“If we are called to love the creation, why are we indifferent to animals?” asks Deborah Jones, general secretary of the Catholic Study Circle for Animal Welfare, in a reflection published by the English weekly The Catholic Herald on 3 October. According to Jones, “the Church, which tirelessly professes moral guidance on a huge range of issues, is notoriously silent about everything that concerns the treatment of animals”. Deborah Jones reviews the thought of some Fathers of the Church to seek to understand the reasons for this attitude. Her survey brings her to Francis of Assisi, who was “nourished by a different concept of God. God is not an indifferent Other, but the One and Only who fills the whole creation with his love… Nature is not something remote and distant from the Creator… it was not created to serve man, because man is inside, not outside it. Nature was created for the glory of God and each creature within it prays and glorifies God by being fully what he was called to be”. She cites as an example the fathers of the desert and the Celtic saints, who “lived their human life in intimate company with animals, even wild animals, to demonstrate the state of harmony in nature”.
