The director of the Vatican observatory, Father Jose Funes, said that God could well have created aliens - including those who did not know original sin. The Orthodox Church will not declare this: it does not have an observatory
In Florence, in the Medici-Ricardi Palace, there is the Chapel of the Magi with fantastic paintings: leopards on horseback, riders in tiaras. This is the Byzantine embassy of 1439: the last attempt of Orthodoxy to unite with Catholicism. The views of the Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate on the world are opposite, at least so it seems to me, an absolute agnostic.
An agnostic is generally free to read the Gospel as a text, outside the context of church dogmas, and therefore the meaning of Christianity for me is not in dogma, but in the fight against it - Saturday for man or man for Saturday?
Catholicism is open to the world and changes with it. If not for this openness, the Vatican would not have had the world's best collection of antique and Roman (that is, pagan) art, an observatory and other things.
She also pushes Catholics to admit mistakes: Father Jose said that he regretted the past persecution of astronomers. From openness - and dancing rappers in the papal palace, and so on.
But Orthodoxy is pure protection. Nothing has changed and will never change. This is how the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), by the way, is charming: entering the temple, you are transported to the time of Ivan Kalita.
However, the guards do not know how to evaluate: their reflex is to condemn new things (and at the same time use them on the quiet, as was the case with the Internet). It makes no sense to wait for an Orthodox view of the Internet, UFOs or extracorporeal conception - we do not expect an assessment of these phenomena from the Hermitage.
If little green men fly to Earth, Piotrovsky will simply shrug his shoulders, and the ROC will call them inventions of Russia's enemies. Because the Russian Orthodox Church is a museum. And it may very well be that the Vatican.
