FaithJoy has provided the most lucid, economical explanation yet.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that ALL living things have souls. Man, other animals, insects, even plants. Souls are what “animate” and separate living things from the inanimate. A thing having a soul is the reason why they are alive, and sets them apart from things that are not alive, such as rocks, air, water. A soul is what makes something alive.
But the distinguishing feature that FaithJoy alludes to in his/her post is that while the soul animates all living things, the soul of a man, in addition to animating man’s body, has powers of its own. The union of spirit and matter means that the human soul, by which our bodies are living bodies and functioning as living bodies, is what no other soul is, a spirit.
While the souls of animals perish with their bodies, the souls of man do not because it has an immortal spirit. They live forever.
I am willing to retract a bit on what I said earlier, but only to the extent that I need to further explain what I wrote.
I still maintain that animals do not “enter heaven”, because that requires redemption and Christ did not die to redeem something that has no power of reason, no mechanism for making a choice. To suggest otherwise is to demean our Lord. I feel very confident that Christ did not endure having his flesh ripped off and his body nailed to a cross while being spit upon because he was concerned about the entrance of a nutria rat into heaven.
The ONLY place where animals may exist in “the next life” falls within the Church’s teaching that the world wil be renewed at the Last Judgment. If humans will regain their bodies, and the entire world will be renewed, I can find nothing (and the Church has taught nothing on the matter) that precludes brute animals living ON A RENEWED WORLD.
That is MUCH different than the saying that pets are in heaven. So in the limited sense of the renewal of the world for the Last Judgment, animals may, indeed, be present for that judgment. But that is NOT the same as saying they are in heaven.
St.Anastasia,
If I have misinterpreted your posts in what I am about to say, I apologize.
I get from some of your statements that no one KNOWS what heaven is like, and thus it is open to suggestion as to what heaven is really like, and thus heaven may indeed have animals.
I respectfully suggest that is dangerously close to moral relativism and liberation theology. It does not matter one bit what any of us THINKS heaven is or is not. If you are an orthodox Catholic, then you MUST believe that heaven exists, and that there is only one such heaven. Simply because man does not have the supernatural capacity to imagine heaven while he is alive does not mean it can mean whatever “we would like it to mean”.
Quite a while back, what I thought was a serious question by the OP, took a turn towards people’s personal desires for a “feel good” type of heaven reminiscent of what the Haight-Ashbury crowd in the 1960’s thought was good for Earth - that is, until they resorted to stealing when their drug supplies ran out and they soon found out that love didn’t cure hunger pangs.
As heaven has been DOGMATICALLY DEFINED by Pope Benedict XII as “the souls of the just see[ing] the divine essence by an intuitive vision and face to face so that divine essence is known immediately”. The Council of Florence dogmatically determined the object of the knowledge of God in heaven as “to know God one and three as He is”.
I still cannot, for the life of me, fathom why ANYONE would want to turn away from the beatific vision of our Heavenly Father to go pet a dog, feed a snake, see a hamster run on his wheel, or ride a horse.
If I am dull, so be it. But hopefully meeting God one day, face to face, is more than sufficient to make me happy forever.
Caveat: I find it a bit amusing and ironic that “liberation theology” adherents cite as one of their “heroes” St. Francis of Assisi, (official) patron saint of animals and (recently, “unofficial”) parton saint of the environment.
