http://www.astrobio.net/news/article966.html
Interview with (I think one of) the Vatican’s astronomers. Fairly wide-ranging. “… if you’re going to convert somebody, you have to treat them as an equal. There are people, when they came to the Americas, who thought that, well, we can enslave these people because they don’t have souls. And the Church said, “You can’t do that.” If you’re sending a missionary to somebody, you’re implicitly saying they’re equal.”