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From its very beginnings, observing the Jewish injunction of hospitality for the stranger (Deut 10:17–19; 24:17–18)1 and remembering Jesus’ foreign ancestors (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Beersheba), his birth far from home (Lk 2:1–7), his and his family’s escape to Egypt as refugees (Mt 2:13–14), his ministry as a homeless and itinerant preacher with nowhere to lay his head (Lk 9:58), his fate as an unwelcome stranger in his own country (Jn 1:11), and his self-identification with the stranger (Mt 25:35), Christianity has consistently inculcated philoxenia, that is, love of and hospitality to aliens, strangers, and migrants.

The life of Joseph Ratzinger reads to the outsider like a singularly remarkable career. He had already begun teaching fundamental theology one year after his ordination to the priesthood in the archdiocesan seminary of Freising. By 1957 he had earned the habilitation, the German terminal degree allowing one to teach as a full professor at university level. Thereafter, he became a star theologian and sought-after professor in the departments of Catholic theology at the respective universities of Bonn (1959–1963), Munster (1963–1966), Tubingen (1966–1969), and Regensburg (1969–1977). At the young age of thirty-six, he was appointed peritus, that is, theological advisor, to the highly respected and influential archbishop of Cologne, Joseph Cardinal Frings, during the Second Vatican Council. It was also “the projectile” of the person of Joseph Ratzinger that had intercepted the curial schemata for the Council, designed under the supervision of Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani (1890–1979), then head of the Holy Office. Perhaps rather symptomatic of some representatives of neoscholasticism, Ottaviani’s motto had been Semper Idem (Always the same, referring to Christ’s immutability and constancy). In contrast to Ottaviani, Ratzinger had opposed the notion of a “Catholic state,” supported the Declaration on Religious Freedom: Dignitatis Humanae (DH), and, out of consideration for Protestants, opposed a separate document on Our Lady, “lest the adoption of such a text imperil the effects of the Council.”1

What would be the implications for Roman Catholicism if persons were to live for hundreds of years rather than for decades? This is the question I will address in this chapter, along with the further question, what is the likely response of the Roman Catholic Church to the prospect of radical life extension (RLE)? There are no official or even unofficial Roman Catholic responses to these questions, because the issue is so speculative and new. So my chapter here will be a kind of thought experiment, based on my knowledge of Roman Catholic theology and a number of assumptions. What are those assumptions?