Pope Francis and Animals: Every Time He’s Talked About It and Why He Continues to Do So

Pope Francis had been pontiff for just over a year when he began to talk about animals, or rather the relationship that people have with them. It was the beginning of June 2014 and Bergoglio took advantage of a meeting with couples married for 25, 50 and 60 years to remember that Having dogs and cats at home is perhaps more comfortable, but “in the end this marriage reaches old age alone.” As will happen many times in the following years, Pope Francis links the issue of the presence of animals to the absence of children, therefore to the question of the declining birth rate that has become a great concern for the Church.

It is therefore a no to the choice, not to the impossibility, of having children and it is a no to preferring animals to children, arriving at a form of humanization in the way they are treated. «There are things that Jesus does not like: sterile marriages by choice, that do not want children, that want to remain without fertility. This culture of well-being… that has convinced us that it is better not to have children, so you can go and see the world, on vacation, you can have a villa in the countryside. So you can be calm…Maybe it’s more comfortable to have a dog, two cats and the love goes to the two cats and the dog”.

The second attack came in 2016 and it is a phrase that has caused much discussion. During an audience in St. Peter’s Square on the morning of Saturday, May 14, Pope Francis said: “How many times do we see people so attached to cats and dogs that they then leave their neighbors alone and hungry. No, please no!” The comparison is always animals, but the attack is always on men who show indifference towards other people. He wrote then The Post quoting the Pope’s words: “Pity – he added – should not be confused with compassion for the animals that live with us. It happens in fact that sometimes we feel feelings towards animals (which, according to the Pope, go to Heaven: “One day we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ” he had said in an audience on November 27, 2014, and which for Pope John Paul II have a soul, ed.) and we remain indifferent to the suffering of our brothers”. Piety, Pope Francis explained, is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit that the Lord offers to disciples to make them docile to divine inspirations”.

Perhaps the Pope’s best-known intervention on the subject is that of May 12, 2023 at the opening of the General States of Birth. The pontiff’s anecdote has gone around the world. He told of a fifty-year-old woman he met. She asked him to “bless her child,” referring to her dog, which she had in her bag. “I had no patience and I scolded the lady. So many children are hungry and she with her little dog… These are scenes of the present but if we are not careful this will be the future.”

The following November he returned to the subject of pets that in his opinion would replace children. “It seems that families prefer to have dogs or cats and not children: it is the “veterinary culture”, be careful of this. Is this the legacy we leave behind?” He did the same in December. Here too there is an anecdote. “One of my secretaries who was walking around the square the other day was telling me: a lady approached with a cart with a child in it; he goes to pet the child… it was a little dog! Puppies take the place of children. Think about this. The responsibility that Italians have to have children to grow and also to welcome migrants as children.”

Only yesterday, September 25, 2024, the last statement during his speech to the delegation of The Economy of Francis in the Paul VI Hall. “Courage, dear friends! Courage! If you are faithful to your vocation, your life will flourish, you will have wonderful stories to tell your children and grandchildren. I see that there are some children there: This is beautiful, in a culture where we prefer to have puppies or cats and not children. We need to beat Italy up a bit!».

All these interventions have been read as attacks on animals. The OIPA, International Organization for the Protection of Animals, wrote last year: “It is a real shame for all families with animals to continually read statements from a pontiff who contrasts living beings with each other, who seems to censor love for other species. Animals are sentient beings, we await some words from Francis also in their favor in the name of a universal compassion that we do not yet see in this pope.”

Sources within the Church say that not attacking animals is the pontiff’s goal. “Those who criticize the Pope for these phrases have not fully understood what Francis wanted to say,” Father Enzo Fortunato, then director of the press office of the Sacred Convent of Assisi, told Famiglia Cristiana at the time of the dog-in-a-purse case. “The Pope’s words have been exploited. For Saint Francis, man is central and only after him are animals and the environment, creation. Too many love, as the Pope said, dogs and cats, but ignore their neighbors. The Pontiff highlighted the centrality of man, children, neighbors, looking to the future of humanity“. This is not an invitation to forget about animals, but to have “a priority of values”. Animals can stay, but it is the children who must not be missing.