Pope Benedict XVI - what can animals expect?

Open Letter and comments

1. Open Letter to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:
Pope John Paul II has put you in charge of the revision of the catholic catechism, therefore you are directly responsible for the betrayal of the animal creation by the Vatican. Without the slightest trace of compassion for the unimaginable misery in the animal world it is written there as follows:

2417: "Animals are created for food, clothing, leisure"
Have you never heard about the horror-conditions in factory-farming, animal transportation and slaughterhouses? Why do you not condemn it? Why do you not mention the healthy vegetarian way of life (like it is written in the book of Genesis)?

What do you have against imitation fur and leather etc?

Hunting, brutal training for circus-acts, bloody bull-fights etc. Is this really in line with the Christian spirit? Indeed I wonder, when I see that in spite of over 50,000 protest letters to the Pope during last year, the Spanish priest Angel Rodriguez Tejedor in Titulcia has not stopped the torture to death of young bulls in the church square after Sunday mass. Whilst the innocent creatures of God are agonising and dying in heir blood the priest is auctioning their cut-off ears to the excited crowd.

2446: "One should not give affection to animals and it is also unworthy to spend money on them, it should rather be donated to the poor."

You are badly positioned, Cardinal Ratzinger, with your appeal to save money on the already exploited animals, to improve conditions of the poor. This could have been done with the enormous amounts that have disappeared from the Vatican during the past 20 years under the financial master-swindler Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. However it still could be done by selling the incommensurable values accumulated in giant atom-bomb-proof vaults in the Vatican.

2234: "Animal experiments are morally acceptable."

With this sentence you have approved one of the biggest and most horrifying crimes of humanity. You have betrayed the entire animal creation - like Judas betrayed the Son of God. The word of Christ.

Under steadily-growing pressure from worldwide anti-vivisection groups, the US Secretary of State for Health, Louis Sullivan (a front man for pharmaceutical interests) looked for sympathisers for the criminal, money-spinning business of animal experimentation. He sure found one: the Vatican. Your approval, in the catechism, has been of tremendous help for the greedy bunch of useless "researchers". Another reason might be, as word is out, that Marcinkus has invested a lot of Vatican-money into lucrative vivisection laboratories and that therefore church authorities find animal experiments 'morally acceptable'

For God's sake, Cardinal Ratzinger, how have you been able to accept in the catechism the misery and agony of the exploitation of animals?

This is the biggest disaster to come to God's creation. Countless Christians, including myself, who are fighting the incredible injustice towards the animal-world have been waiting for a helping word from the Vatican. In vain! Now they will totally despair over the new catechism and turn their backs on the church which worries more about payment of the contribution of social security - 2436, and the use of contraceptives - 2370, than the protection and well-being of living sensitive creatures of God.

(Hans Fischinger 27.5.1993)
NZAVS | New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society

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2. Excerpts from an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger :
Excerpts from an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger by German journalist Peter Seewald
Cardinal Ratzinger is the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's foremost advisor on matters of doctrine.

Seewald: Are we allowed to make use of animals, and even to eat them?

Ratzinger: That is a very serious question. At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God's creatures, and even if they do not have the same direct relation to God that man has, they are creatures of his will, creatures we must respect as companions in creation and as important elements in the creation.

As far as whether we are allowed to kill and to eat animals, there is a remarkable ordering of matters in Holy Scripture. We can read how, at first, only plants are mentioned as providing food for man. Only after the flood, that is to say, after a new breach has been opened between God and man, are we told that man eats flesh...Nonetheless...we should not proceed from this to a kind of sectarian cult of animals. For this, too, is permitted to man. He should always maintain his respect for these creatures, but he knows at the same time that he is not forbidden to take food from them. Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.

Author: Open Letter

Link: Benedict XVI Continues Tradition of Papal Concern for Animals
Link: Excerpts from an interview with Cardinal Ratzinger
Link: NZAVS | New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society
Link: Open Letter
Link: Pope Benedict XVI