In truth, she was a pitiful sight to behold.

Her ear was bleeding, and severely deformed, as though it had been ripped off of her, and a large tumour had taken root at the side of her face.

Without a second thought, my hands reached out, cradling her fragile body to my chest, while my friend called the site-manager for help.

Hours later, after the animal had been taken to the vet, my friend shared an insight that struck a deep chord.

She saw a striking parallel between the suffering of this creature and our own spiritual journey.

Just as I had embraced the wounded animal, so does Christ hold us close in our vulnerability, offering healing and comfort.

The Book of Job invites us to reflect on this connection: "Ask the animals what they think. Let them teach you.

"Let the birds tell you what's going on. Put your ear to the earth and learn. Listen: the fish in the ocean will tell you their stories. Isn't it clear that they all know and agree that God is in every living thing?" (Job 12: 7-10).

In recent times, the role of animals in Christian spirituality has become a topic of debate.

While many adults might view animals primarily for what they can provide, children often appreciate them simply for their intrinsic value.

I have always held onto this perspective, with my love for animals rooted in the belief that we share a common "littleness."

Animals, in their inherent "littleness," reflect and give God glory in a very special way.

Despite their very differing personalities, my pets serve as mirrors, reminding me of my own smallness and dependence on God.

For just as pets rely on their owners for love and other necessities, so too, are we dependent on Christ for our own needs.

Moreover, animals illuminate an essential truth about love.

They teach us that true love requires vulnerability.

As CS Lewis poignantly writes, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal."

Our interactions with animals remind us of our universal vocation: that is, to love and to love well.

Through my experiences with animals, I have come to appreciate their role in my spiritual journey. They have become to me, almost a sacramental—a way to encounter Christ and experience his love in the everyday.

• First published by the Catholic Weekly
• Olivia Dunn is a writer for the Catholic Weekly

The solemn setting of people seated or kneeling in a confession line waiting to confess their sins is typically marked by quiet reflection.

Peering out of the confession booth one day, Fr Joseph Krupp saw that his broad-chested, 32 kg boxer was in a chair, and when the line moved, the dog took the next chair.

A rescue dog with a penchant for mischief. Everyone knew this hound, Marius Arelius Spartanicus had sins to confess after raiding wedding receptions, opening church fridges and, on one occasion, scoffing down a 1.5 kg roast, writes Terry Mattingly.

Krupp has many responsibilities, including serving as the Michigan State University football team chaplain and overseeing the Northeastern Deanery's 12 parishes and four schools.

Rescue dog - healing for priest too

Yet, his commitment to rescuing older dogs reveals a tender aspect of his character.

He views his role as giving these animals a few joyful years but, in a poignant turn, he acknowledges their healing impact on him.

The story of Krupp's bond with his current boxer is both touching and dramatic.

It began eight years ago when he visited the Hillsdale Humane Society to donate supplies after losing his previous dog.

There, he found a boxer "broken-hearted", a dog that no one wanted and desperately needed care and affection.

I walked in just as they were walking a dog out, wrote Krupp.

"He lifted his head, saw me and ran at me so hard and fast that the leash came out of the volunteer's hand. I sat on the floor and he jumped on me, licking me and pushing me to the ground. I just couldn't quit laughing.

"He was found tied to a tree along with another dog. The other dog had died of starvation, and he was close to it. He had been shot with numerous pellets, his tail was broken and a lot of his teeth were missing" wrote Krupp to his many @JoeInBlack readers on X.

Recently Marius Arelius Spartanicus' account @ThePriestsDog recorded the dog's passing.

"I've arrived in Heaven. It's a little neat and orderly here. I've got my work cut out for me" writes Marius Arelius Spartanicus on X.

Sources

• Religion Unplugged
• @joeinblack
• @ThePriestsDog

But the fact is, while much of theology is by its very nature rather abstract, this one is relatable: Large majorities of us have animal companions.

We all eat, and many of us even think, talk and even obsess over what we eat more than we do over, say, God. And how we treat animals has a lot to do with what we put in our bodies — and not just to eat.

In addition, the debate over nonhuman animals features some fireworks.

Catholic theologian John Berkman, a brave light in the darkness on this issue, has chosen to focus his work on animals despite threats from his bosses at the Catholic University of America that they would deny him tenure.

Berkman now teaches moral theology at Regis College at the University of Toronto, and under his direction graduate students (such as Allison Covey) are writing dissertations on animal theology.

There are other pioneering figures in this space: Andrew Linzey, to name one, and David Clough, another.

Clough, perhaps the most important voice in the field in the last decade, set the standard for theological scholarship with his 2018 two-volume book. Celia Deane-Drummond previously a moral theologian at the University of Notre Dame, has started the Laudato Si' Research Institute at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Recently, Deane-Drummond, Berkman and I collaborated on a special issue of the Journal of Moral Theology, the first-ever Catholic theology journal to devote an entire issue to nonhuman animals.

Since then, the Rev. Christopher Steck of Georgetown University published "All God's Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics," cementing the topic as absolutely essential to Catholic moral theology.

But it is the real-world, public work that is putting the issue of the treatment and dignity of animals in play.

Clough's Farm Forward project is really exciting and unparalleled.

A few months ago, I got a note from the Nonhuman Rights Project, asking if I'd be interested in helping organize an amicus brief from Catholic theologians in support of the project's legal attempts to free Happy the Elephant from captivity in the Bronx Zoo.

I was delighted, and the brief — signed by Berkman, Covey, Deane-Drummond, Steck and me — was published and sent to the New York Court of Appeals this past February.

In it, we made the general argument that, especially in the biblical tradition shared both by Jews and Christians, God's creation is not made for human beings.

On the contrary, in the first chapter of the Bible's first book, Genesis, God pronounces multiple aspects of creation "good" in themselves before human beings are even created.

Nearly all theologians now agree that the biblical dominion God has given human beings over creation is not a license to use and dominate, but rather a command to be caretakers and stewards.

We are akin to viceroys ruling on behalf of a sovereign and according to that sovereign's wishes. God, sovereign of the universe, reveals through Scripture a design for what theologians call a "peaceable kingdom," one that includes nonviolent relationships between human beings and nonhuman animals.

And then we applied that general argument to Happy, a 49-year-old pachyderm, who is not a thing for us to confine, use and put on display in a zoo (even in an attempt to produce a good outcome), but rather a particular kind of creature whom God made to flourish.

Happy cannot flourish as this kind of creature while captive in the Bronx Zoo.

She would be significantly better able to become the kind of creature God made her to be in a sanctuary.

Nonhuman animals like Happy have been created to fit into a particular place within the order of God's creation, an order that human beings are bound to respect.

While waiting for the legal process surrounding Happy's fate to unfold, I got an email from the chair of a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences asking for my views as a Catholic moral theologian on whether certain biomedical research being considered on nonhuman animals was morally acceptable.

In light of the terrible toll neurological diseases such as dementia have taken (a toll on which the pandemic has shone a spotlight), researchers are eager to find something, anything, that could lead to our defeating them.

But one significant proposal being put forward — growing human neurological tissue in nonhuman animals to better study the human disease model — goes a step too far.

In a virtual meeting with the National Academy of Sciences' committee, I argued that the leading voices in animal ethics today — religious and secular — reject the idea that nonhuman animals are mere tools.

With their own inherent value quite apart from whatever good might come from our use of them, animals ought to be treated as the kinds of creatures they are. No matter its benefits, research that grows cells in other animals is an obvious violation of our duties.

Whether certain animals have legal rights not to be confined in zoos or whether we will create neuro-hybrids of human and nonhuman animals are big enough issues on their own.

But in the end you may simply not care about other species.

Whether or not we treat animals as the kinds of creatures God made them to be may not be your thing.

The fate of humans, however, also depends on how we treat animals.

There is simply no way we will ever reverse global climate change without dismantling the massive factory-farms that treat animals as "protein units per square foot" rather than as animals with their own inherent dignity.

These farms are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change.

If we use them for food at all, humans' existence requires that we care for animals on smaller farms where they are permitted to live out their lives in accordance with God's plan.

So, yes, respecting God's plan for nonhuman animals is more relevant than it has ever been.

The very fate of our species depends on it.

• Carles C. Camosy has spent more than the last decade as a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Ethical investors often don't want to invest in companies that test on animals. But many of these same people (including me) will willingly take an effective Covid-19 vaccine knowing it will have been tested on animals.

Is this hypocritical?

I say not.

Medicines are not like cosmetics where cruelty-free alternatives exist.

If the law requires a potentially life-saving treatment to be tested on animals, nothing is gained by boycotting.

This reflects the reality of ethical challenges where things are rarely clear cut.

Ethical investors aim for good returns and the world we want, not good returns and the world we have.

The vaccine dilemma is not an isolated case.

It's the same as ethical investors not investing in companies that extract fossil fuels and at the same time accepting that fossil fuels remain fundamental to building our civilisation.

We can avoid investing in fossil fuels and still catch a fossil fuel-powered bus to work every day.

Our law recognises animal rights as minimum welfare standards. But these minimum welfare standards can be overridden in the case of research, testing and teaching.

Rejecting animal testing for cosmetics is easy to understand. It's widely accepted that the testing is unnecessary and the suffering is cruel (both New Zealand and the European Union ban animal testing on cosmetics products). A Covid-19 vaccine is at the other extreme, the law requires it to be first tested on animals.

Many argue from a science-based perspective that animal testing of medicines is not a reliable predictor of human safety. There are growing voices asking why animal testing is legally required if there are question marks around its efficacy.

Some animal testing is plainly outdated but still tolerated.

One of the worst examples is the ‘forced swim test', inflicted on mice to test the effectiveness of anti-depressant drugs.

The premise is that if you put mice in a container of water from which they have no chance of escaping, the more depressed mice will give up swimming sooner and those that have been given human anti-depressants will hopefully swim for longer. Continue reading

Casting the animal participants in live nativity scenes has always been a challenge in New Zealand, where there are no camels to accompany the wise men who made the trek to Bethlehem.

But over the 16 years the Auckland event has been running, organiser Dan Mills has managed to come up with a creative solution. Read more

Francis was speaking at a Q&A session near the end of a pastoral conference of Rome diocese on the family.

Crux reported that Francis spoke of a "pastoral cruelty" at the Q&A.

An example is priests who refuse to baptise the children of young single mothers.

"They're animals," Francis said at the Basilica of St John Lateran.

"This is individualism."

[It's] "an individualism which doesn't affect only priests, but society as a whole, that looks for pleasure, that is hedonist, searching for that ‘damned' well-being which has hurt us so much," the Pope said.

He was also asked about the balance between Church teaching on two subjects.

These are the indissolubility of marriage and being welcoming to divorced and civilly remarried couples.

Francis said that neither "rigorism nor laicism" are the correct path.

"The Gospel chooses another way: welcoming, accompanying, integrating, discerning, without putting our noses in the ‘moral life' of other people," he said.

During impromptu remarks, Francis said that "a large majority" of sacramental marriages today are invalid.

This is because couples do not enter into them with a proper understanding of permanence and commitment, he said.

"We live in a culture of the provisional," the Pope said, noting that this affects priestly and religious life too.

The Vatican's official transcript of the Pope's remarks stated "a portion" of sacramental marriages are null.

The change from the actual words was reportedly at the Pope's behest.

The Pope's remarks drew strong criticism.

Before the Q&A session, the Pope offered a "readers guide" of sorts to two recent synods on the family and to his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.

Francis warned against a "separatist logic" in Catholic attitudes about diverse family situations.

If a separatist logic is followed: "We believe that we gain in identity and safety whenever we differentiate and isolate ourselves from others, especially those who are living in a different situation."

Sources

• Crux
• Catholic News Agency
• Catholic News Agency
• Reuters
• Catholic News Service
• Crux
• Image: Irish Catholic

In off-the-cuff remarks on Saturday at St Peter's Square, he said: "How often do we see people greatly attached to cats, to dogs", but fail to "help their neighbour, their neighbour who is in need . . . This will not do".

Francis spoke about compassion, pity, and mercy which should not "be confused with compassion which we feel for the animals who live with us".

"It happens, in fact, that at times one feels this sentiment toward animals, and remains indifferent to the suffering of one's brothers and sisters," he added.

Continue reading

Even though he is not a nonbeliever Clay Farris Naff finds it a charming concecpt.

But he wonders if Pope Francis meant to include bacteria?

Another week, another story about Pope Francis saying something a little weird and a little cool.

News reports suggested that Francis told a boy that dogs go to heaven.

As it turned out, the current pope was misquoted.

What the Pope said was a little more nuanced than what the media would have us believe - and of course not quite as sensational.

But Naff says, "He had better, because bacteria are part of who we are — a big part. The microbiome within us makes our survival possible."

He finishes his post by by saying, "In truth, whether there are plants, animals, or microbes in heaven doesn't worry me."

"As an atheist and humanist, I haven't the least expectation of an afterlife, and that leaves me free to try to be the best person I can in the limited time I've got."

Read more

They've even "helpfully" noted how this contrasts with the position of his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

But the thing is . . . the whole story is false.

Here are 7 things to know and share . . .

1) What is being claimed?

Among other things:

Pope Francis has declared that all animals go to heaven during his weekly audience in St. Peter's Square.

The Pope made these remarks after he received two donkeys as early Christmas presents.

During his discussion, Pope Francis quoted the apostle Paul as he comforted a child who was mourning the death of his dog.

Francis quoted Paul's remarks as, "One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all God's creatures." [Source.]

Also:

In his weekly audience in St Peter's Francis quoted the apostle Paul who comforted a child who was crying after his dog died.

"One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ', Francis quoted Paul as saying.

The Pope added: "Paradise is open to all God's creatures." [Source.]

Right there we have multiple reasons to be suspicious of the story.

2) Why do we have reason to be suspicious?

First, because the common theological opinion for centuries has been that the souls of animals do not survive death.

Second, because this is just the kind of sensationalistic story that the media loves to get wrong.

Third because we have the same words being attributed to two different events: The Wednesday audience at which the remarks were allegedly made occurred on November 26, but the donkey-giving event occurred later. Continue reading

• Jimmy Akin in National Catholic Register

Besides being an author, Jimmy Akin is a Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to This Rock magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

At least this is one interpretation of remarks made by Pope Francis in his weekly general audience in the Vatican, reports the Guardian.

"The holy scripture teaches us that the fulfilment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us," said the Holy Father.

Relying heavily on St Paul's letters to the early Christian communities, Pope Francis reminded everyone that a "new creation" lies ahead.

He added: "It is not an annihilation of the universe and all that surrounds us. Rather it brings everything to its fullness of being, truth and beauty."

Italian daily Corriere della Sera was in no doubt about his meaning. "It broadens the hope of salvation and eschatological beatitude to animals and the whole of creation," wrote the paper's Vatican specialist in an article published on Thursday.

With apparently little room in the Catholic Catechism allowing room for animals in heaven, reaction to the possible interpretations of Pope Francis' comments remains mixed.

Every year on the feast of St. Anthony the Abbot pets attend mass with their owners and both receive a blessing at Saint Eusebio church in Rome.

Sources

• The Guardian
• La Stampa
• Image: The Guardian

While one filmed, the other pulled the ducklings out of the drain.

Upon being freed, the ducklings immediately ran toward their mother, chirping their appreciation

This heroic action hit the headlines in Huffington Post. Watch video

Authorities in Huay village, Savannakhet province, accused the Protestant converts of conducting worship in their homes and said they must recant or be expelled, said Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom (HRWLRF).

The villagers have defied the order on the grounds that freedom of worship is guaranteed under the Laos constitution, said the Tennessee-based rights group.

HRWLRF also said yesterday that it had received reports of Christians in Nonsung village in Savannakhet province being summoned to a village meeting and ordered to participate in animist oath-taking. They refused to do so, it said.

The eviction threat in Huay village is the second reported in Laos in a month.

On Aug 30, HRWLRF said that 50 Christians in central Bolikhamsai province were ordered to reconvert to their traditional animist religion. They too are resisting the order.

Authorities in Bolikhamsai accused the Christians of believing in the religion of a "foreign Western power," a common charge leveled at converts in Laos, according to London-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

Source: ucanews.com
Used with permission

In her weekly column, Rosemary McLeod reflects on what is likely to happen later in life to young people who are cruel to animals.

McLeod contends that cruelty to animals "as a child is the first step towards a life of causing harm", and that we "shouldn't believe we can do nothing when it happens".

• Read Rosemary McLeod's article
• Image: DogsTrust

Rosemary McLeod is a columnist, cartoonist and journalist.