‘But you shall not eat flesh with its life’: Is it time for Catholics to stop eating meat?
Many Christians think that humans are meant to rule the planet, and so any degree of domestication is willed by God. But, in Genesis, animals are created to be companions to Adam, not his food.
JOHN W. MILLER: This time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is one when humans collectively eat billions of animals. The habit feels rooted in nature, and in our nature. How can it be a happy holiday if we are not feasting on turkeys, pigs, cows and lambs?
The threat of climate change, the expansion of the world’s population and its appetite for flesh, and other health and environmental problems caused by factory farming have provoked a new wave of questioning about the moral economy of our food production, especially of meat…
There are a wide range of positions and motivations for Catholic vegetarianism and veganism, with some Catholics even arguing that the pro-life stance should extend to all animals. In 2019, the Catholic Global Climate Movement challenged Catholics to give up meat for Lent, as a way of helping preserve the environment…
Many Christians think that humans are meant to rule the planet, and so any degree of domestication is willed by God. But others point out that divine order, both in the Garden of Genesis and in scriptural visions of heaven, does not include any killing of animals. In Genesis, animals are created to be companions to Adam, not his food.
The word vegetarian was only invented in the 1840s, but the concept has been around since ancient times. The Egyptians and Greeks realized that meat was clearly dead flesh, in contrast to living plants, and was grounds for abstinence, for various reasons. Pythagoras, for example, taught that animals had souls that were immortal and reincarnated after death, possibly in humans. Some Egyptian priests, and later, Buddha and Pythagoras, chose to not eat meat.
Later, religious movements like Hinduism, the Seventh-day Adventists and some radical Quakers made vegetarianism part of their creed. The Enlightenment also included a vegetarian movement. “Often the vegetarian creed has been one of dissidence, comprising rebels and outsiders, individuals and groups who find the society they live in to lack moral worth,” writes Colin Spenser in Vegetarianism: A History…
Now, Pope Francis, along with many theologians, seems to be increasing calls for animal rights. “Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures,” he wrote in “Laudato Si’.” “This responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world”… Meanwhile, there is a growing movement of serious thinkers, many of them Catholic or members of other Christian churches, who have been building a forceful challenge to the ethics and morality of the meat-based economy.
One of their leaders, David Clough, is a professor of theology and applied sciences at the University of Aberdeen. Dr. Clough, who is Methodist, is a vegan, in part, because it fits his vocation of Christian pacifism. “If I think about what it might mean to witness to the kind of existence that God wills for creaturely life,” he told me, “then it looks to me like not being prepared to kill other human beings and to avoid killing other animals [in the] breaking of a peaceable reign of God.”
Scientific understanding of DNA supports vegetarianism, Dr. Clough noted. “We share 98-point-whatever percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and 50 percent with cabbages,” he said. “This astonishing diversity of living creatures, and Christian theology gives us a reason to be celebrating and affirming that and attending to the connection that we have with the creatures that we share the planet with”…
Even carnivores might be persuaded to make factory farming illegal, say activists. “If Christians started paying attention to industrialized animal agriculture, there ought to be a fairly rapid, fairly broad consensus,” said Dr. Clough. “Whatever we think about animals, we definitely shouldn’t be doing this to them.”
The new wave of pro-animal theologians does not always consider the killing of animals as morally akin to murdering human beings. But killing animals in the context of factory farming is more morally fraught. “Factory farming involves the torture of animals which are shaped into creatures almost totally different from the kinds of beings God created them to be,” Charles Camosy, a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham and author of For Love of Animals…
Dr. Clough noted that when pigs are freed from factory farms into the wild, “they adopt complex patterns of social life, use of territory and nest-building similar to those of wild boars. But modern industrial systems give pigs no opportunity to flourish as these creatures of God: They are raised in monotonous indoor environments in which their tails have to be cut off to reduce the incidence of biting injuries, sows are so closely confined they cannot turn around, and they never get to engage in their favorite activity of rooting in the earth”. SOURCE…
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