May - June 1998 Issue

FROM THE PULPIT

REV CARL A SKRIVER, EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH (1977)

The true God is love, goodness, mercy—not sacrifice, cruelty, killing, and murder...God did not demand bloody sacrifice ...We should only sacrifice ourselves, for service in the world for our human and animal brothers.

REV. ANDREW LINZEY, ANGLICAN PRIEST (1998)
To stand for Christ is to stand against the evil of cruelty inflicted on those who are weak, vulnerable, unprotected, undefended, morally innocent, and in that class we must unambiguously include animals. There is something profoundly Christ-like about the innocent suffering of animals. Look around you and see the faces of Christ in the millions of innocent animals suffering in factory farms, in laboratories, in abattoirs, in circuses and in animals hunted for sport.

REV. BASIL WRIGHTON, ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST (1965)
Compassion cannot be rationed.. The acceptance of one cruelty, under whatever pretext, pre-disposes men to accept and excuse any and every other cruelty, given suitable pretexts. And the one case of cruelty to which most men refuse to extend their compassion, is the case of slaughter for food...The acceptance of that cruelty is what conditions men to accept and tolerate other cruelties like vivisection, hunting and trapping... There is little hope of abolishing the manifold cruelties to animals which disgrace our society, until men give up the habit of eating flesh.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, JESUIT PRIEST/PALEONTOLOGIST (1955)

Considered in its full biological reality, love—that is to say, the affinity of being with being—is not peculiar to man...in the mammals, so close to ourselves, it is easily recognized....Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them together by what is deepest in themselves [the spiritual dimension].

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Minister (1863) For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say ”I have loved as truly and I have lived as decently as my dog.” And yet we call them ”only brutes”!

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