticipates the very sentiments that astronauts would feel and describe over a century later. But perhaps most strikingly, Faber seems to suggest both the plausibility of extraterrestrial life and its capacity for redemption, presumably through the sacramental work of the Church. I would never have anticipated this idea from a Victorian priest most famous for his effervescent devotions and moralizing sermons. Evidently Faber was well read in the science—and possibly the science fiction—of his day.

On this Feast of Christ the King, I also find Faber’s words particularly apt. There is no part of reality to which the sovereignty of Christ does not extend: “Mary’s Son is the King of the stars.” One imagines that Faber would have enthused over today’s solemnity, had he lived long enough to see its institution.

The whole chapter is a spiritual gem, but this strange little paragraph seemed particularly worthy of consideration. The more I read, the more disconsolate I am that Faber has been so widely neglected by today’s Catholics.

Angels by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel. (Source)