I was debating with an acquaintance about the nature of alleged widespread cruelty to animals in Spain, his assertion is that Spain is a Catholic country and the Catholic Church teaches that as animals have no souls they can’t feel pain and humans can do what they like with them as they’re nothing more than mobile property.
Now I’m fairly sure thats not what the Catholic Church teaches but my google-fu has failed me on this one, any help?
Thanks!
I was in Catholic school for 6 years and took CCD for another 4 years. Never once did I hear of anything like this.
Saint Francis of Assisi- patron saint of animals and the environment.
If the Catholic church did not believe animals had souls, I highly doubt they would have a patron saint dedicated to animals.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia
“Catholic ethics has been criticized by some zoophilists because it refuses to admit that animals have rights. But it is indisputable that, when properly understood and fairly judged, Catholic doctrine — though it does not concede rights to the brute creation — denounces cruelty to animals as vigorously and as logically as do those moralists who make our duty in this respect the correlative of a right in the animals.”
I was raised Catholic. We are not taught to believe that animals have souls but we are taught that “dominion over animals” is not a license to be cruel.
Maybe I went to a particularly squishy catholic school but we weren’t even taught dominion over animals. It was all about stewardship. As beings capable of thought and restraint and all that good stuff, it is our moral duty to treat living things with kindness and abhor cruelty and unnecessary violence. (What, did you think we were all vegetarians?)
From what I remember of catholic school education: souls are reserved for conscious, thinking beings like humans*, not animals. But that certainly doesn’t mean animals can’t feel pain – rather obvious to kids in a farming livestock-raising community! And being needlessly cruel to animals was sinful – a wasting of the earth’s bounty that God had provided for you.
*And maybe non-human aliens, if they are ever discovered someday. Which brought up interesting discussions about severely retarded humans, that may have been born with very little functioning brain at all – did they have souls? As I recall, the answer was yes. Souls apply to a whole species, despite individual variations. Just like saying humans have 2 arms, even though occasionally some humans are born without 2 arms.
From the Catholic Catechism:
Thanks for the replies everyone!
Oy… as already described it’s wrong. He’s conflating the view held not only by Catholics but by perhaps a plurality of believers and nonbelievers, that animals do not have “human rights” equal to those of persons, with some sort of “Black Legend” premise that would blame Catholicism for any instance of bad conduct among Spaniards.
Yes, Spanish (and FWIW my own Puerto Rican) culture tends to be embarassingly tolerant of bloodsport (bullfight, cockfight) and of what we now recognize as mistreatment of animals (around here the preferred method of getting rid of an unwanted pet is abandonment in some remote stretch of road, rather than turning in to the shelter). But I see nothing particularly Catholic in that, for all I know this attitude goes back to prechristian Iberians.
forgottenstar, there are patron saints for nonperson entities/concepts, you do not need a soul to have a patron: what you’re thinking of is Guardian Angels.
That’s more or less how my priest explained it to me when I was a kid.
Or to put it another way, we should be kind to animals, not because they have souls, but because we do.