BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Today I saw this blog post by Charles Camosy on the Catholic Moral Theology Site.  Although C.S. Lewis is from a different time frame than the people I posted about yesterday, he is another greatly admired lay Christian who understood that our faith calls us to compassion for animals and ordered his life accordingly.  So I thought a cross-post would be in order.  Thanks to Dr. Camosy.  Enjoy.

50 Years After C.S. Lewis, a Brief Reflection on His Concern for Animals

MINORITY REPORT PART THREE:

ANIMALS, SOCIAL REFORM, AND CHRISTIANITY

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

“Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God.”
                                                        ~ Cardinal John Henry Newman

            For those of us who care about animals, the silence of the church on the issue of compassion and mercy for animals is not only frustrating, it is a challenge to our faith.  When people ask us what animals have to do with faith or why we aren’t concentrating on “more important” issues involving human suffering, we sometimes want to (and some do) run from the church into the more welcoming arms of secular animal welfare organizations.  What kind of a God, we wonder, is silent in the face of a world filled to bursting with needless and extreme animal suffering at human hands?  What kind of a church fails to see the misery to which it contributes?

            The answer, it seems to me, is not the God we meet in the Bible, and it is not the church as it is called to be.  I am not the first to believe this, and in these Minority Report posts, I hope to bring to the fore our deeply rooted traditions that recognize the bonds between compassion for animals and holiness and the repeated calls from a variety of faith perspectives within the church for reform on this issue.  I hope to underscore, as these long-standing, if often unheeded, voices in our tradition have underscored, that this is not a matter of abstract theology, but it touches in a very real way who we are and how we live our day-to-day lives.

          

MINORITY REPORT – PART TWO: 

JOHN WESLEY AND HUMPHREY PRIMATT

We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is atheism.
We may make our boast of Christianity; but cruelty is infidelity. We may trust to our orthodoxy; but cruelty is the worst of heresies.

                                                                  ~ Rev.  Humphrey Primatt 

This post picks up the discussion I began earlier addressing the fact that, while the church as an institution may have been silent about -- or even hostile to -- the idea of animal welfare as a Christian concern, there have always been people of faith with a different view.  John Wesley and Humphrey Primatt were two eighteenth century Anglican clergy who understood our obligations for mercy toward animals as a matter of faith and spoke publicly about it. 

John Wesley, who founded the Methodist tradition, addressed the issue most directly in his 1771 sermon, The GeneralDeliverance.  Humphrey Primatt is much less well-known today, but he tackled the issue head-on in a tract of some 300-plus pages titled ADissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals, published in 1776.  They do not agree on all the theological particulars, but they do agree that we have an obligation as followers of Christ to be merciful to all God’s creatures.