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.
