Pope Francis leads an audience with Italian athletes in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican December 19, 2014. REUTERS/Giampiero Sposito (VATICAN - Tags: SPORT RELIGION) OLYMPICS)GIAMPIERO SPOSITO/Reuters
Pope Francis took his name from the patron saint of animals, a beloved friar who preached sermons to birds, negotiated peace accords with ravenous wolves and taught his followers that all creatures should be loved as our brothers and sisters.
So it was entirely credible that the supreme leader of the Catholic Church should think our pets have a place waiting for them in heaven. "Paradise is open to all of God's creatures," read the headlines of articles that purported to describe how the People's Pope recently consoled a boy at the Vatican, assuring him that his dead dog could enjoy the eternal reward many Christians thought was available only to two-legged believers.
It turns out, sadly, that this dog-meets-God story isn't entirely true, at least not quite yet. While Francis acknowledged that the design of heaven "also affects everything around us," he hasn't so far committed himself to the exact details of the divine plan for pets, vis-à-vis eternity. Fido will have to wait.
But if animal-lovers made a leap of faith, it's for a good reason. Francis has a gift for humanizing a religion that became increasingly detached and abstract under his predecessor, the cat-friendly theologian Pope Benedict. When faced with the true and powerful emotions of everyday life, he doesn't resort to arid pontifications about the nature of the soul but offers comfort that is consistent with his compassionate understanding of faith's earthly role.
You don't have to believe in heaven, even an improved version with cavorting dogs and cats, to appreciate the spiritual reset that the modern Francis has undertaken. Christianity, not surprisingly, has long behaved as an anthropocentric faith where humankind gets to do what it likes with the rest of creation. When you're made in God's image, as Christians believe, you tend not to see other animals as enjoying equal rights or similar after-life opportunities.
Carving out a place in paradise for pets makes sense in a world where some of our most intimate relationships are with our household animals – because what's the point of paradise, real or imagined, if it doesn't correspond to the best things we can dream of? Theologians and traditionalists are rightly made nervous by a dog-park conception of eternity. But as science teaches us more and more about the complexity of our fellow species, how can a religion determined to honour God's creation remain so certain about their soulless state?
A simple declaration from a Pope is bound to raise hopes and challenge such confined thinking. More importantly, it honours an extraordinary bond that traces its roots back to Genesis but still gets trivialized in both the sacred and secular realms. If the daily joy they give us is any measurement, our animals already offer us a glimpse of paradise. Like religion at its best, they make us more fully human.