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Leaflet No. 26.
To Catholics—and others.
The following article is reprinted (by kind permission of the Editor) from an Irish Catholic magazine, The Father Mathew Record. We believe it will be widely welcomed as a definite condemnation, from a Roman Catholic source, of painful experiments on animals. In thus pronouncing against the inquiries of the laboratories, The Father Mathew Record stands in the great tradition of those two eminent anti-vivisectionists, Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning.
Kindness to Animals
IF we are materialists there is no reason why we should be kind to animals; there is no reason why we should do anything that does not bring a tangible profit. As materialists we might exercise the virtue of kindness with a certain amount of calculation, anticipating that we might benefit by the reciprocity such action would call forth from those around us. We might be kind to our friends, to our acquaintances, to our employees or employers, knowing that kindness of such a sort will smooth the wheels of our own lives. But kindness to animals is an altruistic virtue, and a truly Christian virtue.
Man has been given dominion over the animals. I had nearly said as God has dominion over man. But God's dominion is infinite and all-comprehending; whereas man's dominion over even the very least of God's sentient creatures is finite and filled with ignorance. The animal has been given into man's power for his legitimate use and benefit. And herein lies a field of virtue, for in that dominion only has man the opportunity, in however infinitesimal a way, of acting in imitation of the Divine goodness. That is the thought of St. Thomas of Aquin, of the Angelic Doctor, the greatest thinker of the Church. "Now," he says, "in God is goodness and the outpouring of that goodness into other things. Therefore, the creature approaches more perfectly to God's likeness if it is not only good, but can also act for the goodness of other things."
With that in mind, how can we, as Catholics, look on the animal as something owned absolutely, something completely in our power? In the same context St. Thomas comments on that verse of Genesis which expresses the joy of the Creator in His creation: "God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good." Not man alone, the highest, the most complex of His creatures, the only one endowed with a free and rational will so that by its exercise he might honour his Maker, but "all the things that He had made."
"Hence," St. Thomas says, "we are clearly given to understand that the corporeal and visible creatures were made
because it is good for them to be." They were made, not for man's use alone, nor wholly to suffer his dominion; but also so that the infinite variety of created things might reflect God's infinite power and infinite knowledge. "For this reason, therefore, there is distinction in created things that they may receive God's likeness more perfectly by multiplicity than by unity." For us Christians the animal is not merely a mindless mechanism, a means of transport, a source of food, the helpless object of an insatiable pseudo-scientific curiosity. In extending the virtue of charity to the brute creation we are, therefore, acting "in imitation of the Divine goodness," and, from another, humbler point of view, we are honouring God in His creation.
That is the philosophical point of view. St. Thomas was no sentimentalist and no crank. These are the logical deductions of perhaps the greatest and most logical mind in the history of the Church, deduced from the first principles of Christianity. There is another approach, different in quality but not in kind, the approach of the mystic, of St. Francis, who saw, knew, felt God's presence in His creation so powerfully, so immediately that it came naturally to him to call the ass his brother, to speak to the fowls of the air and the fishes of the water. We cannot emulate that proud humility because the power and the grace is not given us to realise the presence of God with such devastating intuition. The knowledge of the mystic is a far more mysterious thing than the comprehension of the philosopher. We can understand the philosopher because he uses words whose meanings we know; but the mystic cannot convey his meaning except in words that are totally inadequate to express a feeling that is not of the senses, a thought that is not of the mind. It would be easier to describe the glories of a sunset to the blind. We can approach to a feeble understanding of this mystical love in St. Francis by realising how it was reflected in his life. And how significantly? In his love of animals! St. Francis felt God's presence where St. Thomas deduced it. It has been said there was nothing of the intellectual about St. Francis. He was a natural philosopher whose philosophy wrote itself in dears, manifected itself in his universal charity, in his gay asceticism, his happy poverty.
Even among the unbelievers the meaning of that philosophy is recognised. Among some essays of a well-known scientist I found recently the words: "It is the special charm and significance of Francis of Assisi that he, if not alone certainly chief among European men, has incarnated some measure of the graciousness that was in Jesus and made it visible and real to the European world." Was he not "acting in imitation of the Divine goodness"? Tertiaries of St. Francis, especially Tertiaries who are teachers in our schools, can do a great service to our country by stressing, in season and out of season, the duty of children to be kind to animals . . .
Now there is no opposition to the man who preaches kindness to animals. He is looked on as a kind of crank, an old maidish, hypersensitive kind of person. That is all. Men look at him, as though at home he kept one of those nightmarish houses where the animal population bade fair to oust the human occupants. He is met with half charitable, half sneering smiles; treated more or less as childish. That attitude is worse than the most outspoken opposition. It is the attitude of inertia that does not admit the existence of any such problem or the need for the existence of such voluntary societies as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Anti-Vivisection Society. I think I might claim that the activities of the former society have been responsible for a tremendous improvement in the treatment of animals throughout the Irish countryside within the past thirty years. And no one who reads the accounts of prosecutions in the daily press can deny the utility of its continued vigilance. But that method of "crime and punishment" is not the ideal way of dealing with the problem. The solution should come from within, from the deep Catholic faith of the Irish people. That it has not sooner come is due, I think, more to thoughtlessness and lack of understanding than to any real viciousness.
But there is another sphere, apart and distinct from the mere vulgar errors of cart-drivers and small boys. There is the exalted scientific world of the vivisector wherein the writ of St. Thomas does not run, nor the holy example of St. Francis have any effect. There are the high priests of science, who fondly hope to benefit humanity by doing violence to the virtues that it has taken centuries of Christianity to create. With them (thank God that they are rare in Ireland) the greed of knowledge has obliterated mercy and pity. They treat might as right, without limit. And the cringing, miserable, broken animals who are their victims have no redress. I wonder that any vivisector can call himself a Christian, who, knowing that this sentient being under his knife is like himself one of God's creatures, will still inflict his calculated and careful suffering for the trivial ends. Surely he realises that he is killing the seeds of pity and compassion in himself; turning his own nature into something of a