Informed Catholics are likely to dismiss the animal rights protesters who stormed a church in Italy earlier this year, demanding that the Church recognise that animals have souls and should be treated like Christians. Of course animals don’t have souls, we might respond, and of course they cannot be Christians. The shrill manner of the protest, and the lack of thoughtful theological justification, suggests that this was a lunatic fringe deserving no serious attention.
But it would be a pity if we neglected the issues that the protesters raised because of the silliness of their methods: bursting into a Mass, dogs in arms. Sadly, the use of the term “soul” in which they framed their protest pretty much guaranteed that they were not going to get a hearing. Catholics are generally conditioned to frame all talk about what is of enduring importance in terms of the soul, defined as that which will survive physical dissolution. Either animals have souls and are morally equivalent to humans, or they do not and so do not matter at all.
The media commentary on the protest implicitly accepted these reductive options, limiting the possibility of a more nuanced response. But it should be obvious to anyone even vaguely acquainted with animals that neither of these alternatives can be correct. Animals are not the same as human beings; but neither are they nothing.
“Soul” is not the only – or even the most dominant – language of the New Testament in framing God’s salvific purposes. The biblical imagination is not restricted in this way: it employs the language of creation and re-creation, of cosmic renewal. It was this that Pope Francis was referring to when he was misreported as saying that pets go to heaven. He was drawing much-needed attention, as he did in his encyclical Laudato Si’, to the scriptural testimony that God’s purposes embrace everything he has made.
Biblical Christology is universal in scale: everything comes into being through Christ and is reconciled to God in Christ. If we say that dogs, cats or horses have no moral or spiritual significance, we are, in effect, saying that they are outside of Christ. And that is pure heterodoxy.
The protesters were offering a salutary summons to Christians to articulate what it could mean for a dog – or, indeed, a whale or worm – to be “in Christ”. To refuse this challenge is to fall into gnosticism: the heresy of regarding this material world as without inherent value, as outside God’s design of love. That is the first step towards denying the Incarnation altogether. It is no accident that the early campaigns for animal welfare arose in Christian cultures.
The faithful have allowed the gathering momentum of animal rights campaigners, with their demand that humans and animals be regarded as of equivalent value, to determine the terms of the debate. When that happens, there is a temptation to represent the Christian view on the matter only with reactionary denial. What we need instead is a return to the tradition, which describes the multiplicity and diversity of the created order in terms of the innumerable ways in which God communicates his love and being.
For Catholics, the hierarchy of creation is not a conflictual jostling. A zero-sum game, playing off humans and animals against one another, is a surrender to the competitive logic of the secular. Creation is not a competition. It is no threat to the unique vocation of human beings to recognise that animals, too, have their particular spiritual dignity, their lovingly ordained role in the divine economy. To honour this role exemplifies the priestly character of human beings, in whom creation finds its voice and full meaning.
A brief reading of the Book of Jonah will disabuse any Christian who thoughtlessly denies to worms and whales the immeasurable dignity of participating in the order of redemption which the Bible unhesitatingly gives to every creature. GK Chesterton recognised as much when he wrote that only fools fail to see that even the donkey has its hour.
The mistake is to think of this participation only in terms of “soul”, defined as individual survival of death. That does no justice to the eschatological grandeur of Catholic tradition, which encompasses the whole cosmos.
Ravenna’s Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe is a surpassing lesson in orthodoxy: the apse mosaic illustrates how God lovingly orders everything he has made towards an eschatological fulfilment centred on the Person of Christ, who unites material and spiritual, earthly and heavenly, in a single order of peace. It was the very Logos himself who commanded that the Gospel be preached “to every creature”.
Pursuing a sympathetic and robust dialogue with contemporary animal welfare movements is a neglected but urgent task for Catholic theology and ethics. When we begin, as we should, from Scripture, one thing is clear: if every animal is in Christ, then it matters what we do with them.
Carmody Grey is a doctor of philosophy student at the University of Bristol
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