The Fellowship of Life
a Christian-based vegetarian group founded in 1973

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Letters
JR and animal rights

What price theologians? Their utterances are not "ex-cathedra" (infallible), so we are free to disagree with them. Their names are not on everybody's lips: "noted" theologians become "eminent" only if they hit the media with scandal.

Take the case of JR, the 19th century theologian whose name means nothing to the man in the pew, let alone the man in the street today. He held outrageous views on the subject of animal welfare, diametrically opposite to those held by Cardinals Newman and Manning, both superior to him socially and intellectually.

Newman held that animals would survive death in a "happy hereafter", and both of these gigantic Churchmen of the last century roundly condemned vivisection - flatteringly called "research" - in no uncertain terms.

Which of these ecclesiastics is the least likely of the three to have been connected to the hotline of the Blessed Trinity?

Notwithstanding the spiritual calibre of the two cardinals - or perhaps because of it - the views of JR appear to have been preferred by the seminaries. "Animals," seems to be a dirty word, not to be mentioned in church or cathedral. Some ecclesiastics indeed react to "animal rights" with speciesism as venomous as the racism of a Boer reacting to "Kaffir rights".

Fr John McDade's commentary in The Universe (November 13), is not as bad as that but he really must beware of appearing to give qualified support to the obscenity of vivisection. There is NO "moral dilemma". Vivisection is based on the world's oldest and most dangerous heresies: might is right, and the end justifies the means.

No amount of the forked tongue, double-talk sophistry will alter THAT.Indeed, JR used the same argument against the post-mortem survival of the animal soul that the materialist could use against human immortality. Beware, too, of quoting Aquinas.

Not many years ago, the Pope warned Italian research workers that animals at the service of man must not be abused. Clearly he does not regard "use" and "abuse" as synonymous when applied to animals, as is the case with too many professional scientists.

Richard M A Bocking

The Universe

(18/12/87).

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